Sunday, January 17, 2010

COMPUTING: Does this happen to you? (my legend precedes me)


OK, I’ve been teaching people how to program since 1975.  I’ve been teaching AP Computer Science since 1988.  I’ve been installing and maintaining LANs and Clusters since 1993.  So, I suppose my legend precedes me….
What am I talking about?  Well, whenever someone’s mouse isn’t working or monitor starts acting funny or they can’t login or save their work, “all I have to do is touch it!”  I put that in quotes because my students always say it.  If a student’s program won’t compile, sometimes all I have to do is walk by and it suddenly works.

Case in point, my brother-in-law has finally entered the 21st century.  He broke down and got a wireless Gateway laptop from http://www.hsn.com and enabled his wireless router from Verizon.  He was surfing over to http://www.facebook.com every day, happy as a clam, until the mouse stopped working.  Needless to say, hours of tech support from India was not very helpful.  So, he was incredulous when my own children said, “all he has to do is touch it!”  He didn’t want anyone to touch the laptop lest it break even more.  He was about to return the laptop to HSN when he let me touch it!  Guess what, I literally touched a button on the top of the display and all was well with the world once more.

Generally speaking,

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