My father the technophobe

My dad continues to be anti-computer and, dare I say, proud of it. I fixed the can't-connect-to-the-Internet problem last night (turned the modem off and back on again) and sent his outgoing email, then attempted to field a series of questions that went roughly thus:

HIM: Well, why the hell does it do that?
ME: Um... I don't know... it... I just... look, it's fixed now, OK?
HIM: And why can you not see what you're sending before you send it?
ME: Huh?
(Some back and forth until I worked out he was talking about automatic line wrapping. Attempted to explain this feature.)
HIM: Well, why the hell does it do that? It's messing up my tables.
ME (thinking: um, WHY are you trying to create tables in an email?): Actually, if you want fancy formatting it's best to send it in an attachment.
HIM: Oh, sure, then whoever I send it to won't have the goddamn application to open it.
ME: Look, if they don't have Word by now there's no hope for them, OK?
HIM: All I want is to be able to send a letter. I know how to format letters. I learned 50 years ago on a manual typewriter, OK?
ME: O-kay. Whatever.

(Five minutes pass.)

HIM: And another thing. Why when you print the email does it not give you the date?
ME: Hmm... well, did you print the draft or the sent item?
HIM: I haven't DONE a draft until today.
ME: No, no, I mean did you print it before or after you sent it?
HIM: What goddamn difference does that make?
ME: See, until you send it, it counts as a draft, and it doesn't have a date stamp --
HIM (going downstairs with the recycling): That makes no sense. ALL I WANT is to see the DATE on my LETTER.
ME: But it doesn't HAVE a date until you --
HIM: I suppose Bill Gates knows better than I do what should be in a letter.
ME: YES, DADDY, THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT THE PROBLEM IS.
HIM: Oh, don't be like that.
ME: It's an EMAIL. It is not a LETTER, which means --
FRONT DOOR: *slams*
ME: *sighs and goes to bed*

whoah. /Keanu

Want to get a sense of some very large numbers? May I present: the Megapenny Project.

I love things like this.

(Edit: and of course there's Powers of 10.)

House update: Friday

I have appliances!

My aunt reports:

Today for lunch we had chilli with toast and salad, and
rhubarb and strawberry tarts with ice cream.

Robin's washer and dryer arrived. We are impressed with Tasco's efficiency
in alerting when deliveries will be made.

John moved the fan in Jen's bathroom.

Dan firred the second floor bathroom ceiling and David fixed the door
frame.

Bill did a lovely job making the third floor drywall all smooth.

Cheers, Helen

Jen has also suggested that we sit down on the
weekend and try and get some of the money that's owing to us back. Sounds
like a plan to me.

(no subject)

Cousin Jen and I saw Syriana this evening. It's... dense to the point of total opacity. Probably missing the first 5 minutes didn't help our understanding of the plot much, but I'm not sure how much difference it would actually have made. There were an awful lot of vaguely familiar-looking middle-aged white men in it as secondary characters; I recognized William Hurt and Chris Cooper, but failed to recognize Christopher Plummer, and don't think I knew any of the others. I also knew who Alexander Siddig was, although I kept losing track of his character's scummy little brother.

Ran into some other cousins at the theatre. (Observant readers may have noticed that I have a lot of cousins, mostly on my mother's side, or rather, I may have a ton on my father's side as well but I don't know them. No matter what the topic is, in my family we can usually chime in with "I have a cousin who...". Decline of the extended family? Not so much in these parts.)

Caught the lighting of the Olympic flame. I'm always so fond of the Olympics.

This is not as interesting a post as I thought it would be when I started.