holiday parental i.t. dept, reporting for duty (part 2)

Oh God, I am so dreading the way this stuff sneaks up on you this time of year. Forgotten passwords, installing printer drivers, bad mp3 player consumer choices, you name it . . . .

It starts early this year, since I'm in Loudon, TN, from like today until the 1st, with a 4-day break to travel to michigan.

I'm so glad my parents are lifelong mac people and my dad is an engineer at heart

although I will be spending like 6 hours of xmas eve and a 12 on the 25th sitting in the UNITED STATES HOMELAND HELPDESK so really, you guys think you have it bad, how about fuck you

oh and I forgot to add - the NoScript add-on for FireFox will pretty much ensure that whomever can't get owned by most if not all current bitchsploitz so plz plz also try to talk your folks into that as well if at all possible

I don't have to DO the I.T. work here at home, but I do have to (attempt to) use the computer. Freakin Norton won't allow half the world's perfectly normal commercial websites (like, oh, say, NETFLIX) to connect, the link to "Internet Security Help" is DEAD and does nothing...quite frankly I can't believe I can log into ILX.

And my parents won't leave the computer on overnight because night-time is when the hackers and spies and identity thieves sneak onto the interweb and rob you blind/install viruses.

you should convince them that running the computer at night is the equivalent of leaving a light on in the house when you are away

You know, that stuff the VA hospital system fucks up royally once every half hour.

hi dere, part of my old job was self-reporting this shit to the undersecretary's office.

i set up soulseek for my dad last year and my mom yelled at me because FILESHARING IS ILLEGAL

What are they gonna do, p...

Apparently the cat thought that joke was in bad taste, she just sat on my hands (on the keyboard).

wow kevin I am so sorry, ugh

my favorite helpdesk call of late was my landladies upstairs (one of whom is a therapist) needing me to get the HD out of their old tower to avoid possible HIPAA lawsuits. crank, crank, unscrew, unscrew, pry, pop, here you go ma'am thank you for understanding and adhering to the law

I read this as "the rapist", but I guess I never thought about HIPAA at that scale.

i set up soulseek for my dad last year and my mom yelled at me because FILESHARING IS ILLEGAL

-- bell_labs, Thursday, December 20, 2007 12:22 PM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

and look what happened!!!!!

sorry poor taste

wow kevin I am so sorry, ugh

-- El Tomboto, Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:37 AM (Thursday, December 20, 2007 11:37 AM) Bookmark Link

fuck don't be, that was one of the easiest parts of that job. every couple of days i'd have to send an email to the DUSHM's office saying "someone in milwaukee sent an unencrypted email that contained ppi" or "a file containing ppi was left unattended in an unlocked area". then a couple days later i'd follow up at the facility level about what steps they took to guard against it happening again. usually just some bullshit answer like "gonna lock the door" or whatever.

it was pretty much a case of paying real strict attention to dust on the carpet while the house is on fire.

jon wtf?

see kevin over here our one (1) hardline requirement is that reports of PPI/PII/PHI whatever have to be shot up to the white house and the OMB within one hour of receipt so they can figure out how many hapless bastards they have to cover for free credit monitoring for the next five years

I think we should all pause for a moment and recognize that jon willamamamams just admitted a joke he made was in poor taste and immediately apologized

i actually don't mind doing parental IT as long as i don't have to explain anything. it never helps anyway.

see kevin over here our one (1) hardline requirement is that reports of PPI/PII/PHI whatever have to be shot up to the white house and the OMB within one hour of receipt so they can figure out how many hapless bastards they have to cover for free credit monitoring for the next five years

well, as you said earlier, between VHA and VBA it would literally happen every single day somewhere. we'd get a list every morning from the deputy undersecretary's office that had every infraction from the prior day and i think the shortest list i saw was 12 pages.

wow jon, you're a dick!

i don't get it

should I just delete all these nb beefposts

before somebody explains the "joke"

oh wait this is on the NB hahahaha

ATTN ALL ILX COOKS, I NEED YOUR HELP - prison commissary test kitchen challenge!

the drug is called excelsior and it is killing us all

-cutty

jon i'm not ashamed of my dad being in jail, so it's not like your zings hurt or anything, but it's still a dick move!

I still can't believe he realized it and said sorry though

oh, jon

In other news, am currently trolling the limited selection of used laptops on the local CL. I needs a wireless device for the rest of my time in knoxville and my michigan jaunt.

Guess where the wireless hub set up by yours truly last year now resides!!

if you said, disconnected and sitting in a drawer because someone claims it keeps knocking him off the internet and someone else used her laptop for about two months, you are correct!

In the rents' defense, that's exactly where my wireless hub is now (because it never worked reliably, and I realized at some point that my bedroom was not nearly big enough to justify going back and buying a better one)

9:30 CONFERENCE CALL ON SATURDAY MORNING WITH THE FUCKING CIO

I think some people may have been misreading my intent upthred.

Why does the CIO at work on a saturday?

6 hours on thursday removing rich codec(?) virus from brother's pc (took 3 hours for a full scan, another 3 hours to spot the problem, am not a windows guy). most of today removing trash from uncle's old laptop and installing stuff on it that mother wants. trying to stop 'muz aod app' phoning home whenever mp3 player software starts up (it adds *itself* as trusted app to microsoft firewall every time, can it do that? slightly less annoying now it's not trying to use the non-existent dialup modem...). registry edits to stop crap installing itself into task bar and bringing laptop to its knees on bootup (is only a 800MHz Duron (actually a nice vaio, but a 2001 model). will do for web / email)

their favourite task for me though is rewiring / retuning all the videos / tvs. every single year...

http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/ ???

get the sunbelt one

i am going to pitch Apple Remote Desktop to my family tomorrow; if they front the money, I'll troubleshoot their computers from the comfort of my own home.

o
m
g

trying

but at least there are cookies and ham and (soon) turkey
and also the beach and w33d

and coffee
and love

No turkey tonight, but we did have shrimp. I got to figure out how to put 4 dvdr worth of video of my infink nephew onto the parents computer and set it up so's they can easily watch it. Apparently half the vid is stuff that my brother meant to send me ealier in the year, but was too lazy/forgetful to.

you have an infinite nephew?

no, infink. A.k.a. ratfink.

Ah fuck me, what a great way to start the new year, having to show the idiot again how to use his dvd program to watch the dvdrs again.

Last year I introduced my dad to Bittorrent and this year he is ranting about dupes, bad uploads and how great axxo is and how it's a shame he seems to have disappeared. wtf?

fixed mom's printer

also bought her a new universal remote AND programmed it

son of the year here, folks

Wireless now up and running again, 50-odd un-resized photos of nephew taken by his grandparents now emailed to bro & sis-in-law, time to begin another season.

try to introduce parents to flickr, y/n? i bet i'd set it up and they'd never use it again.

i am going to pitch Apple Remote Desktop to my family tomorrow; if they front the money, I'll troubleshoot their computers from the comfort of my own home.

― gbx, Monday, December 24, 2007 3:56 PM

o man i need to do this

Okay, just set up at least two different satnav rigs for family members.

Get ready for another round

Is it wrong to come here only this time of year?
I remember this thread from the sandbox.

not looking fwd to this

http://www.sentience.com/num50bp.gif

yay, girlfriend's parents being computer literate!

So far, only had to run the NOD or whatever scan it is, and completely updated the parents' Garmin rig and my sister's Wii.

"The laptop has got really slow"

"I'm too old to learn Apple"

AND had to explain repeatedly and in great detail why you couldn't have a fax machine(that answers after the 2nd ring) and an answering machine(4th ring) on the same line and have both work properly

didn't have to do this!!!!!!!

"how do i paste a picture into my email" using gmail was the worst of it, i think they are learning
got an annoying gps for the car though despite not really having a problem getting lost

we couldn't work out how to get the wii to connect with the wifi; i'm not sure what the guy who installed them did, but I can't seem to get it to accept a wireless connection even w/pswd

they didn't ask meto do anything but I had to set up mu xbox and that lead to a tv wiring autopsy. whoever set up their system left some monster cable hanging there, connected to nothing. pretty lol.

set up dsl with wireless router for them; dad wants to know if that means he can now print his sudoku puzzles from the internet at home, rather than having to go to work to do this.

I made the (possible) mistake of getting my dad a laptop with Windows 7 installed. He's never had a laptop before, nor has he used Windows 7. I've been on the phone to support him twice so far.

roku netflix box setup lols

"can you put a movie on itunes?"

Hi, dear son.
Thank you so much for the purple print. Now I get it that these pixels are not text. Kept thinking one should be able to just click on it... When you come, maybe show me how to pixel. Also, are these now ONLY purple, or can I print them any color?

reporting for doodie

- firefox upgraded
- safari toolbar brought back

Ha just posted one of these on the 'home for the holidays' thread. My dad said he had emailed the makers of a dodgy toolbar he had unwittingly installed to ask how to remove it. Last Christmas
with the family I had to un-italicise all browser text. I have no idea how they do these things!

• relative #1 wants to buy an iPad. I don't own one and know nothing about them and have said so. Not getting involved.
• relative #2 has problems with the battery on their mobile not keeping a charge for more than a couple of days. Not getting involved.
• relative #2, again, has problems using e-mail, specifically remembering which button to click on to reply to an e-mail. I prompted them with the suggestion that, er, could it possibly be 'Reply'? Minimal involvement.
• relative #3 has problems finding stuff online, but their pride means they won't ask anyone for help. Don't have to get involved.

Fortunately vital network settings on Win7 are buried so far down in a labyrinthine menu structure that it's not possible for the casual user to even find them, never mind change them.
New router seems to be holding up as well. I'm not going to tell them that all kinds of funky NAS shit can be achieved with the USB on the back though.

My mother's i.t. requirements are actually pretty low, considering she's 80. Occasionally I have to load new images into her jigsaw puzzle game. When I brought her TV back to life a few months ago (firmware update) you would have thought I'd performed a successful exorcism on it.

"Your mother sucks co-ax in hell!"

Relative #2's Kindle also seems to be working out OK. It's one of the simple ones (the Kindle not the relative), but I was concerned that it would be a whole load of problems. Configuring it for the wireless network was a pain, but once that was done all there was was a brief "what does the battery indicator look like?" "a battery" "oh" conversation.

Rob Hyde ‏@rob_hyde
'Why the fuck did you install Yahoo toolbar?' - millions of people using the computer at their parents' places a minute ago

I really need to update OS X on my mom's laptop, which I may tackle this week.

I am really asking for trouble in taking them an Apple TV, aren't I?

i have heard the nutcracker on public radio at least three times in 48 hours

o wait, this is it

haha my mom had the nutcracker on yesterday too, just once though.

I thought I'd avoided IT dept holidays duty, because my mom has gone mac, but no. Just the usual re: every tiny thing that doesn't work perfectly is understood as a disaster rather than a blip to figure out. I'm more patient than I used to be, at least.

just removed 2 aol toolbars powered by ask jeeves

mom realized the beeps she heard were indicators she had received text messages on her iphone

mom only takes 3 minutes to figure out how to delete messages

My relatives are divided into those with practically no interest in technology, aside from maybe an e-reader and a PAYG mobile, and those who have owned some kind of computer for over 30 years, yet still don't know WTF they are doing, but won't ask anyone for help. In the latter group is a relative who's had a new Win8 laptop for the last 4 months but still hasn't got to grips with it, despite buying one of those thick Dummies 14-in-one books on Win8. So they're still using, at the same time, their 3 year old Win7 laptop that makes a noise like quadcopter. Refurbishing laptops is a big part of my actual 9-5 job. So I'd get to work on that with a can of compressed air, perhaps more RAM, swap out the HDD for an SDD maybe, reinstall Win7, maybe dual boot some flavour of Linux. But no, because this person will not admit to not knowing everything. Although in this case I dislike them intensely, so wvs.

Also, the Win7 laptop has so much adware and other crap installed on it, when IE is running, the top half of the screen is toolbars.

Oh and said relative keeps putting off running Java Update for some reason, even though it would take five minutes at most.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/e6fpc3/i_do_believe_this_fits_in_here_as_well_happy/
https://i.redd.it/5tlz7615rs241.png