The other day I had a great argument with one of my sons about his laptop.
\n
\nIt reminded me of the arguments I had with my own father, though he was berating me for not knowing more about my car.<\/p>\n
Some jackass vandalized my VW bug back when I was in high school. He yanked out all the distributor wires. Gone. Of course the car wouldn’t start, but I had no idea what was wrong. I know that some orange, tubular things were missing. I called them “hoses” but they were wires.<\/p>\n
Now, of course, I know what they are. Back then, I didn’t. So I took it upon my father’s advice and I learned how the engine worked, the difference between the generator and the alternator, and other useless stuff that doesn’t apply any more because cars are pretty much computers these days.<\/p>\n
Fast forward 30 years.<\/p>\n
My son wanted to print something from his laptop. I got his laptop to communicate with the network printer, which is kind of cool: The network printer isn’t on the wireless network but because the Network Gods have smiled upon me, it still works.<\/p>\n
Or worked.<\/p>\n
Nothing would print from the laptop. So I thought I’d have a look-see.<\/p>\n
Turns out, the lad’s laptop wasn’t connected with my household network. Nope, it was connected to one of the neighbor’s wireless networks.<\/p>\n
It was useless to chastise him; how would he know? Most people who use computers have no clue how they work or why they do anything. He just turned the thing on, it said, “Wireless network available,” and he click the OK button to connect.<\/p>\n
Shove finger in nose, be happy.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t the worst of it. I had to toil for about half an hour to get the dumb laptop to stop<\/em> automatically connecting to the alien network. It was a futile attempt.<\/p>\n Eventually, I discovered that there were two<\/em> utilities trying to connect the laptop wirelessly: Windows itself and some dumb-ass utility installed by Acer. After killing off the Acer utility, and restarting the laptop, I finally regained control, banished the unwanted network connection, and had the laptop configured.<\/p>\n The lad learned nothing, of course.<\/p>\n Well, maybe, perhaps someday, he’ll pick up one of my books and learn a little about what his computer is doing. Then again, maybe not: They have just made computers too easy to use. Either that, or it’s a conspiracy for computer consultants and repair places to keep the general populace dumb and themselves rich getting paid to fix minor problems. Who knows?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other day I had a great argument with one of my sons about his laptop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16],"class_list":["post-3012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-laptop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3012"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4188,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions\/4188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}