Technology Stuff

My dad is upstairs trying to choose a ring tone for his new phone. My dog, who is sitting beside me, is somewhat confused by the noises. ^_^

He got a Razr, which he chose because it has big screens for easy visibility and big buttons for easy dialing. When he got home with it a couple of days ago, he yelled at me because he didn't know what the memory card was for.

I am somewhat worried that my dad will blow the phone up. See, my father suffers from the unfortunate combination of being both technologically inept and a button pusher. He doesn't know what anything on the phone does, so, to find out, he pushes every button until something happens. He often doesn't know what that something is, or how to reverse it (or if he should). That said, it also took him several hours (literally) and a lot of complaining about the uselessness of the instruction booklet in order for him to figure out that you push the button in the middle to access the main menu. He didn't actually say that that's what he was having trouble with, though--why would he do that?

Actually, now that I think about it, it took my mother well over a year to figure out the same thing about her phone, but she at least was able to access most parts of the menu by pressing the directional buttons, so she didn't really need to access the main menu. I think it was when I told her that her phone should have a calculator and she was like "Where?" that I showed her and she was surprised that a main menu (and many other functions) existed on her phone.

My parents are such baby boomers...

My new computer is spiffy. I still have a couple of things I need to tweak, but, for the most part, it is more or less perfect. This will mean nothing to most everybody who reads this blog, but, on this computer, when playing World of Warcraft, I can wander around Shattrath at 60fps. 60fps!!!! I set my sepll detail to high. ^_^

I remember, when I was looking at buying my last computer, my brother told me that 1GB of RAM was probably much more than I needed. For three years, I cursed him for that advice. This computer has 4GB of RAM. That probably *is* much more than I need, but upgrading to max RAM was remarkably cheap, so I decided to err on the side of too much. I doubt I will regret that choice.

One thing, though: The pictures/slideshow "gadget" on the Windows Vista sidebar thing is vaguely horrifying. I told each gadget that it wasn't allowed to do anything before closing all of them and then closing the sidebar. Shoo!