A visit by family members usually coincides with embarrassing failures of computing in our household. This is embarrassing because I try to be fairly tech savvy. However, any cred is immediately wiped away by events such as those which occurred during this most recent Thanksgiving:
- While my sister and I were trading the latest internet videos, my home-brew PVR stopped playing flash video correctly. To be specific, flash stole control of the desktop and prevented control of the browser. A quick update of system packages fixed the problem. Nonetheless, my sister was left with the impression that my PVR is crap. Thanks, Adobe.
- While trying to make tee-shirts to commemorate our celebration of Turkenfunken (don’t ask), I made the dumb (and desperate) move of using an inkjet tee-shirt transfer in our new laser printer. This resulted in melting the transfer to the silicone rollers in the toner fuser unit and nearly setting the printer on fire. Several hours and YouTube instructional videos later, I managed to open the side of the printer, extract the fuser, remove the transfer from the unit, and reinstall all the parts. The printer now works fine again. Thanks, stores that don’t sell transfers for laser printers (you know who you are, Staples, Target, Fry’s, Michael’s, and Hobby Lobby).
- When trying to print my sister’s boarding passes, my laptop stopped displaying javascript-enabled pages correctly. This forced us to print from the only other computer in the house with printing enabled: my Windows gaming machine. The inability to get things printed quickly led my sister to make a snide quip about a house full of degrees and not a single working computer. Thanks, Windows printing.
I’ve observed that my PVR only seems to fail when family is around. Similarly, printing, wifi, Time-Warner internet service, and X10. Since the only common factor is family, I wonder if computers are really the problem . . . ?
