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Hello February!
On the Manly Ferry today this guy with some kids pointed at my seat and said in broken English, “can we sit there?” I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he was asking me for my seat, when there were many many many seats inside for them to use. Anyway, I scooted over to give them some space. Then I realized why I hadn’t sat in my new seat in the first place. There was a column in the way making it hard to photograph. I missed at least one photo I would have been able to take from my old possie. Then it started raining—well only spitting really—and everyone rushed on inside.
“I’m staying”, I said defiantly, moving back to my original seat and sitting my backpack next to me. It reminded me of that moment in The Big Lebowski when Walter refused to quiet down in the diner.
I got to Auntie Rae’s place with a steak and mushroom pie and coke from the pie shop. I ate my lunch and we went down stairs to try and get her on the Internet. Windows Aero’s spazzy colour scheme made it hard to see what was going on in the screen. Input boxes with subtle colour changes look attractive, but when your vision is giving you trouble it is murder. She had notes on usernames and passwords that she needed, except for the vital one: the ISP username and password, and so we failed to get on. After working with Chuck for years, someone who was smart but not computer savvy, it’s clear that she needs some simple checklists for the few computer activities that she needs to perform. He used to have things like “then click on OK” on his check list to remind himself to do that. It made me want to scream and pull my hairs out in frustration sometimes, but a lot of people don’t use computers as flexible tools for solving arbitrary problems, they have a fixed set of things that they need to use a computer for and they don’t want to spend any more time than necessary to get through them. It took me a long time to work out that I needed to adapt my approaches working for him.
Also, Aero is shit.
Anyway, I think that after a few visits I can get Auntie Rae on the Internet no worries.
