Blog entries are likely to be a little thin on the ground for the next few days. We’re going to visit my sister and her family in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico this weekend. Always a pleasure to hang out with Meg, Rad (yes, that’s really his name) and Anya; they’s good people. Margaret plans to do some Xmas shopping (Santa Fe is home to, among many other things, The Chuck Jones Gallery), go for walks and play with the dogs. Me, I plan to spend the entire visit crawling under desks and staring at a screen until my eyes bleed.

I have become the official Information Technology Department for my entire family. This probably sounds familiar to a whole lot of you out there. It’s the price of being part of the Generation Nerd; you have to spend a good hunk of your time in the aid of those family members who were not so fortunate as to be born with a silver DDR2 533 Dual-Inline Memory Module in their mouths.

It started with my Dad, who bought his first Macintosh back in the mid-90’s, eventually moving on to his current computer, one of those jellybean iMacs. My family still lives in Hawaii, where I grew up, and tech support was, well, problematic. The absurdity of troubleshooting a graphical user interface over the phone was exacerbated by the fact that my father hasn’t a technical bone in his body; he still waits until I come home on vacation to buy a new digital watch so that I can set it up for him. It nearly drove me to drink—Lysol—to be on the phone with him, telling him to hold down the “Shift” key while restarting, and having nothing going as planned, spending twenty minutes trying to figure out what went wrong….only to have him report that he had, in fact, been holding down the space bar.

Around 2000 I forced him to get broadband Internet access (under threat that I would no longer help him with his computer problems), and I installed remote-access software on his computer. Things have gone more or less swimmingly since then, except for the rare occasion when he listens to the Customer Service people at Road Runner instead of me.

I’ve since set up two of my sisters with computers of their own, salvaged from my own personal junkyard of machines, with varying degrees of success. Something I have learned from this experience is: do not give your family members used computers built from salvaged parts unless a) they live no further than across town from you, or b) they are shacking up with another nerd. And, in the case of b), vet that nerd carefully, people! My sister Libby had a friend tinker with her computer because he said he could make her Internet connection faster. Instead he hosed the thing so thoroughly that it never connected to the Internet again. The final score: Libby, down one computer; me, out about twenty bucks in long-distance bills.

This time, I talked Meg into buying a brand-new iBook, so that she can run all the lastest in desktop-publishing software. At the same time, I talked her into getting DSL, which will help greatly in getting her up and running on the new ‘puter, both from a remote access standpoint and in terms of software updates, troubleshooting, etc. Macs, thankfully, are relatively immune to Trojans, viruses and other malware (due to a combination of a tighter UNIX-based permissions system and a mere 5% market share—who’s going to spend their time writing software to fuck with only 5% of the potential base of victims?), so security considerations for her machine involve little more thank enabling OS X’s built-in ipfw-based firewall. Rad’s old Windows 98 PC, on the other hand, is a plump little sparrow with a broken wing flopping around in the middle of a suburban lawn. That’s going to take some real insulation, lemmetellyou. The land speed record for a Windows machine connected to the ‘Net with default security settings being hijacked by hackbots is now thirty seconds. And that’s with Windows XP, not an operating system that came to maturity before the medium through which it is being attacked. And this doesn’t even take into account all the crap that’s just gotta be on the thing already, that will have to be cleaned out.

So, let’s see…..I’m going over there to set up a home network; give an older machine a much-needed enema; configure, install high-end software on and train my sister on the use of a brand-new computer and operating system….all in four days.

Well, I guess you might be hearing from me Wednesday. Possibly later, depending on how the angioplasty goes.