Technological genius

A couple of weeks ago I helped a friend to spend a lot of money. Do you know how much fun that is? Believe me, it is. We went to the Apple Store in Shinsaibashi on Monday and she plonked down enough cash to make me feel dizzy. She had been saving ¥500 coins for the last year or two in a piggy bank, and it is amazing how much you can save in ¥500 coins relatively quickly, if you are determined about it. She has been VERY determined.

However, she did not pay for her new computer in ¥500 coins. I tried to be mature and not show my disappointment, and on reflection she was probably right. I don't think they would have appreciated it. Instead she had the coins changed into notes, and used those, to buy one of these, the biggest, 24-inch one, and one of these, the 'smaller' one. (30 gig.)

A day later her new toys were delivered, and I was there when they came. She wanted my help with setting everything up, and while I didn't think I would be much help, who was I to refuse an offer to play with someone else's new gadgets?

The delivery man dumped (but gently) the enormous box in the genkan, and left. My friend and I stared at it, intimidated, and decided to have a cup of coffee.

But eventually we got the computer upstairs, unpacked it (which took almost as much time as what followed) and plugged it in. I was a bit worried about the wireless mouse and keyboard (how do you connect those?) but then we switched on the computer. (This turned out to be the only time I consulted the manual - to find out where the power switch was.) The familiar chimes rang out, and we laughed. It worked! I love it that everything comes pre-installed. And as it turned out I didn't have to know anything. On the screen appeared diagrams about what to put where (batteries, mainly), and a couple of minutes later everything was working.

In fact I am not REALLY sure why I was there, because after that the new computer only wanted to talk to her. The only time when I might have been a little useful was perhaps for the bit where I initialized her new external hard drive (her new backup system), twice (because I did it wrong the first time) and plugged it into her old computer to back up all her old data. I just dragged it over to the new drive. That was easy, but she seemed to think it was all terribly mysterious, so my techie aura remained intact.

It even remained intact when we got to the bit I had been a little worried about, which was getting the new machine connected to the Internet. I didn't have a clue. The Man did ours when I was at work one day. I had even asked him to go with me to my friend's place because this whole business made me so uncertain (he refused - he was too busy), but my worry turned out to be unnecessary.

"Which is the modem cable that connects to the old computer?" I asked my friend, eyeing the spaghetti of cables behind the desk.

"This one, I think," said my friend, untangling some of the cables. "There are three coming from the modem, and ... let me see ... yes, this is the one that plugs into the computer."

"Three?" I asked, a little alarmed. "Oh, one will be the power cable, and that's the computer one, and the other is the, er, the other is, er, the cable cable. I suppose." I didn't feel very clever.

"Shall I pull them all out?"

"NO," I said. "Just the one plugged into the old computer. We'll switch it to the new computer."

She unplugged it and passed it to me.

I looked at the plug, and looked at the variety of hubs on the back of the new computer. One of them looked the right shape, so I plugged it in.

Then I stared authoritatively at the computer. Nothing happened. What was I supposed to do next?

The computer stared back unhelpfully. My friend hovered behind me, totally confident in my abilities and waiting for the magic to happen.

I launched Safari. I was pretty sure there was more to this than just plugging in the modem, but YOU NEVER KNOW. And it's true, you DON'T, because it turned out that in fact plugging it in WAS the only step necessary. I typed in google.com and the Google search page came up.

"Um, that's it," I told my friend, hiding my shock. "You are online."

"Oh, you're so clever!" she said, "I could never have done this by myself."

"Actually, I think you could have," I said, and I wasn't just being modest, either.

The next thing was to get Eudora, her email program, working. She wanted to be able to access all her old mail. I told my friend i might need all her cable provider details.

I downloaded the latest version (sponsored mode - getting the full version could wait a couple of days) and installed and launched it. Then I found her old Eudora settings file and double-clicked it. My friend had left the room, and this was a good thing because I let out a very rude word when the new program responded to my little experiment by crashing.

Before attempting to launch the program again, I moved all her old mailboxes and things over to the new Eudora folder, trashing the new ones. Then I double clicked the settings file again, somewhat uncertainly (but I didn't know what else to do). Astonishingly, the new program launched and everything worked. How did that happen? I mean, I wanted it to happen, but how can it be that you can jump from a very old version on a different system to the latest version and still have everything intact like that? It was amazing. All her old mailboxes were there, the settings were there too, and no mail was lost.

My friend came back into the room.

"Here's your email," I said, smugly. "I don't need your provider details after all."

Now she thinks I'm a computer genius.

After that we set up the iPod. Easy.

A few days later another friend wanted me to help her to set up her new iPod, too. She is so intimidated by new technology I think she was afraid to take it out of the box by herself, and she'd heard how helpful and impossibly knowledgeable I was.

I told her it was a piece of cake, but she didn't believe me, so I went. I was pretty sure that when she saw how easy it was my reputation would suffer. But still my techie aura remained intact, because I installed Firefox onto her machine as well and showed her how to use tabbed browsing. She now thinks I am a technologically advanced person and I have no doubt she will call me whenever she has a problem. That in itself could be a problem, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. (Besides, I showed her how to force quit a program instead of pulling the plug when something didn't go the way she wanted it to, and I'm fairly sure she won't be having problems any more.)

But she also thinks I'm a genius because I introduced her to Miette's Bedtime Story Podcasts. She was enchanted at the selection offered, and also with Miette's story-reading skills when she experimentally listened to a little of one story, and when I subscribed her and she saw the archives in iTunes she could not stop clicking "GET." I tried to tell her she could always download the rest later, but she'd gone click mad and stopped listening to me. She ended up with over forty stories on her iPod, and I do not expect her to surface for a while.

Miette is one of the reasons my old 4 gig iPod is simply not big enough anymore. I keep getting 'cannot sync' messages because my iPod is full, and have to unsync stuff I haven't heard yet. I do not seem to have time to keep up with everything I want to listen to. I want a new, bigger iPod.

But if I get a new, bigger iPod, it will take forever to sync because my computer is a little too old to have USB2 and the new iPods don't have Firewire. Actually, it appears the iPods have not had Firewire for a while. I hadn't realized.

Bloody Apple. They make things easy, but only if you keep up.