Tag: ‘new computer’ · TangleBones

Vista Confirm and Cancel Dialogs

Jared has been run­ning Win­dows Vista on his new com­puter for a while, and he keeps run­ning into the same problem.  When he wants to install a game from a CD, he double clicks on the icon to run the auto­play script, but because Win­dows is now scan­ning every­thing that passes through memory to make sure that you aren’t a pirate (see the Longest Sui­cide Note in His­tory), this takes a few sec­onds. Jared gets bored and ends up either click­ing on another window, or click­ing on the CD icon again.

The reason this is a prob­lem is that when the auto­play even­tu­ally runs, it kicks out the Vista “Are you sure you want to run the appli­ca­tion that you just ran?” dialog box and blacks out the screen. Or it would, unless you  hap­pened to click on any­thing else, in which case the dialog dis­ap­pears. You can’t alt-​tab to it and you can’t see it on the screen. The only way to get back to it, as far as I can tell, is to Ctrl-​Alt-​Delete and choose the task man­ager at which point the dialog appears.

I don’t really want to teach Jared the three-​finger salute because I don’t want him mess­ing around killing processes, but I’m also tired of him coming to me scream­ing that he can’t install his game.

So is there a way to turn off these warn­ings, or an easy way to get back to them that I can teach Jared?

Long Division

Yes­ter­day I had to spend a couple hours work­ing with Sierra on her home­work. Her math assign­ment was a few dozen long divi­sion prob­lems of the 35,343/19 vari­ety. She had taken a stab at them, but gotten frus­trated. I was wor­ried because I’m a lousy teacher: I just can’t seem to grasp that other people don’t know the things I know.

But after going over a couple prob­lems, Sierra jumped back into her work and started asking me to check them as she got done. And wouldn’t you know, she got the hang of it! She got better and faster as we went along, and all it took from me was a little encour­age­ment. I am so proud of her.

Today, Sierra’s turn­ing 11. We got her a snazzy new com­puter, a printer/scanner, and some soft­ware. The com­puter comes with a built-​in dic­tio­nary, an ency­clo­pe­dia, a camera, wire­less every­thing and all the toys a little girl could want. She’s been want­ing a printer of her own for a while – I get the feel­ing that she’ll be spend­ing her allowance on ink from now on.

We had told Sierra that she’d get a new com­puter if she made the honor roll this term. But report cards don’t come out until Friday, and we real­ized that giving her a com­puter on the con­di­tion that she doesn’t need it to do well in school is stupid. Plus, Sierra had a rough start to the school year and prob­a­bly won’t make honor roll, but she’s really turned things around. We decided that we’d reward the effort instead of the outcome.

So the next time any­body hears me com­plain­ing about my little girl being spoiled, remind me of two things: how bad I’ve spoiled her and how proud of her I am.