Thursday, February 21, 2008

I 'Heart' Andre

My laptop is no longer pouting! This preteen has finally resolved her issues, thanks to some very good support from Andre at Toshiba. What a godsend! I was concerned that I would not be able to understand the IT person, either because of accent or computer terminology.

Instead, Andre was patient with my questions and even laughed at my self-deprecating comments! And as everyone knows, the surest way to my heart is to laugh at my jokes. That, and complement my kids. Which fortunately Andre didn't have a chance to do, since my kids were successfully "plugged in" to PBS for the entire conversation.

The problem seemed to be Microsoft downloads, so we reset the computer to about 4 days before those stupid programs hit. AND WE'RE BACK ONLINE.

2 comments:

Noel said...

I've had to turn the clock back in response to botched Microsoft updates, too. I occasionally wish I could do that in other parts of life, too.

Noel said...

Gentle Reader, I shall use the real life Andre as a segway to the charcter Grigg Harris in the movie "Jane Austen Book Club" who was the only character I really liked in the movie...a caring, longsuffering computer geek who liked science fiction and was willing to read Jane Austen novels to be in the book club and get to know one of the female characters. The rest of the characters were pretty dysfunction which led me to wonder if Jane Austen's 19th century characters were as dysfunctional in their time as these characters are in ours? Dysfunctional characters ruin a movie for me as they did in another California movie, "Sideways".

I probably also missed a lot of the allusions since I am not familiar with ALL the books they read in the club and I couldn't multitask between the movie and Wikipedia book summaries very well. I ended up focusing on the movie. There was a featurette on "Deconstructing the movie" which was helpful in retrospect and one on the life of Jane Austen which had a lot of material I had already gleaned from Wikipedia.

Another thought I had was if the movie characters seeing their lives paralleled in the Jane Asten books is similar to the experience engineers have seeing their lives paralleled in Dilbert. (My wife laughs at me for typing this since Dilbert is a comic strip and Jane Asuten is literature..please, dear wife, be culturally relevant.)

The movie is rated PG-13 and I was glad my daughters were not watching it due to some sexual thematic material.