Head Tale

Went out to my parents’ for New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day.  As the image above notes, going home often means doing tech support – whether for Shea’s folks, my folks or anybody else I’m visiting.

Not that I mind – I always am happy to have something I can contribute and am somewhat decent at to balance out all that my folks and Shea’s folks do for us in terms of helping with household renovations, car repairs and other stuff that I’m not so good at! 😉

I knew this trip to IH wouldn’t just be a quick fix on one thing and had kept a To Do list of various things I wanted to do as well as things mom or dad had asked for me to do or help them with or whatever.

I thought it might be interesting to summarize what I did…

• install new SaskTel router since their old one had died.  I thought I wouldn’t need to call in for support, mom thought I would and it turns out we were kind of both right.  If they’d set-up the account properly when M&D picked up the router from SaskTel, I wouldn’t have had to call in.  But since they didn’t, I did need to call in and get it activated.
• Installed the new Clickfree backup system Shea and I got my parents for Christmas.  You pay a premium for the plug & play aspect but it’s pretty slick.
• Configured the Kooboodle service which is part of the Clickfree company.  I don’t think you need a Clickfree drive to use this service but it’s pretty sweet in that it automatically puts copies of all your photos (web resolution rather than full backups) online for you to privately view or share from wherever you are and whichever device you’re on.
• Put the Kooboodle app on their tablet and my dad said he was already enjoying how easy it makes it to browse through old photos.
• Installed Samsung Keis  which is apparently the iTunes of Samsung Android devices?  (This point inspires a tangential anecdote:  I have a branch head colleague who often says “Those guys in IT aren’t necessarily smarter at computers than any of us.  They’re just more willing to click buttons until they get the result they want!”  I suspect the IT folks might take small exception to this observation but it contains some truth – a lot of times with computers, just being willing to jump in and try something you’ve never done before – such as figuring out what you need to back up an Android device instead of your more familiar iOS device – is one example.)
• Backed up their Galaxy III smartphone and updated its firmware
• Backed up their Galaxy Tab.  I must’ve clicked something different when they first got their their Galaxy Tab as it already had the latest firmware.
• Went through both devices clearing out apps they don’t need, cleaning up the blank pages that have accumulated and configuring a few settings to better reflect how they use these devices.
• Give mom a mini-tutorial on her phone’s various settings.
• Played around with the e-mail settings on the laptop, phone and tablet to see which ones were syncing and which ones weren’t.
• Ran a couple different anti-virus/anti-malware programs on mom’s laptop as she thought it was slower than usual.  Nothing found.
• Confirmed her firewall was activated
• She already had a good handle on this but showed her how to use Dropbox from her laptop or phone.  Cleaned up some of the pictures I’d uploaded there from her phone to Dropbox that she’d taken at my 40th birthday, our Grey Cup party and so on.
• Ran some maintenance tasks on the laptop, cleared up the cache and recycling bin and a few of those kinds of things
• Backed up files from her old desktop computer to a thumb drive to move over to laptop (realised I forgot to actually move them over – next time!)
• Tried to find an easy way to backup/export the e-mail she had on Outlook Express on her old computer.  This doesn’t look as easy as it should be so I’ll have to go back and maybe try to get it exported to Hotmail as recommended by a couple quick Google searches I did.  Failing that, mom said she’d just go through the old e-mails and forward any she wanted to keep to herself and delete the rest.