I'm gonna write more about the cruise later, this was just something I wrote to describe an... interesting technical situation for some other folks, and I felt like sharing here.


Over this past winter break, my mother and I went on a cruise for some mother-daughter bonding. Pretty sweet. The ship had a computer lab with Adobe Photoshop Elements that was open for guests to use to edit their pictures.

Now, a bit of history about my mom. She's an accountant, and has been using computers since she switched colleges to be at UCLA when it got one of those card-reading monstrosities. But, she's mostly focused on specific applications. She can make Excel, Lotus, Quicken, Turbotax, etc. dance in ways that would take me decades to figure out, but she can be a leetle bit shaky on computers in general.

Mom's also a bit high-strung and prone to panic. She listens to a computer talk show and reads a few magazines, and knows enough to know that she should be very afraid. Which is wonderful, since with her insistance that nothing be downloaded, nothing be clicked, all suspicious mail be deleted unread, and the machine be disconnected from the internet as soon as whatever neccessary work is finished, there's almost no. physical. way. she could ever get malware infections. Yay!

But It's also terrible, because if I do anything on the computer without explaining what I'm doing, why, reassure her multiple times (and she still won't believe it) that even though it's not the exact paranoid steps she would take or is something she doesn't understand that it won't destroy anything, she's very quick to assume that her daughter, a comp sci engineering student who also works at her college's advanced tech desk, is omfg going to break teh compyooter!

...fun.

But while she's panicky, she's usually *fairly* computer literate. So it was a complete surprise to me when she walked through the Adobe "open file" menu, selected one of her pictures, had it open smoothly, and went into total panic mode.

"It's not working! I told it to open the file, and there's only one thing there! Where's the rest of them?"

Eh?

I sort of looked at her blankly, and set about explaining the odd fact that a single .jpeg file contains one picture, as a general rule. Apparantly I need to be aware that there is different terminology used elsewhere, such as in the accounting circles she travels in, and files often contain more than one item. She specifically mentioned Excel here, so I think she's refering to the presense of tabbed worksheets? Maybe? I dunno? Folder != File... I think... but it seems that I'm closed-minded.....

That particular incident was eventually followed by my relaxation at teatime (Folks always hate on british food, but scones + cream + tea + more cream + sugar = nummy) being disturbed because "all her pictures from City2 were gone!"

Turns out she was in the directory \\Pictures\City1\City2(mispelled\. She wanted to be in \\Pictures\City2(mispelled a different way\.

...once I pointed this out, I was shooed away because I was trying to mess up her system. This system had multiple copies of pictures every which where, as when she couldn't find a picture, she re-downloaded it off the memory card into a different folder spelled differently. Some were sorted by day, some by city, and the 'system' was often switched around mid-folder. Eventually she made a cd of all the ones she'd actually edited, and left the whooole mess behind.

...However, this IS indicative of her real-life organizational skills, so I don't know if this relates to an inability to use Windows Explorer, or is just a continuation of known traits....

Don't get me wrong, I love me mum and am ecstatic beyond belief that she treated me to this cruise. That said....