How Do You Spoon?

As the person who, for the last 20+ years has been in charge of my mother's computer fixing/helping/education, I take issue with this image that I'm sure we've all come across on Facebook:

It seems to make a good point, but  I taught my mom to copy and paste for the first time in about 1995. She's still not sure about it when she has to go from one document to another to paste. She freaks out when she has to attach a file or download a file. I guarantee you, if after 20 years, I still wasn't sure on the use of a spoon and I called her from college yelling at her that she broke my spoon when I was the one who just wasn't good with a spoon, she would yell at me just as much as I yell at her when I ask her for the 600th time, "WHERE DID YOU SAVE THE FILE!? NO! IN NOTEPAD ISN'T AN ANSWER! YOU CAN'T SAVE FILES IN A PROGRAM! THEY GO IN A FOLDER! WHERE IS THE FILE!!!!???"

For bonus content!

Rosetta Stone for Goats

click the comic to biggify

My husband was gifted a copy of Rosetta Stone during the holidays. He asked me to help him install it. My instructions were: Put the disk in the computer. Follow the instructions. Don't eat the disk.

New Things I Learned This Week - Episode 2

First thing I learned is that it is damned near impossible to open a laptop case.  There is no illustration for this. Just imagine 65 tiny screws and one JRose spouting colorful curse words.

So yeah, the fan in my laptop no longer turns which means that I can only use my computer until it starts to turn into lava, and then, I have to turn it off or it shuts off the monitor and starts smelling like burning components. It is kind of ruining my will to live.  I tried to open said laptop case thinking that if it were just 3 years' worth of lint wedged in there that I could clean it out, my computer would not be a total loss, but alas, I couldn't get the fucking thing open. I clearly do not have the secret password to the hopping club that is going on inside there.

Also, GIMP... While I am sure it is a lovely drawing program made by very nice people who are kind enough to give it away for free, it is NOT comparable to Painter 12, which is what I usually use to illustrate this here blarg, and my frustration with trying to install my drawing tablet on my friend's computer and wrestling with layers on GIMP today has lead to a fair bit of crying. I miss my computer.

Second thing I learned, on Father's day, actually. Someone working in Google Chrome's spell check programming department is obsessed with Allie Brosh. I have surmised this because I tried typing the following in to my facebook status and this was what it suggested as a correction:

And lastly, I learned, while driving to visit my friend on the interstate, a fact that I am very sad to know:

The beautiful majestic monarch butterfly...

... is a terrible bright mustard yellow on the inside.

How Outlines are Trying to Ruin My Life.

I am extremely mad at outlines, because I am fairly certain they are the only reason why my spell checker doesn't mark lower case "I"s as incorrect.

I will now outline all the reasons that outlines should go fuck themselves.

"Why Outlines Should Go Fuck Themselves"

I. They make me look stupid when I accidentally type "i" instead of "I" when typing quickly.
     A.  I am not dumb
               i. I have a college degree.
              ii. I graduated 8th in my high school class with a grade point average of 3.919.
             iii. I use big words and stuff.

     B. I should get kudos for typing quickly, instead of looking foolish.
               i. I learned to touch type by chatting for hours on end, which makes me cool.
              ii. I use more than one finger per hand to type, and am the only person in my household to do so.
             iii. I can type in the dark and while watching reality TV shows.

II.New outlines don't even use roman numeral support lists anymore.
     A. Apparently, kids today can't handle roman numerals.
               i. They're not being forced to conform to the stupid standards that we were, which is kinda unfair.
              ii. If I had to do that shit, they should have to also.

     B. Spell Checkers are totally out of date.
              i. In addition to not marking lower case "I"s as incorrect since Arabic numbers are now the
                standard, they don't know the word Wasabi.
                   1.Or internet. . .
                        a. But they do know the word shillelagh.

III. Conclusion.
     A. Outlines and Spell Checkers are acting in collusion to screw up my ability to look like the smarty pants I am.
            i. They should go fuck themselves, as a result.

Now Make Like a Tree and Get Out of Here.

I don't know what kind of internet shitbowl thinks it is awesome to try to trick people into thinking that TODAY is the day that Marty McFly time traveled into the future.

I've covered this before in my ranty Back to the Future post entitled "Great Scott" but I'll say it again:

Marty McFly visited October 21, 2015.

I told someone that today when he claimed that today, my 13th wedding anniversary is the day "Marty Went To." In response to my correction, he linked me to this:

• First of all, that is a picture of Marty McFly in 1955.
• Second of all, YOU'RE A STUPID ASSHOLE. I just TOLD YOU what day Marty McFly went to. I even doubled checked by going to a Back to the Future Wiki because you shouldn't correct people when you are not right. 
• Lastly, you need to have your internets taken away permanently, because you don't know how they work.

The point is, I could likely make that time circuit readout read "YOUR MOM" and it wouldn't mean that Marty McFly traveled to your mom. It means that people on the internet are shit strainers and like to trick people into making me angry.

This image is photoshopped. Marty McFly never went to your mom.

International TYFNKP Day

We seriously need a MAJOR holiday for people who do computer phone support, internet phone support, phone support for anything technological AT ALL. They need parades, and large cash prizes, and pretty much anything they want that is not totally illegal.

I come to this conclusion after trying to help my mom, over the phone for an hour and a half, to download and transfer two files. At this point, I want to destroy planets, take up smoking, and find an orphanage so I can kick some really unfortunate children.

The fact that technological phone support people have not killed us all is a testament to their patience, kindness and over-all awesomeness. Thank you, IT support. For not killing people. You're the best!

And on a completely unrelated note:

So, last year I won Blog of Note from Blogger. I found out a couple days ago that this year, I won Voice of the Year 2012 from BlogHer.*

Actually, I won it in Visuals, so I guess I kinda won Visionary of the Year. Doesn't that sound more impressive than "Voice of the Year for Something You Look At?" The piece that won me this honor was "Occupy the Holidays" which you are all welcome to go look at again (or for the first time, perhaps).

*My "sponsor" aka the people who put those ads on my blog and promote my work and provide my income of 20 bucks every 3-6 months

Thank you BlogHer, for choosing me as someone worth listening to, or looking at, or something. I am very honored and I love it when you guys tell me I am awesome (and send me money*). <3

*Nope, didn't win any money, just thanking them for paying me every 3-6 months.

USB Insertion Made Simple: A Guide

Skynet 1.0: Abuse of the RedBox

After watching my mother try to rape the Redbox Kiosk with the movies she was returning for me, because I have my nephew's cold and didn't want to get out of the car in subfreezing temperatures, I am fairly certain that this sort of thing  is the beginning of the Skynet Incident.
They didn't show it in the Terminator movies, but clearly, the repeated abuses of these machines are going to lead to a revolt where machines start attacking and murdering humans.

At the very least, RedBox should set up hidden cameras to record and broadcast, for our amusement, the various ways in which people are unable to figure out the operations of their machines.

VIRUS WARNING! QUICK! GIVE ME MONEY!

While I am entirely against violence and revenge, people who create those viruses that pretend to be virus warnings that try to trick computards, like my sister and her husband, who don't have anti-virus programs on their family's laptop (because WHO NEEDS ANTI-VIRUS!? YAY! THE INTERNETS! OOH WHAT'S THAT!? CLICK CLICK CLICK!

)

into paying said virus makers to remove the virus on their site that pretends to be "Window's Helpful Security Tool"... those people, they should have acupuncture needles inserted into their peeholes. I'm just saying. I don't condone violence*, but they kinda deserve it.

*This statement, the result of 11 hours of wrestling with a fake security warning virus out of the goodness of my heart, which kept me up until 6am, running and rerunning two different malware removers and spybot s&d, to try to get my sister's computer usable for her work trip (which she told me about last night at 7pm), only to find that the virus keeps me from being able to finish the last step to remove it (installing an actual anti-virus program) so that the whole hard drive needs to be wiped, though the backup OS disk has been lost of course, is not representative of my usual feelings or intentions towards hackers, who really should DIAF until I get more than 4 hours of sleep. Really, die.

<3, JRose