Sunday March 20, 2016 Guerneville CA.
John’s computer lesson
I was up by noon today which was good as my hives were real itchy last night and I didn’t get to sleep until about six this morning.
It was raining lightly so I thought it would be a good day to go down the road to John’s as I had told him I”d give him some computer lessons. John’s just getting into computers and he’d like to be able to move pictures and stuff around and do Crag’s list.
Called ahead
I called John to see if he was home and he was. Another friend of his, also by the name of John was over visiting and they had a project to fix, so come on over.
Something for the guys to do out in the shop
They had one of those jump start battery kits with the air compressor and things all built into them. Only problem was the snap out plug attach for charging with a 110 cord were loose and would not snap into place, as in floppy.
Supervising
So we went to John’s workshop and I supervised their taking it apart and finding what the problem was. Two small screws had broken off in the plastic, so we thought about it for a bit.We figured we could just solder the wires directly to the plug prongs and put a big gob of putty epoxy around the back of it to hold it all in place.
So John went to ask his wife if he could use her soldering gun. She let him and she had solder too, so I helped John get the soldering part done. I had brought with me some putty type epoxy so we mixed a bit up and pressed it around the prongs and set it aside to dry.
Oh, oh, a Mac
One John left and the other John and I went into the house where I discovered they had a Mac, not a windows machine. Oh, oh, things just got harder as I’m not that familiar with todays Macs, but I hear they are similar to windows so I decided to give it a try.
Cut copy and paste
I wanted to show John how to cut, copy and paste files and folders and also rename them and move them around for his first lesson. I found out Mac’s use move not cut and they do some other stuff different too.
I got stuck a couple times and had to get his wife to help out.
Eventually I got John doings all the basic stuff, just barely, but that’s a good place to start.
Home work
I gave John some home work. Take some photos with his camera and copy them to a new folder in his picture folder we made today giving the folders appropriate names.
Learn by doing
I’m teaching John by what we used to call the HP way. It’s learn by doing, no tests or quizzes. I show you how, you try, I show you how, you try until you get it, or I keep showing you until you do, not ever pressuring the student to get it. Just repeat and I’ll help out when you get stuck. Repeat.
The system works real well for teaching real complicated stuff or anything for that matter. We worked on it for a couple hours and John did real well.
Here’s John just as we were finishing up for the day. I think he was pleased to get to this point.
Of course, I learned quite a bit myself figuring out the Mac.
Yummy rock fish
It was after five when I left, but not before John gave me some frozen ocean rock fish he’d caught. Yummmmmm. That will expand my beef diet a bit.
I went on home where the rain had pretty much let up, but it was cool out, so I went in the house and fired up the heater and that was pretty much my day.
More rain is expected tomorrow so maybe I’ll be back to working on my van projects.