Father Daughter Stuff

By mabinogi On January 29, 2005 · Leave a Comment

I had Caitlin last night, as Emma went to Sydney yesterday and today.
I picked her up from her (Great) Grandma’s house at 3ish where for the first time in history she was already ready to go.
I took her to see The Incredibles as I mentioned in the post dedicated to that, which we both enjoyed a lot. Then we grabbed some KFC and headed home.

After dinner she announced that she was going to do some work(!), and got out a book of various educational type excercises, puzzles and games (with gold stars!) and sat down and finished it – so she could have the satisfaction of sticking the big gold star on it.
It wasn’t school work, as school hasn’t even started for the year yet. It was just a book that she must have got for christmas, or even just randomly over the holidays. I’d imagine if she ever got a book like that for homework, it would remain uncompleted, and un-starred ;)

Next she decided that she wanted to do some more work on her web site – so I got her to try to come up with a story for the pictures she’d already put up there.
I then spent the rest of the evening telling her how to spell words as she labouriously typed her way through the five sentence story letter at a time, and then showed her how to get the layout she wanted.

After that I asked her if there was anything else she wanted to do with it – to which she announced rather enthusiastically that she wanted to put games on it.

me: Ummm, that’s a little too hard, I’m afraid
her: awwww, but pleeeassee
me: please wont help, I’d like to say we could do it, but it’s not really the same thing as HTML. What sort of games did you want to put there anyway?
her: oh, just something simple
me: Well, if it’s really really simple, then maybe we might be able to have a look at it
her: yay!

She then grabs a pen and some paper and starts madly drawing stuff, muttering to herself, whilst I feel the ominous approach of impending doom

me: Ok, that’s good – but how will it work?
her: oh, just a bit like Neopets and a bit like Blue’s Clues.
me: (helplessly) you said simple.
her: yeah, it is
me: I’m sorry miss, there’s no way I can do that….it’s not really all that simple, it’s actually really, really difficult. It’d take years, if I could even do it…and anyway…it’s kind of way past time you should be in bed…
her: (crushed) oh.

There’s nothing like having to destroy your daughter’s faith in your god like paternal powers by admitting that you’re unable to implement a massive multi user web site and an interactive multi media educational game before bed time.
But in typical Caitlin fashion, it took her about 30 milliseconds to get over it and bounce on to the next thing ;)

This morning we played a little Flipnic (a rather bizarre PS2 pinball game I picked up at EB for $20), had breakfast, then headed out.

We went to the computer fair to look for a new (or more likely, second hand) hard drive for her computer, as her one is tiny and can barely take an operating system let alone anything else. I figured I could probably find something in the 8-10Gig range for fairly cheap.
I also intended to see if I could find another second hand motherboard like the $40 one I saw before christmas so as to give her machine a little bit of an upgrade too – probably something like a 500Mhz processor.
Well…about an half an hour later we wandered out with a whole new computer for her.

After we’d done the rounds of the tables a couple of times for me to get an idea of what was there, I’d decided that I probably could put together a bit of an upgrade for her – possibly even enough to let her run XP instead of having to stick with 98. I’d seen a motherboard with a 500Mhz AMD K6 in it for $50, a 10 gig hard drive for $20 and 256 Meg of memory for another $50. That was more than I had got out, but was still pretty good, so we went out to go and get some more money.
For some strange reason though, I decided that rather than getting another $50 out, I’d get $120 – so I did.

Then we went back in, and now having just over $200 in my pocket instead of just under $100, I did the rounds again re-evaluating the situation, and looking at some of the second hand complete machines.
Most within the price range still weren’t really what I wanted – they’d be too slow, or have not enough memory, or too small a hard drive, or all three. So I was just about to go and do the motherboard/CPU + memory + hard drive thing when I saw a tag on a stack of computers that said $195 – 1GHZ Pentium III – which caught my attention, as none of the other sub $200 machines were even close to 1GHz – and I kept reading – 256Meg RAM – even better – that’s enough to run XP in – 30 gig hard drive – 30 gig? all the others were in single digits! – and 100 megabit network and keyboard and mouse.

I stood and stared at them a while to work out if they were actually real, and re-read the tag a few times. Then I did another round of the room to make sure that it really was as good a deal as I thought it was, and yes – $195 at any of the other second hand tables would get me a maximum of a 700Mhz machine with 128 (or even 64) meg of memory and a 6 gig hard drive.
So I headed back over there, and there were a couple of guys talking to the stall holder about the machines – they seemed to be having trouble believing it too, and I heard the stall holder say that he had hundreds of them in his warehouse. I managed to get his attention (getting your wallet out and counting your money tends to do that) and bought one. He carefully demonstrated to me that the specs matched the tag before shutting it down, grabbing a keyboard and mouse for us and handing it over.

So, I went in looking for a $20 hard drive and came out with a $200 computer. That’s a depressingly common occurrence for me.

We (well, I – Caitlin didn’t take long to decide that watching progress bars crawl across the screen is really not very interesting, and dragged out the mechano instead) spent most of the rest of the afternoon setting it up – installing Windows XP because Caitlin really wanted it (I’d find that depressing except for the fact that she also wanted me to install Linux on it too), upgrading XP to service pack 2, and installing the software and drivers for her graphics tablet.
So now she finally has a machine that can actually drive her christmas present.

So, a summary of Caitlin’s time here: