CJ Ellis showed up here today, apparently because he had wanted to do some work on our site, but got caught by the rain. Took the opportunity to help him transfer his home phone line to VoIP, which proved more difficult than I had expected.
First, of course, I had to set up access for him. CJ's not stupid, but he's 75 years old and has never really learnt anything about computers. For him nothing is intuitive. No point in trying to teach him the fine points of FreeBSD.
First, he needs a computer. There's a mob called Computers for Seniors that offers cheap computers for concession card holders. CJ qualifies, so took a look. They offer what appears to be a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCentre with 2 GB memory, 60 GB drive and lots of Microsoft software for $249 or $250, depending on which page you look at. I bought a ThinkCentre last year, but I only paid $99 for it (along with another $29 for postage). Looking on eBay shows that that kind of offer is still available. Found a very similar one, again for $99, but only $20 postage. Compared to mine it has a faster processor and double the disk, and also Microsoft Windows 7 Professional . So are the Computers For Seniors ripping people off? They're certainly not overly cheap, but they're also delivering a monitor, keyboard, mouse, lots of expensive Microsoft software and also a certain amount of training. But if anything CJ is even stingier than I am, and he has monitor, keyboard and mouse, so he was happy to take this one.
So: get him online. Sign up with eBay. Wait, first you need email. I don't think mutt is his kind of program, so signed him up with gmail. Problems again with eBay passwords; at least gmail doesn't tell you what your password should look like. And that gave him automatic signup with PayPal, which found his address, presumably from the credit card supplier. So now he has a computer on the way.
Printing out email? Simple, ^P. And the results were catastrophic:
The fonts were terrible, and the text was truncated to the right. Why's that? Some problem with the FreeBSD browser? No, I had the same thing on Microsoft. The answer's obvious: gmail is too leet to print out pages using the standard functions. Instead you need to find the printer icon in the middle of the display, recognize it for what it is, and click on it. It then sends a PDF to the printer, which in my case wasn't very impressed:
This appears to be a PDF compatibility issue between Chrome and my printer, possibly a font issue. If I have this kind of problem, I can see CJ having an uphill struggle. He called me from home later on to say that his fax didn't work with the VoIP phoneand this after spending $30 to change his home phone number to it, and promising to pay $200 more if he moves back to Telstra. Hopefully the fax issue isn't a show-stopper.
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