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Enjoying a High-Tech Round of Show-and-Tell
The Post's Leslie Walker introduces Randolph Harrison to a few of the features of her digital camera.
(By Dennis Drenner For The Washington Post)
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She expressed more interest in digital cameras, saying she wanted one of the skinny Casio models barely bigger than a credit card that she had seen a friend use. For now, she and her partners check out a loaner from her office whenever they get a new property listing.
As for the Web, she did little online shopping, though she and her husband did some online travel booking, reserved boats online for their Annapolis sailing club and occasionally bought books from Amazon.com.
Back in the newsroom, Beyers, Pegoraro and I discussed items we could recommend or show the Harrisons. We agreed there was no point in pushing them too far. Most tech gear is needlessly complicated, and requires time to master. We decided to keep it simple.
They wanted help in installing the Firefox Web browser, which Randolph used at work but hadn't been able to get working at home. Pegoraro would install the iTunes music software to show what they could do with that iPod they wanted. We agreed on a short list of Web sites to introduce them to, such as Half.com for used books and Answers.com for reference.
Beyers suggested we also install Picasa 2, the free photo-organizing software from Google. I volunteered to lend the Harrisons my three-megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera, since I had recently bought a newer model. And Pegoraro promised to bring his arsenal of anti-spyware programs to obliterate the recurring pop-up message rattling Jeanne.
"I'll kill it if it's the last thing I do," he vowed.
When Pegoraro, Beyers and I arrived at the Harrisons' cozy townhouse the next Monday, the couple and their dogs, Riley and Murphy, were there to greet us. Randolph joked that he was basically too lazy and cheap to equip himself with the latest, greatest technology.
He had, however, taken time Saturday to run an anti-spyware program on their home computer, which may have removed some nasty programs that hackers and electronic snoops tend to install on home computers. But any fix Randolph may have achieved likely would have been short-lived. Pegoraro found there was no active firewall, a program designed to protect computers from intruders entering over the Internet.
No sooner had he sat down at their computer than up popped one of those text messages that irked Jeanne: "Message from Security Monitor to Windows User.' "
"If the firewall was on, then it should be blocking this messenger service stuff," Pegoraro said.
With a click here and a click there, Pegoraro activated the firewall built into Microsoft Windows XP, which started blocking those Windows messages. Then he ran adware and spyware sweeps.
Jeanne mentioned another glitch: When she browsed property listings on the Metropolitan Regional Informational System Web site, she got a blank window instead of the photos she was supposed to see on virtual property tours. Pegoraro diagnosed the problem as an outdated software program and installed the latest version of Flash.
