Photo by: Joe Hatfield

Wow…What a long holiday that I have gone through! And it’s OVER!! It’s time to come back to something serious and exciting. My work, my blog, my club, contest, jogging…

Chinese New Year holiday was indeed a great memory for me this year! I got a chance to catch up with my old friends (primary schoolmates, high schoolmates). So many things have been changed. I have a friend who is pregnant now and she is going to deliver her first baby next month! Some of my friends plan to go wedding this year. Wow… what’s happened to me? I’m still single and always available… hahaha… It really doesn’t matter as finding a girl friend is not one of my resolutions for this year. I will let it go as it is. No rush…

I have done one thing that I felt very satisfied and happy during the holiday in Malaysia. I taught my dad how to log on internet to read news on stocks and newspaper. He has been nagging me since last year to teach him how to go online. I tried my best to ignore this topic as I felt that a man at his age of 68, who doesn’t know English at all, doesn’t know computer at all…. Internet is definitely not his cup of tea. Teaching him, it would spend me months, I thought. And I pushed this responsibility to my sister’s boy friend. It turned out that my sister’s boy friend was not a good teacher, my dad still knew nothing about internet.

Since I always aspire to be a great speaker, conveying a message in the easiest and most understandable way is also part of my job. I will take this challenge, I told myself.

Hey, dad, let me teach you how to log on internet. (By the way, I’m still using dial-up connection in Malaysia. It’s a little bit unfair to him as he has to learn extra steps…)

1) Switch on computer
- I think this should be the easiest step throughout the INTERNET LESSON.

2) Manipulate the mouse
- I asked my dad to click on the “dial-up” icon on desktop. I told him logging into internet is like making a phone call. Dial-UP is a phone, and you need to dial the correct number to bridge the connection to the internet.
- My dad was very poor in double-clicking. His finger was not so flexible, I guessed. He always failed to open the dial-up window due the slow response of his double-click. I adjusted the double-click speed to the lowest and occasionally he managed to open the dial-up window. One strange thing that I found was he always looked at his finger and mouse while doing the double-clicking task. I shouted at him, LOOK AT THE MONITOR! Then he recalled the incident when he taught me driving, I always looked at the sterling and gear knob instead of looking in front. Yup, it’s the same thing I told him. LOOK AT THE MONITOR!

3) Open a window of Internet Explorer
- Typing the URL may need extra few hours for me to teach him. So, to short-cut this process, I created a short-cut icon to the newspaper website that he intended to read. By clicking on the short-cut icon, he immediately logged in to the newspaper website.
- I could see the satisfaction in his eyes. He was so amazed by the “fast-speed” that he could cope with the internet learning.

4) Click on the link in the website
- I told him whatever he wants to read, just click on the hyperlink. A finger-like icon will appear if it is a hyperlink.

5) Minimize, maximize, close a window
- This is actually quite a simple task. However, I made my dad repeated the same task over and over for more than 50 times. The minimize, maximize and close buttons are too small for him to aim properly. Occasionally, he still looked at his finger and the mouse. Again, I shouted, LOOK AT THE MONITOR!

6) Shut down the PC
- Click on the shutdown button. That’s all!

Yesterday my dad called me, he told me, sometimes, he could log in the internet successfully, sometimes not. I said, it will take some time for him to familiarize. After all, repetition and practice will definitely make improvement.