Friday, April 08, 2011

How'd He Do That?

I left our little one, who's 19 months old, in front of my work laptop for about 20 seconds while I ran upstairs to get my car keys. What's the worst that could happen, was he going to delete all my e-mail or something?

I came back, and found this:

He managed to flip the orientation of the screen from landscape to portrait. The only way I know how to do this is by going through a series of menus and hitting the confirm button a dialog box. Yet he managed to find some mechanism to do this in the 20 seconds I left him alone.

Amazing. Makes me wonder what kind of skills they're teaching him at day care. I'm going to have to have a talk with them - in this household we learn Emacs shortcuts first, *then* Windows shortcuts. It's just our way.

7 comments:

  1. I imagine it's a windows thing??? If so, try Control-Alt-Up (or down, or left, or right) to change the screen orientation.

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  2. 1. If you haven't read Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett, then you ought to. It contains useful advice for a parent in your situation.

    2. Grr. Logging in to wordpress to sign, then backing up results in message lossage in Chrome.

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  3. Jerry - thanks for the lead and sorry about the comment loss. What a pain.

    -Ben

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  4. Anonymous6:02 PM

    > in this household we learn [...] Windows shortcuts

    And there is your probl'm, m'am.

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  5. And if it's not Windows, but Linux, he must have randomly typed "xrandr -o right".

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  6. It's Windows...but that's a good Linux hack to know about.

    -Ben

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  7. Emacs is all menu driven now -- and I still use the keyboard shortcuts more often than the menu choices. But I haven't' taught them to my kids, oops. (Only have one who actually uses emacs, and it's more for the games, believe it or not.)

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