My parents got online probably a few months ago. Now they're are both always online on their laptops and typing like a 12 year old in chat/sms-speak, telling me news about cousins thrice separated who I've never spoken to and sending picassa web album links every second day with pics full of the newborn nephew.

How are your folks with the computer and the internet?

my mother is almost stubborn when it comes to computers. I taught her how to use the IMs but she will just refuse to accept to have learned anything from it. I think she simply wants to show that these things are useless and of no concern to her. As for my dad, he uses them a lot. SO I can no longer keep cool status messages on my GTalk. The last time I did he told my sisters, "What?! Why is he saying things like that ?"

Incredible isn't it? My facebook is screwed as well, having added (ex)colleagues and family. Status messages like the following is ruled out: "OMG OMG i hd buttsex all nite nd ws feeling shitty soooooo i din go 2 wrk!!! Fck those corpr8 hores neway lolz!!111"

both my parents are fairly adept at the basic mail checking, chatting and surfing. my mum even has a facebook account.

hence, they're both blocked on my g-talk and my mum isn't my friend on facebook. my virtual space is my own, etc.

Mom's been on the net for the last year or so and is getting quite comfortable with it but mostly limited to checking mails and g-talk and Wikipedia. Dad refuses to learn or even try so I still check his mails for him.

Mom's fairly immune to the net - sometimes she uses Skype to talk to my sister in the UK and she checks her own mail, but that's about it.

Dad, on the other hand, has become quite the cool guy. He's not very pro-active about getting hip to the newest things online - for example, I had to set up his Facebook and Hospitality Club accounts when I went home. But once I ran him through the basics of using it, he started frequenting it soon enough. Being a social person by nature, he's suited for stuff like Facebook, where he can sit and catch up with all the fruits in his bigass family tree.

He's also been a member of the F1 Ferrari forums for several years. Not just that, now he's a seasoned smack talker as a result of several flame wars with McLaren fans who came over to the Ferrari section to talk shit about Schumi. In fact, once he enlisted the services of me and my cousin to help him flame the crap out of an adversary. Total 21st century father-son bonding - screw fishing and sports.

Plus, my family mailgroup is going haywire after having been hijacked by my cousin, uncle and dad. They keep discussing history, philosophy and other matters at random, the latest topic being the logistics of growing marijuana at home. That's when my cousin isn't posting mails about how his wife is dressing up for an Easter party as a Mary Magdalene playboy bunny, solely in order to offend the religious fundies in the group.

Dad's communication on chat is a bit stiff, though. Much more formal than face to face, no sms lingo at all, and also long pauses between messages.

Overall, I guess I have it good. I'm not too bothered if the parents can see what I'm up to online (and by extension, in real life), since (1) I unfortunately live a life free of most scandal and (2) they've been pretty liberal with me in general. eg:
- Not pushing me in any direction with regard to education.
- Supporting my decision to do game development even though there were more immediately profitable avenues available.
- Asking me once about the arranged marriage thing, then not bringing it up again after I waved the offer away.
- Not pestering me too much about getting my Christu confirmation done after I expressed some dissent in the matter.

Which reminds me, my pastor was on my Gtalk list. I seriously wonder if he's ever seen my status message going "Now Playing: Deicide - Death to Jesus" or something of the sort. Ah well.

Chacko Sr is damn cool. May be I'll finally get to meet him after your move.

What does he think of kvltsite? (the others could answer too if your parent/s know about the site) I know I threw out any sort of family-friendliness in our language right at the start. A couple of cousins have checked out the website and have enjoyed the comics and the occasional okkvlt rant, and have told others in the family about it, but generally people don't get what we're talking about so no one bothers to check it out after may be the initial glance.

Srikanth Panaman wrote:
generally people don't get what we're talking about so no one bothers to check it out after may be the initial glance.

That's about right.

Ok, I've taken care of the Facebook privacy issue. I made different lists of people, and tightened up privacy settings using the lists. Phew.

Yeah, of all the parents of my friends who I haven't met already, Chacko Sr tops the list.

The next time I'm in Bangalore, I'll look in your folks GK. They were incredibly welcoming and nice people.

My dad is pretty sorted online - he chats, does an assload of e-commerce transactions forwards ludicrous spam - mainly articles that one of my insane cousins digs up with about the great Islamo-Christian perils that Hindus face. Strangely enough, he's extremely tolerant in person which makes me wonder if he even reads the stuff he's forwarding.

Only my brother is on my facebook profile after I told him specifically to not give the name or the ID out to anyone else. Which is one of the reasons I'm Crudo Cruox and have the Wwe Boll picture - makes it that much more difficult to trace.

Wwe Boll

I know Boll is a trained boxer and punched the shit out of somethingawful's Lowtax in a match, but damn I didn't know about him becoming a pro wrestler.

Dad's pretty savvy to any new technology and does lots of banking and investment things online. Adept with MS office and what not. He keeps two comps in his clinic, one on hid desk from where he constantly checks stuff like news and stock scripts and checks online medical journals [ mainly through my uni account!!] on a daily bases. He keeps on asking me about new web apps and gadgets etc. whenever he can't form an opinion after net search. Right now wants a Blue Ray player, which I'm trying to convince him is not worth the expense, considering how less free time he gets from his schedules.

Mom gave me a tough time when I first started to teach her rudimentary emailing. She'd start some email and at some point invariably come to me with " beta, now what should I do?". Then she got a new operative endoscope, and started giving DVDs to her patients as a record of their procedures and suddenly became net savvy! Last time I checked, she was burning dvds and maintaining her bank accounts by herself, instead of relying on me and my dad. Pretty good for her since she's a lifelong med-student-nerd variety and I don't have to do, for her, searches for all sorts of stuff anymore!

That's excellent Nilay.

Once people get past the "I'm too old for this" or "IF i press something wrong everything will blow up!" mindset it tends to be pretty smooth sailing. The latter mindset is hard to get over - I struggled with it for the first 8 months or so after I began working since I'd been totally brainwashed by my brother who can be quite a dick about some things. I've noticed what keeps the parent generation away, besides unfamiliarity, is sheer laziness. Some people get the feeling that if they persist with the "babes in the wood" shtick, someone else is going to do everything for them all the time. I happened to work with such a person around a decade ago. Apart from being technologically backward, she was among the stupidest people I have ever encountered.

Anyway I ran her by all the complex technology we used at work - MS Word and Internet Explorer and figured she's be good to go after two weeks of helping her out. But she was weirdly and obstinately idiotic. For instance, she and this other wanker who had joined around that time were, on one occasion, working on the same fucking floppy disc. This when our computers were equipped with large (for the time) hard drives and we had a network drive as well. Every time one of these assholes had to save a file, they'd saunter over to the other person's computer and grab the floppy disk. They were evenly matched in this tournament of stupidity, until Renuka forgot all about the floppy drive and got a disk error trying to save her file.

She was incidentally working on Notepad. I'd spent a lot of time over those two weeks telling her how cool Word was, how our DTP guy only accepted documents in word format, how she could spell check on it on the fly etc, but none of that got through. She would use Notepad, forget all about 'word wrap' and then come up to me with "Something is wrong! The text is going far away. Is there a virus?" By week 4 I had lost all patience. I'd be like "Which software are you using? Oh Notepad? Well that's a very advanced software Renuka and I've not been trained in it. If you were using Word I could've helped. Sorry!"

What galled me even more was this cretin was assistant editor, making thrice as much as I made and was wholly incompetent. She once spent an entire day cadging images off the internet for some special issue we were putting together, hogging the computer all day - we had just ONE TCP/IP account among all of us. Except she didn't save the images or as she put it, "don't remember WHERE I put those pictures!" She'd also claimed she'd forgotten which sites she had visited. Guess who had to track all those images down again? But given I was also posting furiously on the planet daikatana forums that day, that was a LOT of fun.

HathyaSaiBaba wrote:
The next time I'm in Bangalore, I'll look in your folks GK. They were incredibly welcoming and nice people.

I don't know what you tell them or do but yeah they're totally impressed by what a sweet fellow you are. I keep getting asked about you also so yeah, come and visit.

Dad's quite tech savvy, mom spends most of her time online video-chatting with family. One thing I notice about all these parents-in-the-internet is that they are ALL massively into forwarding.