Two years ago, the in-laws gave the boys a computer for Christmas. They already had one and yes it was old and pieced together but it was running linux and worked great for them. We tried running Windows on their frankenputer but they constantly were getting spyware and trojan infections.

Enter the gift from hell. I begged my sister in-law to not let her husband follow through with this plan. He was an only child and loves spoiling the boys with video games. The problem is the video games they want to play always end up with someone angry so they’ve been removed from the computer from hell. Now it’s only for school use, public school homework and Time4Learning for homeschool use. They were warned repeated not to use Internet Exploder for any reason other than Time4Learning. And they heeded that warning until yesterday.

Boy #2 asked to be signed up for Time4Learning to use over summer vacation. He wanted to get ahead and then when the new school year starts, ask for a grade placement test. Well, he had a distraction problem. He’d sit down to do schoolwork and end up spending hours on YouTube and MySpace and accomplish very little with the school work that I was paying for him to have. I installed the Firefox plugin for parental controls and blocked everything that was a problem for the children. By #2 threw up his hands and quit his plan after 24 hrs. Then he snuck on the computer and used IE to get to the things he wanted. Now I have an infested system that if this one last thing to try doesn’t fix it is going to end up having to be reformatted and winblows reinstalled.

This is the sort of thing that led to my retirement from computer & internet support services. And I hate it that my 14 yr. old child is acting like an internet addicted techno-tard. And I hate that damn computer even more today.