February 11, 2010

Will wonders never cease

My wife tells me that she has found a website that can give piano lessons!  I thought that was remarkable, so I asked her to show me the website.  This site actually has videos showing you how to play the piano!  I’ve always wanted to take piano lessons but when I was a child my parents said that there was no room in the house for a piano and they couldn’t afford to pay for piano lessons anyway!

Well, now I see that I could use this online method to learn on my younger son’s keyboard that he left behind when he went to college!  I think that maybe I’ll give it a try.  I’ve got plenty of time and nothing to lose.  This should be interesting!

February 7, 2010

When you need help

One of the things that I think is great about the age of the Internet is how easy it is now to get services that once were hard to find. For example, when my kids were in school, they were often making and receiving phone calls after school from other classmates who needed Math help. Our youngest son even became a Math Tutor in his senior year in high school!

Now I understand that students can access Free Online Tutoring when they need help with their studies. I think that is a really wonderful thing, as long as the students have access to the Internet! You would not believe how many people I meet around here that tell me that they don’t have Internet access at their house! I don’t think my family could survive without it at this point in time; it is so heavily intertwined in the running of the family!

December 20, 2009

Gold as an investment

My wife has been encouraging me to consider investing in gold when we get our insurance settlement money.  She seems to think that putting some of our money in gold would be a good hedge against the stock market dropping again.  I have to admit that I have always considered gold as a suspect when it came to investing money.  I know that the price of gold can fluctuate too.

But my wife keeps telling me that investing in gold as a way to diversify our portfolio is a sound decision.  She keeps telling me that it is never wise to put all of your eggs in the same basket, and that we need to spread our money out so that if one investment does poorly then the other might take up the slack and do well.  I have to admit that there is a lot of logic in that reasoning.  Diversification is a good way to protect ourselves financially.

December 10, 2009

The numbers

When our nephew Travis needs Math help with his homework, he often calls us up and asks us to help him out.  We have a scanner and fax machine so sometimes he will fax his homework over to us to review so we can see what the problem is if he can’t explain it well over the phone.  Lately he seems to calling us every night, so I’m going to suggest to his parents that they sign him up for Free online math tutoring.  I think that with an Online math tutor Travis might actually learn a little bit more than simply running over his homework assignment with us.

I think that having Free online math help is a wonderful service to have for children that are struggling with math.  I know that a lot of kids don’t  really understand how important math will be to them when they are adults, and I think that the Online math tutoringprograms can make it more fun to learn than just some old coot like me trying to help them to understand the concepts behind the homework problems.  I wish that there had been free Online math help for me when I was growing up!

October 8, 2009

Technical support is evolving

Isn’t technology wonderful when it works?  And it’s absolutely hateful when it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to!  I’ve been around long enough to know that computer glitches are the work of the technology demons that hover over and around everyone who uses the computer.  At any moment the blue screen of death could appear!  In the not too distant past, even minor computer glitches could paralyze an office for a day or two; waiting for the “computer guy” to show up to fix the problem, or even worse the computer would have to be taken to an off-premise site for a week or more.  Ahhhh….. those were the “bad ol’ days!” of the pioneering days of the personal computer.

In the modern day, remote desktop software can be, and often is, the answer to many of the problems that can arise in an office full of computers.  This secure software enables a user to be in one location and access the computers in a different location to trouble-shoot and hopefully repair what is wrong with the troubled computer.  So if the problem with the computer is not something as drastic as the motherboard frying, the quick-fix is a real possibility with this type of technology.