Thanksgiving 2007

Yesterday evening we got back from our regular Thanksgiving trip to Oshkosh. The trip itself had two really odd (well, different) things about it that are worth remembering for the future.

First, we barely got anything to eat because of how small the portions were. Our family may have been the only one that was actually a little bit hungry on Thanksgiving. The leftovers ended up the same way. I was glad on the day we left (yesterday) when we got to eat some good-sized portions of leftover food in Green Bay at my aunts house.

The second thing that will make this Thanksgiving remembered and nice was the amazing amount of work that Eric and I did to their computer setup at their house. We changed their internet connection to a high-speed wireless one from dial-up. This was done the day we arrived before the Thanksgiving meal. We set it up as a protected network but gave their iMac the password and made sure that our macs could also connect. Then, the day after we first backed them up with SuperDuper!. Then clean installed 10.5.0 onto the machine. After the install we migrated back their data to the mac and installed the new iLife (‘08). After that we took the 12 software updates they required which included the iMac EFI Firmware Update. After that the fun began. We set up Time Machine so they’d never have to think about it again and began to work directly with them on setup. We split the two of them into their own user accounts, renamed the mac and hard drive to give it some uniqueness. We then asked them about email. To truly do that they decided that they’d want their own domain name that would at least give them a single email address that could follow them around. So after a lot of discussion they ended up buying the domain name “oshkoshpiano.com”. We then gave them both email addresses based in that domain and Gmail accounts to be at the heart of their email. We then spent over an hour for each of them to get their Mail,app (in their separate user accounts) set up to get that email as well as their old AOL email. It took forever to figure out the issue with sending email and in the end it turned out that we had forgotten a step in the Gmail setup. After that task was over we did some work in System Preferences. First we added iChat as a hidden login item so we’d always be seeing them online if they had a question. Second, we gave them both separate desktop images. Third we changed the prefs on the mighty mouse to make it simpler. Fourth we enabled the Guest account. We then started explaining to them what they needed to know and worked deeper on the setup for mailboxes and other simple things like that. The day we left we showed them iTunes and iPhoto. Overall I think that Eric and I did a ton of good work for them and have made it simply possible for us to connect with them more (via iChat video, etc.).

That was what we did during the Thanksgiving trip this year. It may not stick as well to them (the mac stuff), but it was helpful for us anyway. I hope that all of you had a nice (and more filling) Thanksgiving. Enjoy, Alex.