You *all* know what this is about. Having to answer any computer related question no matter how far it is from what we really do for a living. “My computer is slowing down, should I reformat the hard drive?”, “popups popups everywhere!”, “I just deleted *all* of the pictures from your sister’s wedding. What do I do?”

One solution I had thought of was to partner with another geek and trade family tech support – so when your father calls and he’s mad at his computer, you won’t take it personally.

Leon Bambrick (SecretGeek) and Scott Hanselman have a much better, pro-active idea. Which is to take ownership of your families backup, virus protection etc. plans – really by just reminding them periodically. Sounds easy enough. Check it out.

by way of Don Kiely, an explanation from Aaron Stebner who was on the VS Setup team at the time the decision was made – if you are curious. I definitely was. I like Aaron’s comment on being asked this question so frequently:

of course, in the mails from internal devs I have to remove the expletives from the question also….. 

These are the guys who came up with asymmetric encryption, aka RSA encryption — (I’m learning a lot about this topic at the moment). In 2002 they won the Turing award, which is the like the nobel prize of i.t.. I would be neglect not to point out that this award was given to Alan Kay in 2003. Kay is the creator of Smalltalk 🙂 as well as a pioneer in object oriented programming.