I helped my Mom with her computer tonight. What the heck is wrong with my industry where we can't create something that the *rest* of society can use? My Mom was upset that she couldn't connect to her wireless network at home, and really confused why it kept saying Netgear when she had a D-Link. She was going to return her new MacBook because it couldn't connect to her network. Well, as you might suspect, she wasn't connecting to her network, she was connecting to a neighbor's network. So how do you remote diagnose these problems. Well, you don't. Trying to walk somebody through these kind of issues over the phone is nearly impossible and insanely time-consuming. So, I installed a version of UltraVNC SC (SingleClick) that lets you build a client that your friends/family can download and run as an EXE. As long as you have a static IP (or get the same DHCP assignment from your provider), you can have a viewer running and they can connect to your machine and you get to view their desktop.

Pretty sweet, especially when helping your parents. I then did the quick and obvious things, like connect to her router, change her password on the router, change the name of her wireless network (the idiots at Best Buy thought it would be OK to use her last name as the name of her Wireless network so that any neighbor would have that much more information when hacking in), disable SSID broadcast, and use WEP. A little redundant, but a good practice nonetheless. We then set up her Macintosh using a very helpful USC page here. She's elated, and won't be returning her Mac, nor buying a new wireless router (which was her other suggestion).

I have to wrap this up now as my four-year-old just came in (its midnight), so I need to walk him back to his room...