That it takes almost two hours to teach a five-year old how to download a picture from the Internet...It's like this... after chatting with River for about a half hour, Ashvin followed his 'Kuya' in chatting with me. Now, Ash, just like any other five-year old boy, needs to know everything about something he is currently doing, and after only five minutes of chatting, he asked me to give him a "download". Well, Ash is not new to chatting. We chat with him almost everyday, and he's already familiar with signing in and out, turning on the webcam and the voice chat facilities, and many other features of the Yahoo! Messenger that other adults wouldn't be able to learn in their lifetime. Maybe he heard it from his Kuya, who is in himself another tech-savvy boy, maintaining his own Friendster site and also doing other techie things on the Net, but Ash is very curious about downloads right now...
And so, I told him that I will send a picture to him. It is actually one of his pictures... taken just before we left once again to travel and work far away from them, and the one where he is bragging about his new shoes just before going to school. The initial steps were kind of easy... I just transferred the file, asked him to accept the file (which he missed the first time by clicking 'Decline' instead, so I transferred it again), and told him to wait until the file transfer finishes. That part was completed with minimal glitch, and everything was fine. And then...
After completing the transfer, I asked him if he saw his picture and he said he did not see anything. I told him to open the file and he said what button to press. I told him to describe to me what he sees in his YM window, and that's when the trouble began... Ash couldn't find the file, and much more he doesn't know where and in what folder it was saved (well, what can I say? He's five years old!)... I asked him to put the camera in front of the computer's screen so that I could see his YM, but it didn't work (of course...) I asked him to call his Kuya River, but River seems to be doing something and is unavailable for the moment. Alice joined the fray already because Ash is starting to get tantrums and we can clearly see him crying on the webcam. We've done the process again (transfer file)... then repeated it once more...until Ash got completely into fits... Alice decided to call them on the phone, talk to River in a strong voice (so he helps Ash), and finally solve the problem.
When River arrives, we repeated the file transfer one last time and it took only five minutes for Ash to learn how to download his picture from Yahoo...
Well, sometimes you have to learn things the hard way...
