I'm very defensive about my computer. Maybe it's the fact that it's running Windows 98 and hasn't been reformatted since ... 1999. In any case, I get especially wary when people with no computer experience (e.g. my mom) start using my computer. Nothing good can come out of a newbie using my computer.

When's the last time you heard, "OH man! Mom, you fixed up that nagging 49.5 days Windows crash bug! Thanks! You rule!" If visiting hotmail.com or some korean news sites made Windows better ... well. No need for Indian offshore development companies, right?

Anyways, I had to recently clean my keyboard. You see, crap gets underneath the keys and it got to a point where I could *feel* stuff being crunched when I hit the keys. So I took off my keys, brought out of vacuum, and vacuumed my keyboard. It was perhaps one of the dirtiest things I had ever seen ... dust and hair and old food ... nasty.

In any case, when I was snapping the keys back on, I had the ultimate idea for a "foolproof" system. I rearranged my keys.

The first time my mom tried to use my "new" keyboard layout, I could see she was slightly confused. She stared at the keys ... and then slowly pecked away one by one. Then she looked up at the screen, only to find gibberish. Frustrated, she turned to me for help.

"Mom, I rearranged the keys."

At first she thought I had rearranged the keys as in "switching away from a Dvorak system." That does make sense.

"No mom, I simply rearranged the keys. It's still the Dvorak layout. The keys just don't represent what you hit anymore."

My mom is not very ... "keyboard friendly." She *needs* to see the keys in order to type them.

She hasn't used my computer since then.