Sherman E. DeForest

This is my last posting of 2007, and what a year it has been. My nearly blind client who had a heart attack the night after I set up his new computer is out of the hospital and being very active. He called me to come over to help him with some problems. When I […]

Tutoring seniors in computer literacy can be frustrating or rewarding. This week was rewarding.
My new client is an 89-year-old woman who is severely limited in seeing due to macular degeneration. This condition slowly eliminates the ability to see the sharp things at the center of vision, but generally leaves the ability to see peripheral things. […]

To make up for the lost client I mentioned last week, a different type of a new client merits mention. A woman I met at the Senior Center called me this week and asked if I could help her husband. They just bought a new computer and he needed help setting it up. Immediately I […]

This week I lost a client. Actually I lost the client a week ago, but she did not tell me at the time. We seemed to have a good thing going. She runs a small business in which her computer is critical. It was giving her problems. On the phone, it became obvious that she […]

Security is still a major problem for seniors wanting to become computer literate. They seem to divide into two major groups. One group is extremely paranoid and afraid to surf or download anything. The other group blithely goes about clicking on the latest moving banner to see if they won the free trip to Las […]

Here is a story without an end yet. You can speculate on how it will turn out. A senior friend who lives about an hour’s drive away has a small business in his home, which requires a LAN with server and five work stations. He does not have a regular tech service provider and knows […]

My last post seems to have been misinterpreted by several people. That can only mean one thing: I was not clear in my writing. In fact, I have no negative feelings toward the client who did not maintain her computer. It would be more proper to say that I am frustrated by the tendency of […]

This week a quietly panicked new customer called for help. She uses her computer for business and for club duties. For some time it had been suddenly stopping, but she rebooted and it would work for a while so she pressed on. Finally her computer simply gave up the ghost. She heard about me from […]

This fall I planned to present three short courses designed for seniors. The first was to be a combination decision theory and puzzle course based loosely on my other Lockergnome post. The second was a moderately advanced photo restoration and enhancement class for people who wanted to go beyond simple cropping and organization. The third […]

My senior course on how to obtain freebies safely has attracted more than student interest. Several local tutors have asked me about it and I have received comments asking more about the content. In response, I will talk more about it here with the provision that this is still experimental, and the nature of the […]

The first presentation of my course on downloading nifty things for free went extremely well. The laboratory was full, and we still had a waiting list, In fact, the next presentation is already full with a waiting list. This reflects more on the desire of my senior students to get things for free than my […]

By the time you see this, I will have completed presenting my first short course on "Nifty Free Things from the Internet". This was a whimsical idea for a volunteer presentation through OASIS, which caters to continuing education for seniors. While I have no idea how it will turn out, I have already been surprised […]

We had interesting exchanges this week with several seniors who are not now my clients and might not become clients in the near future.
The occasion was our annual Homeowners Association Garage Sale. For those who have not experienced this failure in social engineering, homeowners associations are a hybrid between government and private organizations. Their […]

What can I tell my senior clients about docx and xlsx? Several have had the unpleasant experience of not being able to send readable files to friends. It is rather lame to suggest that recipients should go to Microsoft and download a converter to solve a problem they did nothing to cause. What is the […]

Much of tutoring seniors involves helping students overcome (1) paralyzing fear of contaminating their computers with some horrible virus, or (2) their complete trusting of the Internet and the kindness of strangers.
Even when a student has a fully protected system and safe surfing habits, things can sometimes go wrong. This week one of my clients […]

I have often mentioned that most of my senior clients are women. One could assume this is because men do not live as long as women in general, and therefore the senior population has more women than men. The demographics of aging are certainly a contributing factor, but that is not the whole story.
Some of […]

One of my most interesting clients is an older woman who started from complete computer ignorance and decided to become computer literate. She went pretty far by herself, but eventually asked me to help her with a series of private lessons. She and her husband have a wireless LAN. He has a desktop he uses […]

Last week I wrote about a client who experienced a combination of lack of computer literacy along with some hardware problems. His problems had apparently been made worse by some free help he got from friends. This week I am in a bit of a moral dilemma. His frustration level has increased and now he […]

Often I am better at tutoring than at fixing hardware problems. That was demonstrated again this week when I had a new client. He wanted several things. His computer was getting too slow. His wireless Internet connection did not work (and never had worked). He wanted to know how to organize his folders and thousands […]

Perhaps a person can actually make a good living by tutoring seniors, but I doubt it. Seniors as a group simply do not have much disposable income to spend on extras such a private tutoring. However, one can make some nice supplemental income and reap other benefits.
For instance, one of my regular clients is a […]