Parental control of computers

I am not sure how many computers there are in this house, I know there is a large pile of tin boxes in the garage which were once cutting edge computer technology, but are now useless collectors of dust. As the wretched things decay I sometimes try to breathe some life into a Frankenstein creation of odd computer parts, like some Shaman resurrecting the dead.

The waste and obsolescence still astound me, I come from a generation who saved stamps from envelopes and milk bottle tops for the PDSA.

Luckily my kids do not share this reticence of retaining worthless artifacts and simply use these wizards boxes for what they are - an eye into the world or a tool to present information - and what a world, what information, everything which can be imagined can be seen and downloaded. If you only have a little imagination there are sites which can tease from a few words which you can “key in” whole galaxies of new ideas and images.

My son Jack is twelve and is often sitting at the next desk laughing out loud at Southpark or zipping through Youtube, we both discovered some Tommy Cooper clips last week.

So it is becoming clear that parental control is necessary, not everything on the Interent is a benign as “Glass Bottle - Bottle Glass” .  Some security is built into Windows and there are a lot of packages to restrict access to password control websites. Jack and my daughters think this is a super idea, so now we have parental control, the only problem is that I can’t use some of the computers now that they have locked me out.