Bright Idea, Nimrod

My step kids live in two different houses. Dad's house and Mom's house.

They have homework most nights and are still young enough that the overwhelming majority of their work is paper and pencil. Of course, that won't be the case forever.

My step daughter was assigned a book report recently. The instructions gave her the option of hand writing it, or typing it. Being the super student that she is she obviously wanted to type it. (she is a precocious little genius, isn't she?)

That prompted a few questions. She started working on the assignment on Sunday even though it isn't due until tomorrow. (told you she was a super student) That means she could start it at Mom's house and then finish it at Dad's house. There is also the nasty little tid bit of Mom and Rob not having a functioning printer at their house.

What to do?

Robbie comes up with the super idea of giving the kids a Google Documents account of their own. That way they can work on reports like this at either house without having to truck the files back and forth on a disc or something. Great idea! I let the kids chose the user name and password (with Mom and me having veto power, which we used a couple of times) so that they would remember it.

While my step daughter was at her Dad's this week they logged in and printed out her report. Although there was something strange happening.

The pages (not her report, but the actual Google pages) were in Croatian.

Yup. Croatian.

So... I logged in to fix this. I had Firefox open and logged into my own Google account so I opened up Chrome and logged into theirs. I had to translate the page into English, using Google translate. Then Chrome crashed. I tried again. Chrome crashed again. Urgh.

I switched to Safari. Same thing. Crash. Twice.

I switched to IE. It managed to get me where I needed to be, but when I clicked on Settings it opened up the wrong menu. That's right, the wrong menu.

Finally I just logged myself out in Firefox (the swanky new Firefox 4) and logged into their account and everything went fine. I was able to change the default language from Croatian (how the hell did it get set to Croatian? My step daughter sure as hell wasn't reading Croatian on Sunday) to US English.

Problem solved.

I also take it as further proof that Firefox kicks all other browsers in the ass.