l'accent grave

My sweet dad, who is a writer, and as I was growing up, always wrote by pen on paper (using a record cover as a hard back while he sat on the sofa, then typed up each edited draft completely anew), now uses the computer daily. He's come a long way, but still it's difficult at times.His transition to the computer started with my brother Ian, when they stared Tokyo Q online together. Now, I can't imagine living here without email and iSight connectivity with both my mom and dad.

My mom moved to NY from Japan back in the day when it cost $3 ~4K to fly home, packages via sea mail took forever and were expensive, and talking on a phone required you to spit out quickly the most necessary information as soon as you could. It must have been incredibly hard for my mom to be so apart from her home country...

Back to the l'accent grave. I got this email from my dad recently:

Yes, I have a nickname: Widge or Widget. More importantly, he has instructions in English, but he uses a Japanese keyboard, which is different. Letters and such are placed elsewhere. For me, I much prefer using an English language keyboard with the option to switch over to Japanese since I learned how to type on that keyboard but his keyboard is with the English and Japanese letters combined, thus making the English letters in weird locations, and any help I can provide nul.

I googled, and sent him standard Mac instructions, but it didn't work. So he called the local Mac helpline, and after an hour (who knows why it took that long), was able to get it. Thus he replied about the success:

Yay for my dad! I thought it was a rather cute incident.