Claire has suddenly developed an opinion on how we should do the online backups for our home computer.  This morning, after watching TV with her breakfast, Claire approached me and said in a serious voice, “Dad, I think we should use carbonite.com.  That way if you lose a file, you can, like, restore it.”  (The way she said “restore”, you could tell this was a new word for her, or at least a new usage of that word.)  Clearly, Claire was doing her utmost to be helpful.  I said, “Thanks for the tip, Claire.  I’ll keep that in mind.  We already use something like that called Mozy.”  Claire’s response was, “Okay.  But maybe we should change to carbonite.com.” And then she wandered off to get dressed.

If you ever doubted the value of a TV advertisement, as I do from time to time, then let this be a lesson.  It sure worked like a charm on Claire.  I am not in a hurry to switch to carbonite.com, though, since it means weeks of uploading all our data to the new service, which means weeks of slow internet access.  Trying to think how to frame that for Claire…How about, “That’s a nice idea, but it would mean learning.com and starfall.com would be really slow and annoying for a while.”  That just might do the trick.