Using Technology to Keep the Peace

Your home office is your workplace. For you, it is just like going to the office. But, it is also in your house, and sooner or later, your little one is going to want to see what Mommy or Daddy does.

Nooooo!

I have a beautiful 2 year old daughter. I work from a home office, and split child care duties with my wife you goes to a "real" office. Now, a man's home is his castle, and a man's office is his, well, office, but that doesn't make it impenetrable. The problem with any defense system is its weakness. In my case, it is the fact that my daughter can turn the door knob, and she is super cute, so saying no to her is tough unless there is a safety issue involved.

She's at that age where she wants to do what she sees Daddy do, just to see if is fun. On more than one occasion, I've opened the back door of the car to put her into her car seat only to hear her say, "Drive too?"

I like to think it is my good parenting skills and resolve that keep her out from behind the wheel, but in reality, it probably has more to do with the police, the insurance company, and my wife.

So, when one day she ran down the hall to my office, opened the door and saw me typing, she pointed at the keyboard and said, "Play too?" So, I opened up Notepad, maximized the window, and let her go. I figured I'd get some gobble-de-gook that I'd delete when I closed the program. Otherwise, no harm, no foul.

Less than three seconds later she hit some Control+J-Alt-4-Whatever key combo that not only closed Notepad, but also closed other things as well, including my project. Doh!

To Protect and Entertain

This story has a happy ending thanks to auto save, but I'm not willing to take that chance again. So, I searched for ways to "lock" the keyboard short of unplugging it. That's when I stumbled upon BabySmash. BabySmash is a seemingly simple program that essentially takes away virtually all of your keyboard functionality by redirecting it into a full screen white background which does nothing but display the letters that are pushed while making fun laughing sounds. It captures and destroys all of those shortcut commands. Not even Control-Alt-Whatever will cause you any harm. As an added bonus, your young one gets to have more fun that just pressing the keys, because they understand that those letters up on the screen are from them pressing the keys. Any time a non-letter key is pressed, a smiley face in varying shape pops up on the screen. Big thumbs up from the baby.

What about the mouse, you say? Got that covered too. Moving the mouse generates a colorful line of circles across the screen. The only thing you have to worry about is those fancy keys on some keyboards. My wireless Logitech keyboard has this row of keys along the left side that I have never pressed in my life, I don't even know what they are doing over there other than to increase the number of keys count. Those function keys can slip by the program and do all sorts of bizarre things. Thankfully, the keyboard comes with a utility which the user can use to program the keys. I set all of those keys to "Do Nothing" and we are in business.The one really big negative is that the program is a memory hog. That isn't a very big deal because you can't be doing anything else at the same time, but if you are running processes in the background, expect them to bog down like you were defragmenting your hard drive while running a virus scan and playing an HD-DVD. The worst part is that when you do shut it down, it doesn't close all of its stuff. The PresentationFontsCache or something keeps running on my computer and I have to kill it manually. All in all, a small price to pay.Now, if I can just find some way to lock the remote control keys.