Ike Taught Mom & Dad about Internet

My parents stayed with me for a few days after leaving the coast for Ike.  They've now returned to find their home thankfully intact except for downed trees.  I've tried to get Mom and Dad to try the Internet for years, but they see no need and think it's too complicated.  Still, while they stayed at my house for a few days, they began to realize a little bit about how the Internet is changing our world.  

I was able to show them Youtube videos of the beach community where they *owned* a beach house that is now a slab.  I also was able to find satellite images from a weather satellite of the area and used the satellite images on Google maps to cross-reference the images and show them before and after images of the area.  We watched their home-town news on the the TV station's website and we read their home-town paper.  We were able to apply for disaster assistance on the FEMA website.  We found blogs and forums covering the hurricane and learned about how people were recovering.  Plus, I subscribed to the Houston Chronicle's hurricane feed on Twitter so we got up-to-date information on what was happening in Houston.

Take-aways from this experience?  Mom and Dad learned that the Internet (a) wasn't hard to use and (b) contained information that was hard to find elsewhere.  Will they rush out to buy an internet connected computer? Probably not.  But their resistence is melting.