Tikkabik

Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of my awesome friends Dan and Katie, who had a spare iBook that was gathering dust at the bottom of a closet, James' most fervent Christmas wish was answered early: He has his own computer.

It's a dual USB-equipped white iBook. It's about as basic as you can get: 128MB RAM, no AirPort card, CD-ROM drive, and it's perfectly adequate for the needs of a six year old. I've already given him an old DWL-122 USB wireless stick I got from D-Link years ago, and have ordered a 512MB SO-DIMM that should arrive early next week. Presuming I can get my hands on a relatively inexpensive used AirPort card (haha, they're as rare as diamonds), I'll eventually get rid of the USB stick.

I'd gone back and forth about making it a Christmas present and decided ultimately not to. James already has plenty of Christmas gifts from us and from Santa, and is bound to get more from relatives on Christmas day. Besides, this way, he gets to start benefitting from it now.

As it always is with new gear that I get, I had some fun putting about with it when the iBook arrived yesterday -- upgrading the software to the latest release for Panther, cobbling together a package of software I thought would be good for that system. I still have a few things to do, such as install Classic, so James can run edutainment software that we've had lying around for years, that the kids still enjoy.

So now, James is quite happy surfing on the Intarweb and even has his own e-mail address (which I've limited to only accepting messages from us, his brother and sister and his grandparents, as I don't think my first grader needs to understand the benefits of penis enlarging products quite yet).