A Small Step for Boy; A Giant Step for Boy-Kind

Ian has been agitating, ever since I got a new laptop for my birthday, to let me let him use it. Of course, I'm eager to steer him away from the Internet (sorry if that sounds naive), and in order to reassure me that he was no stranger to electronic communications, he told me in some detail this morning about how at school, they have an institution called "Computer Recess," which, just as the awful phrase implies, means that they go play on the Internet - in some semi-sheltered capacity, on the public dime. But I have resisted until now.

However, one man can only do so much... Ian is on vacation this week, and Amy is apparently part of the conspiracy, so now my Google Chrome default page, which displays screenshots of the six most commonly-visited sites for easy access, has, along with GMail and Google and Wikipedia and the boys' blog itself, a new commonly-visited site, namely the NASA homepage.

And to top it all off, because I have Ubuntu on my laptop (I won't bankroll the Evil Empire in Redmond and their bad operating systems), there is an additional feature that most W*ndows users wouldn't recognize, where, in addition to logging into the machine, you have the option of leaving a message on it for other users. I have never used this feature; I may talk to myself when my imaginary friends aren't looking, but I have never actually left myself any notes on my computer. But somebody else put the messaging system to good use on today, his first day of using Ubuntu. As we logged in (Ian guided me through it so I could see his technical signature), I saw a message waiting for me that reads as follows:

heading: gnome-screensaver-dialog
12:45:30 PM [This is standard part of the messaging display]
i am ian i woud like
to go to go on your
conpu


[Ian told me he got cut off at that point, so he couldn't type the full word "conputer".]

(February 24, 2011)