Setting Up a Computer for My Daughter

Unlike Scott Hanselman, I do not post descriptive pictures of my African-descended child on Internet—nor do I have no regard for revealing important information about what the inside of my living areas look like and what meager possessions we hold. I do this for security reasons and to protect the privacy of current and future adults in the household. I don’t even have pictures of my children on my desk for the same stereotypical, postal-worker reasons. (I do, mind you, have an excellent charcoal drawing by my eldest son on my desk.) Do I live in fear? Or do I pay my respects to all the peoples of the Internet, the scandalous peoples… Unlike Scott Hanselman, I grew up on stories about what happened to Martin Luther King and many less famous people like him. Clean-cut, Church-going people can “tempt the Lord” and lose their perceived divine protection by exposing themselves carelessly to prying eyes. There is a kind violence or at least a lack of grace about this North-American-style carelessness. It’s not like leaving your door unlocked in Canada. It’s something else… Anyway, Scott is too busy to consider my security advice, so I leave it here for you and a few underage victims on MySpace.com…

So it may be news to you that I have a daughter that’s almost three and she looks and sounds profoundly great! I refurbished one of my old AMD boxes for her and installed some ABC’s software (and will try Edubuntu later). I am pretty sure that she is too young to use a mouse. What I mean to say is that she will probably not use a computer mouse as a computer mouse for at least 12 months. So what I had to do was set up the keyboard to use the mouse pointer in her current Windows 98 OS. This research led to “Mouse Options” and “Using MouseKeys with the Keypad.”

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