Oliver + Firefox

Somehow in the week that I was away, [[Oliver]] became a completely accomplished user of Firefox. While he’s not installing his own extensions yet, he can start it up, find PBSkids, and independently browse around for hours. This is all due, I think, to his reaching a sweet spot of hand-eye coordination (so as to run the mouse effectively), a sudden surge in digital curiousity, and a desire to be in the driver’s seat.

As I type this, it’s Sunday afternoon and Oliver is sitting over in [[Johnny]]’s office with my [[laptop]]. I haven’t heard a peep out of him in 30 minutes, although I hear Barney singing and Teletubbies gurgling from time to time.

What’s most amazing about this is that only a couple of weeks ago Oliver simply couldn’t do this: three weeks ago I left him alone in front of [[Catherine]]’s iMac for 5 minutes and I came back only to find that he had mistakenly ended up at the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Of course there’s always a chance that his choice was deliberate and that I mistakenly redirected him to Barney when he was in the midst of an evaluation of the DRM situation in Latvia.