It’s good to have family around for the holidays, but my cat Jack is a little shy and doesn’t always like the company. He’s been spending a lot of time hanging around in my room in the basement away from the commotion.
 Jack on PowerBooks |  Jack with XO and MBP |  Snuggling |
I didn’t take photos of me unboxing it, since you can find unboxing photos all over the internet by now, but I did take a few quick snapshots of my XO sitting on my desk that I’ll include throughout this entry.
The XO logo on the back of my laptop ended up being light blue and green. (The colors of the logo, for those who haven’t been following the OLPC project, come in about 400 different combinations, which will help students uniquely identify their own laptops when they are distributed to schools.) I’m pretty happy with the color combination I got; it’s kind of neat how there’s that element of chance for the colors you’ll end up with.
It’s really surprising how small the XO is. Even after seeing photos of the XO next to rulers and even seeing a prototype, it’s still smaller than one expects. It really is a machine designed for children.
 Closed |  Upside down |  Ears up (unlatched) |
The keyboard will take some getting used to. My fingertips are small enough and the keys are spaced far enough apart that I don’t have any problems with hitting multiple keys at once, but I’m finding that I often hit the next key over from the one I was intending when I’m not looking carefully at what I type. I expect to be typing on it with reasonable speed after a little practice, though.
 Open |  Booting Up |
The software looks like a promising start. For the most part, I’m finding Sugar to be fairly intuitive. Most of the stuff I tried worked pretty well, too. The Browse activity is quite usable, and while it’s not as fast as Firefox on my Mac, I wouldn’t call it slow. It sure beats the web browsers on a lot of mobile devices that I’ve tried.
I’ll be checking out the included programming environments soon, too.
So, overall, it’s a neat machine. The hardware looks great. The software still has some room for improvement, but it’s definitely getting there.
Saturday morning after my Japanese final, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Between having assignments due in all of my classes and working on making sure that the final project for CSE 466 came together okay, I’ve had hardly any time to relax these past two weeks. I broke my record for the number of contiguous hours I’ve spent in the CSE building. So, it was a real relief when I finished my final Saturday morning and I now have until Thursday afternoon before my next final.
It really felt good to spend the rest of Saturday doing nothing but sitting around and playing video games without having anything I needed to get done by the next day. I haven’t really been able to do that all quarter long.
Despite being busy and tiring, it was a good quarter. I’m looking forward to my slightly lighter course load next quarter and focusing more on my capstone course, now that I have all of my other program requirements out of the way.
And maybe, if we’re lucky, I’ll get more pictures posted next quarter 
Here are a few quick snapshots of stuff I’ve been working on in the lab.
 | cat /dev/random > /dev/lcd-txt
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Testing a new LCD driver-in-progress by outputting a bunch of random characters to it.
 | Board with test wires
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Lab board augmented with wires to be able to connect a logic analyzer to a few different signal buses and debug problems.
You can see the whole whiteboard pictured in the photo above here. It’s the radio protocol specification for the 466 final project.
