Procuring the gifts were the easy part but the advent of advanced computer technology have added the confounding variable of having to now configure a gift for the end user.  My father is getting a digital camera and a tiny computer that will be his.  I took the liberty of setting the date/time on the camera and began the XP Crapware Rite of Purging which ended after 3 hours of saying “yes” to “are you sure you want to remove this trial version of a program of dubious utility?”  I made the icons giant, replaced IE with FireFox and set up my Windows Home Server to run a backup daily so should he discover the glories of the registry reversing the aftermath of exploratory computational surgery should be trivial.

I then started to pad the corners of the furniture, as it were, adding AdBlocker Plus and NoScript to Firefox but stopped at adding parental controls.  I was mostly thinking of this as a way to stop phishing sites but am keen to avoid the “Terry, why can’t I get porn?” conversation.  In fact, I’m tempted to have Firefox automatically clear its history so under no circumstances could I encounter a scenario where I could have this conversation.