Meet Yuka （ゆか、紫）

My baby OLPC arrived today! She is SO CUTE. I played a bit with her, got her connected, installed Tetris, played in Terminal. I am SO IN LOVE. She'll be PERFECT as an ebook reader, and will make an outstanding kitchen compy (I can store recipes elsewhere and call them up as needed; the screen is so readable, and she's so well sealed, that I won't have to panic the like I do when my MacBook Pro is "assisting," but getting flour and whatever else I'm cooking with on (and probably in) her!

The XO logos on the front lid were not customizable, but were completely random selection. There's 20 possible colors, and the O and X parts can be separate colors. I had a 1 in 400 chance of getting something like I actually did get... Purple!

I spent all last night thinking of a name. All my computers have since had four-letter girl names. My old windows box from '99 was named Lyra; 12" Powerbook was Quon, current MacBook Pro is Mjrn (in OSX) and Jote (in WinXP), and even my Blackberry Curve's name fits (Cici). Murasaki (紫) is the Japanese word for Purple. The name suited, but was too long. So off to Jeffrey's Japanese Dictionary!

Fortunately it has a "Search by Japanese" option, so I looked through the female names with that Kanji, and came up with one favorite - ゆか, or Yuka. Who else has that name? Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto. The voice actress for Yukino's mother in KareKano. A video game soundtrack composer. A bunch of other Seiyuu (voice actresses) and famous people. So it's a real name, and it's a safe name - and it uses the same kanji for purple.

So everyone, meet Yuka, the newest addition to the computer farm. I'll post more on her as I get to know her and how she works!

For more information on OLPC (the one laptop per child program) visit their website at: http://laptop.org/. You can also read about the Give-One-Get-One project which I am a part of.