August 2009 - Social Networking
As an American living in Europe I am still not used to taking advantage of all the holiday time allotted to me each year. After appeals from my manager and a grueling 4th quarter, I decided to take three weeks of vacation in August. We have pets which combined with family commitments condemned us to stay home and work around the house during the holiday. This turned out to be very dangerous.
In order to understand the danger, you need to know that I have been going online for business and social communications since 1971. My first experience aside from the rotary dial telephone was communicating via a Remote Job Entry (RJE) terminal to a central mainframe doing the administrative tasks for the city high schools of New York. As none of the school's administrative staff understood the RJE station, the Computer Science students did most of the terminal work. When not running attendance or scheduling jobs we would send messages to the other students running the other jobs in the other high schools. I now wonder if the Analyst in charge of the IT system counted on the students to aid the adults in the deployment of the system. Getting back on track, over my holiday I wound up using my free time by going online and addicting myself to one of the Social Networking sites.
