What did you do before the Internet existed, Mum?

A long, long time ago, before the Net came to Aus­tralia (well, before AARNet, anyway), sad geeks had no e‑mail and no chat rooms to hang around in. What on earth did they do? They had pen­friends. I know: I had 30 pen­friends when I was 15, from all over the world: Amer­ica, France, Turkey, Eng­land, Brazil.

I was reminded of this in class tonight by a stu­dent while we were dis­cuss­ing the real­ity of online rela­tion­ships. He men­tioned pen­friends and how the rela­tion­ships you formed there were real although they were dis­tant. I thought it was a great point. I didn’t men­tion my own sad his­tory. I’m still in touch with only one of them, of course, Chrys­tele, the one I stayed with in Paris. I met others of them: Andy from Eng­land, Adrian from Germany.

Classes went really well today. My stu­dents are really enthu­si­astic and the cur­riculum is work­ing per­fectly so far. 

I dropped in to my new job first thing this morn­ing, but my first full day is tomor­row. It’s so bizarre being ‘back’ at Fair­fax but in a dif­fer­ent build­ing. I really thought it would feel more like start­ing at Text Media, which is a com­pany I’ve long respec­ted, and that Fair­fax just happened to own us, but with the intranet being Fair­fax and the help desk being the same, it feels like coming home.