Isn't it amazing how there are people out there who still don't know what RSS is, or blogs, or news aggregators? I've had to explain them to two separate friends this weekend, both of whom I regard as intelligent clued up independent women. They still live their lives without this sort of essential kit, both for work and for fun.
I don't think they teach stuff like that at school either, being stuck with the IT equivalent of the 3 Rs, Word, Excel and Powerpoint, with the internet and Google as an afterthought, though most kids learn the internet when they are weaned, it seems. How do all those illiterate and innumerate kids that Britain produces communicate now? Or are they so out of it, they don't use the internet? Despite all her fancy stuff, Bee's production of her school Yearbook on Word was treated with contempt by the printers who had to shift it into Photoshop. "Don't you have that at school?" You can guess the anwer.
Now I seem to have developed a reputation as a techie. I suppose it's true that I am a bit of a geek, and still better at IT things than my kids. On Friday I was in a meeting in Sarajevo with an Advisor to the Minister and got a text message from Oxford "what is the password on the internet". Since this was clearly a matter of life and death in our household, I had to leave the meeting and send three possible passwords down the line. Of course it was none of them, and the problem was the wireless not the internet (aren't they the same? says Sloph). I was reduced to texting "it's the one on a post-it note on the book shelf and it begins with FF". Luckily that worked, though probably because the cleaner never dusts my bookshelves.
