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| My cyber or internet
world has changed over the years. At first, it truly was a 'world' to me. One of the first things I did on the net (at around 1995) was IRC. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is the precursor of Java and html chat rooms. You don't have to have anything fancy to chat, even a text-only unix account works. I stumbled on it by mistake a couple of days after I got my internet account and immediately got addicted to chatting. Not a good thing to be when you're trying to earn a degree... I spent way too much time on IRC in Slovakia. Nowadays I hardly log on, but I do miss the good times I had there before. My nick on IRC was/is Ella - it means goddess in hebrew, and besides is the name of a good friend of mine. Having a female nick on irc is kinda interesting... someone should conduct a social study on 'Male IRCers, Why they msg women they do not know and Why they think these women are interested in what they'd like to do to them". Oh well, /ignore is a handy command :) . My hangout on IRC was #A_Channel - a channel I founded after some 'discord' at another channel, #thecafe. I can't even remember what the problem was, but back then it seemed terribly important. #A_channel was founded in March 1996, and back then and for several years was practically a second home for me and many others. I made many online friends there. I guess we grew up and moved on... I'm still in touch with some of these friends, but the channel itself is almost always empty :(. As proof of how important IRC was to me, here's something I wrote during the 2 times I was forced off the net :). Nowadays, I still chat, but not on IRC. I do it on mailing lists, especially the LowCarbChat group. This is a close (yet not closed!) group that started out talking about a low carb diet but has evolved into so much more than that - we truly are friends. The mailing list method of chatting is better for internet addicts since it doesn't require you to answer a message immediately - you can do it whenever you have time and thus still have a life. We still do have real time chats sometimes when a few of us are online at the same time - via email although every so often we use the group's chatroom. some musings on IRC/chatting online: Talking to people on IRC is different (well, obviously) from real life chat. Typed words aren't always indicative of what the person behind them thinks. Emoticons (smileys, etc.) are a big help, but it's still easy to be offended by what may seem to you a curt response, which wasn't intended as such. Try to give the other person the benefit of the doubt. A small word of warning - do NOT believe everything you are told on the net - there are sick people out there who get their kicks from creating a character for themselves and getting people to trust them. It isn't difficult to do that - why should you doubt what a person tells you about themselves?. YOU tell the truth on the net, you think that everyone else does too. Well, you're WRONG. Now, I'm not saying not to believe anything anyone tells you, but... just take care. And if you DO get duped - well then, try to see the funny side - that someone out there is so pathetic that they have to make up a new personna (sp?) for themselves. |
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Nowadays,
most of my time on the net is spent reading posts from various mailing
lists I subscribe to - mainly professional ones but not only. This is a
partial list of lists I am on:
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