Remember back when the Internets was just a series of skinny tubes — you know, back when people got on it with AOL and we called it the World Wide Web?  This is before you knew you could have a whole web site, let alone a zillion of them, and the best most of us got was a “Home Page”.  Like this:  http://www.SomeISP.com/~johnlockwood.

And as long as we’re being nostalgic, my sister Joyce used to walk me to the store for penny candy.  Cherry stones were 3 for a penny.

Cherry stones were a bargain.

Anyway, fast forward, and here we are connecting to the Internets via high speed broadband, at just about the time in my life when I’m getting too old to use high speed broadband to connect to any high speed broads.

I’m falling apart.

And that’s just part of the reason why I’m primed and ready to become some sort of Web 2.0 victim.  It’s not so much that I was run over by it just standing here, as I was run over chasing it.

When I was a kid, about the time I was eating penny candy with Joyce, I had a dog named Rascal that was killed chasing a neighbor’s car.  This poor dachsund that I loved so much was no match for the left rear tire of Mrs. Schesinger’s car, or any of her other tires, for that matter.

Gosh, that went from nostalgic to moribund in about a minute, didn’t it?

Anywho, I’m not dead yet, so it ain’t all like that, but the classic question for dogs like Rascal has always been, OK, dog, you can chase a car, but what happens if you catch it?

Fortunately I’m so far behind that the danger is minimal.

Today I spent a half an hour on facebook.com making sure I had a few friends so I wouldn’t look stupid if I sent anyone over there to be my friend.  Mostly I was just re-adding friends that I’d already laboriously set up on LinkedIn.com.  

I still haven’t quite gotten Jay Thompson right.  I tried to get him to be my friend on LinkedIn twice, and a bunch of computer glitches got in the way — but along the way I think we managed to fire off a couple of emails. 

I think Jay Thompson sent me the invitation to Facebook by way of revenge, so I’d have to make the same friends out of same people I barely know all over again.

I don’t really think that.  It’s OK for me to pick on Jay, because he know’s I’m just kidding.  After all, he’s my friend on Facebook, and he would be a connection on LinkedIn, too, except for a bug.

Sometimes all your social life needs is a good QA department.

While that was being sorted out, I signed up for 30Boxes.com, which strikes me as useless, but there I am on it, and Yelp, which looks cool but when I tried to use the cool parts they told me a salesman would call me.

Gee, swell. 

Then another time today I spent about an hour and a half putting together a web portfolio, so you could see where I am on Linkedin, Myspace, Facebook, MyBlogLog, and YourGrandmothersLeftNostril.

Really, you haven’t been up to YourGrandmothersLeftNostril?  You should check it out. 

Don’t forget to add me as your friend. 

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