Internet identities

A major item on the UK news this morning is the 12 year old girl who has run off with a 31 year old American man who she met in an Internet chatroom.

One thing I find really strange is that her parents say she was spending up to 11 hours a day on the Internet. Maybe I’m being naïve (and my daughter isn’t 12 yet, so I can’t speak from experience), but I’d think there was something very wrong if my child was spending so much time on the computer, and I’d certainly take steps to do something about it.

You really can’t know whom it is you’re communicating with. There was someone a while ago on a message board I visit who several of us chatted to a lot, and got on well with, who turned out to be a hoaxer. In retrospect you could see that there were little oddities about them, but there was nothing at the time that really seemed strange enough to make you realise. It wasn’t until this girl decided to kill off her ‘character’ and appear herself as his friend that she got found out. The strange thing to me is that the character she created, who we all chatted to so much, still seems like a real person in my mind, even though ‘he’ was an invention. This was somebody I liked, who I probably would have looked up if I were ever in his part of the world. Now, I’m a (relatively!) mature adult who wouldn’t have put myself in any sort of dangerous situation to meet this person, but I can see how easy it would be for a younger, less worldly-wise person to be totally fooled.

I’m glad I spend some time on the Net myself – at least when my kids start getting interested in using it I’ll have some idea of what’s going on out there, and what the potential dangers are.

Sunny weather

It’s very very hot here this afternoon, real ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen’ weather. My office has no air conditioning so my colleague and I are trying to make do with an electric fan - a far from ideal situation. The only thing that is helping me to keep a sense of proportion is that I’m following the Tour de France on the Eurosport website, and those guys are cycling over mountains in weather like this.

The weather is making me think about holidays, and remember some brilliant days out in the Alps. When it’s this hot we try to get up really early and set off, so that we get most of our climbing up done in the relative cool of the morning. Then we plan to come down to some mountain hut or other in time for a light lunch and several cold beers, all taken at leisure, then wander back down to the campsite/car when it starts to cool off a bit in the late afternoon.

This sort of heat is always a real problem caving too, especially in Austria on expedition. You leave putting your gear on until the last possible moment, because it’s so hot on the surface rocks, and as soon as you’ve geared up you start to sweat really badly. Then you dash to the entrance and abseil down - but down the cave it’s cold (about 2 degrees centigrade in Austria) so within a few minutes all the sweat is making you freezing cold.

There’s one place near where we cave in Austria where one of the main footpaths goes past a cave entrance that blows cold air out. If you’re really hot, it’s bliss to go and sit in the blast from the entrance for a few minutes until you cool down - just like sitting in front of an open fridge door!

Can’t wait to go on holiday... *sigh*