In 2001, I went to San Francisco to stay with a guy I met through the internet and had spoken to on the phone only once. Looking back on it now, it sounds a little crazy. I nearly got turned away at the border because I didn’t know his address – only that he was meeting me at the airport.

I could have become one of those stories you hear about in the news – scary thought. Instead, I spent a wonderful month in America, putting on a stone in weight, fiddling with computers, enjoying the sunshine and then driving to Seattle in a 1973 RV that was falling apart, to meet more people that I knew through the internet along the way.

Fast forward 8 years to a bar in SOHO, and I’m at a meet up for UK technology journalists and PR’s called “KNOT”, organised by Andrew Lim. Several hundred people turned up and he raised over £1000 for charity. The entire event was organised through Facebook and Twitter. Many people didn’t know each other. I met people that I’d only ever had conversations with over Twitter.

On the same note, online dating is no longer seen as a taboo – but rather just another social network where everyone has the same obvious motive. Relationships are formed and maintained entirely in text and people think nothing of it. The idea of meeting someone through the internet has almost become, dare I say, normal.

Twitter, Skype, Facebook - there really has never been a better time to be social in every medium. I wonder if I told people I was going to America to meet someone I met from the internet now, I’d get the looks I got in 2001? And would border control kick up such as fuss? I don’t think they’d care what I was doing as long as they had my finger prints

It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m attempting to download the Windows 7 beta for the eighth time, while desperately trying to find something to occupy my time that isn’t on my massive “to do” list. I’m bored with Spore, I’ve already been to the gym and I’ve overplayed Guitar Hero. I need a distraction like thinkabouttech.com needs more writers.

One thing that I’ve been meaning to do for a while is upgrade my main machine - I’m still using the Ubuntu 8.04 based Linux Mint “Elyssa” as my operating system, which has now been superseded by the 8.10 based “Felicia”. I’m also still using OpenOffice 2.4, despite everyone going on about how good OO 3.0 is. Yet, I haven’t upgraded either. There are two big reasons for my tardiness - one is that I don’t need the new features offered and two is that my setup is damned near perfect! It boots quickly, I have access to everything I need, it’s stable and is still current enough to get the latest security updates. I find you need a good reason to update - usually something breaking or a feature that you really need, none of which apply to me. As they say - if it’s ain’t broke - don’t fix it! So for this weekend, I’ll be avoiding the upgrade and will play with the cat instead.

However, just for fun, let’s assume I am upgrading. I’ve been pondering over sticking with Mint Linux, or just moving back to Ubuntu. I really like Mint Linux because out of the box it’s how I want it, but I could summarise in two reasons as to why I like it over Ubuntu. One, it comes with the Medibuntu repositories as standard, which gives you better media encoding/decoding and two, the start menu - I really like the start menu, it’s a lot better than the classic Gnome.

However, just as Ubuntu is often accused of not putting enough back into the Debian/Linux code-base - why isn’t Mint making it’s code part of the Ubuntu code-base? It wouldn’t be hard to make the Mint start menu a package that any Ubuntu user could install. I can’t help but feel they are making a lot of work for themselves, especially when they reinvent the wheel in several places. So when I do come round to upgrade, I think I’m going to be heading back towards Ubuntu…