IT PRO: Blogs: Maggie Holland: 2007 October

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Mobiles might fly? Pigs next?

Posted in Mobile on October 25, 2007 at 4:11 pm

Granted this is a somewhat delayed reaction to news that Ofcom is considering letting airlines install base stations onboard so passengers can use their mobiles mid-flight, but I

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Not over the hill…yet

By Maggie Holland in Editorial

Posted in Uncategorized on October 16, 2007 at 11:19 pm

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This is the last blog I shall write as a 28 year old…For come midnight I gain another wrinkle, my gammy knee gets a bit worse and I start to feel, well, older.

Today’s been one of those days where I’ve felt sorry for myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not necessarily worried about getting older, it’s just I’ve always preferred other people’s birthday’s to my own. But in amongst my woe, I’ve realised I’ve got a lot to be grateful for. While I may have had youth on my side 15 or even 10 years ago I was very naive both as a teenager and in terms of technology.

My first introduction to ‘technology’ aside from the TV and phone was mucking around with Casio calculators as a kid trying to see how many rude words I could write by typing in numbers and turning the device upside down.

Fast forward a few years and I remember the old BBC computers we had at school. We had to share them and could spend lesson upon lesson just trying to print out a menu for our fake restaurant using a slow and clunky dot matrix printer with that horrible conjoined printer paper that may well have cost a bit but certainly didn’t look expensive.

Then there was the communications technology. Or lack of it. Not one person I knew had a mobile. In fact, I didn’t get my first mobile until I was 20 and it was a Motorola brick that looked much like a car phone. If you wanted to get hold of someone, you had to ring their landline and politely ask if they were home to anyone who answered other than them. And, you had to be respectful of when you called: I remember calling my school friend Emma up once at 9.30 and being told off by her father With mobile technology it would seem the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable (within reason) have shifted. Indeed if you don’t want to risk waking someone with a call you can text them instead.