When I left high school, I didn’t look back. I have a few friends from HS, but mostly I found many more like minded people in university. That seems to be a male trait, in that more women seem to keep a circle of friends from HS than men do, but for those that find themselves at university, this is where the social circle that may stay with us our entire lives is formed.

However, today, university frosh, both male and female, and keeping in constant touch with their HS friends via instant messaging and VoIP. They don’t remove you from their buddy list because you went to different schools. This means they are keeping more and closer friends from their HS days and also are more in touch with life at other universities.

I expect this will have far reaching consequences, not all predictable today. To how people live their lives, how they socialize and go on vacations, and how aware they are of the world outside their new university life. With buddy list presence, these remote friends are gaining an intimacy in some ways higher that we used to give to local friends.

Attending a convention in the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) I found one thing very surprising. The show organizer had to install wireless APs all around the building on poles, with long wires leading to power and ethernet. How can a new convention center not already be set up for wireless? I will admit, in some ways it is correct to anticipate that the radios that would do the work will be quickly obsolete, and thus should not be so permanently installed, but it seems crazy to me that a new CC would not have been built with spaces in the ceilings or upper walls ready for some sort of wireless network.

The meeting room halls also don’t have tons of power jacks in the floors. Today, at modern conventions, everybody brings laptops and they want to plug them in. Better conventions in older halls run extension cords and power strips, and there are a few of those here, but why should a new convention center not be ready to go?