Taking a mildly pro-active approach to Social Media and Networking

In the interests of further developing and broadening my employability skills (ahem) I have boldly gone and created a Twitter account, a Pinterest account and a Linked In account. I did use my real name on LinkedIn for obvious reasons. One difficulty I faced was filling the "Where are you employed and by whom?" sections. When I tried to type that I was employed by children, at home,  LinkedIn was quite unhappy so I changed it to student. I guess that's accurate too. LinkedIn offered to help me find the right smartphone app and I did just that. I haven't fully finished my profile but I want to take the time to get it right.

Then I created a Pinterest account using my alter ego - Jeanne Buckfield.  Didn't have much time to play with that one so I just got as far as pinning an image from NASA re: plans for Mars and creating a board. It is all pretty straightforward and I like the option there for keeping pinterest boards private to select followers. I will play with Pinterest more over the weekend. That's the plan anyway.

Twitter was a little more annoying to set up. First it was was reluctant to accept my email address. Once I convinced it do that Twitter became pretty insistent that I select a pile of twitters/tweets to follow to create my timeline. So I am following one daughter, The Mercury, Manchester United, NASA, JPL, Universe Today, Top Gear, another daughter, my son's teacher, Chandra, Angela, the English football team (World Cup coming up soon) and Mars One. Then I tweeted to one daughter and promptly lost interest. My daughters' will be startled by the presence of a certain Jeanne Buckfield following them. Both Twitter and LinkedIn searched through my contacts list and offered suggestions as to who I should follow or connect with. 

After that I moved on to playing with OwnCloud which is provided by the domain my main email address is through. But it crashed and I lost interest again. It's all open source and still in the teething stage; not too mention occasionally unstable on Windows platforms. No real surprises there folks.