Hey Dude! What up? I'm jus' chilln', ya know? You got my message and you want in? No problemo ...

No, of course my parents have no idea what I'm doin'! How could they? They are, like, old. Dad's pretty good with a PC as long as it's Windows, and Mom, well, if it isn't Word or Outlook or IE she's, like, lost. Do you know she still closes each application when she wants to switch to another one?! It drives me nuts!

So what's goin' on? Well, for a start there's our texting network. Me and my buds and their friends and their friends have set up a, you know, texting group using a cool Web service so when there's a good party we can find out real easy where it is.

It's really cool -- you can get real-time messages via texting, IM or the Web! We've got all sorts of text codes for what's going on, you know, like whether there's beer, and even cooler is we all work together to track the cops and cover for each other. You need a ride 'cause you're wasted? Need a cover story for your parents? Me and my boys got you covered!

Actually this has become so freakin' big we also set up a Web site -- we call it DaHoodworks. My friend Bobby put it together 'cause he runs the Web site for his Dad's furniture business so he just set up a private section for us to use. His Dad hasn't got a clue, and even if he finds something is going on, all the stuff we don't want him or anyone else to know is encrypted anyway. It's really cool. Bobby showed me how to use public key encryption.

Oh, and there's our music club! We call it a club but it's just a load of us who all know each other. There's about 150 of us and if you aren't cool and you don't know someone who is "in" you'll never find out about it.

We know all about those dweebs at the RIAA and we keep a low enough profile that they can go on picking on random grannies and unemployed single moms and never know what we're doin'!

We swap the music, like, through our Web site, although we use a whole load of free services to make it happen. A lot of the sounds are bought from iTunes, but there's also tons of new underground stuff that gets sent 'round. Bobby's friend Carl the Cableman (don't ask why he's called that) built a cool little database on some free service that we use to see what tracks are available -- no, I don't remember what the database is called -- there's a link on Hoodworks so you don't need to remember.