Loserville

OK. It is now official. I am now a LOSER!! Leave it to Facebook to prove it.

I must admit, for someone who is tech savy, has been playing with computers since the 1980's (you remember TRS-80's and Commodore 80's?) and was on the net before most people had ever HEARD of it (remember DARPA Net and then ARPA Net?) and used things like FTP and TELNET and SMTP and GOPHER to navigate since the wonderful graphics rich HTTP that created the WWW in world wide web was only a far off idea; social networking hasn't been one of those things I have been all over. Guess I like a little privacy beyond my private parts.

Fellow employee and quasi friend Stewart Pittman of Lenslinger.com fame started preaching the virtue and power of Facebook and it was something I really needed to get into. After looking at some of the myspace pages, (what do people get out of posting some of the stuff they post on myspace?) and deciding that maybe myspace wasn't the space I needed to be in, I was also intimidated with Facebook. I tried to poke around Stew's Facebook but really couldn't see anything because I wasn't a member. OK. I have been around the block enough times to see when I am being scammed into doing something I am not sure I want to do and these "you can't do anything until you join" just is asking for trouble in my past experience. This was to be also.

After a couple of weeks of going back and forth on it, today I decided to do it. I joined Facebook. Entered my information and then realized, I have no friends. Not on Facebook anyway. The people listed that COULD be my friends are not what I would call friends in the truest sense. They are/were acquaintances at best. People I once shared a very brief time of life with, and had it been more than that, I would have expected to have remained friends or got pissed off at each other and then ended it with a definite ending point. Most were just people I hung out with that faded away years ago. Some are people I have worked with but never hung out with, even less then my quasi friendship with Stewart. I see an ex room mate from college listed, but if his photo was any indication of his current state, then I was wise to NOT continue that friendship all those years ago! I figured I had at leaset one "friend" on Facebook. Stewart. He COULDN'T refuse me as a friend since he was the one who said it was great! Or could he? Well, luckily he didn't since he is the only friend I have at the moment on Facebook, real or other wise.

I guess I don't get "social networking of the Internet age." If the purpose is to see how many "friends" you can collect on these social networking sites, then I have better things to do with my time. If the purpose is to actually rekindle old friendships, then I am really screwed. Either most of my friends don't do Facebook or I really don't have any friends.

Either way, GAME OVER! LOSER!!

Is It Time Yet?

Wow. Another year is about over. When did that happen? I hadn't realized my last post was in August. That doesn't mean I haven't been blogging. Quite the contrary. I have been pretty hot and heavy with my work blog as we get closer to the Digital Transition date of February 17, 2009. After writing that, a lot of stuff I would use here, gets used up there so it really takes a off the wall broadcasting subject like the MaryEllen O'Brien blog, who by the way found it and commented back (Sorry MaryEllen it took me 3 months to realize your comment was hung up in review!) to get posted here. After the transition in February my work blogging should slow down a great deal and I can get back to posting more here.

But here we are about to move into the last year of the first decade of the 21st Century. What an interesting year this past one has been. With the US elections, the media going into the tank for an ideology, economy tanking and the Israeli/Palestinian issue heating up again here at the end of the year, life just seems to roll on. What will 2009 hold in store? More economic bad times for the short run at least and the new President seeing if being a Community Organizer is good enough to run a country. Beyond that? Who knows. Too many characters out there that can change history in a single minute.

As the old Chinese curse goes, "May you live in interesting times." We do.