Is, Was, Thinks, Feels, Wonders, And Possibly Even Says

I realized today that I've let certain things go a little too far....

By that I mean, especially, Facebook. Somewhat, blogging. But mostly Facebook.

There was a time when my friends and I would spend hours on the *cough* Internet... or really a dial-up computer to Clemson-area bulletin boards. The one I distinctly remember was called the Mechanics Garage. I always envisioned these being run out of dark basements, something like the Warlock in the latest Die Hard movie had. Some nerdy dude, with a sinister laugh, doling out Castle Wolfenstein knock-offs, the newest freeware version of Duke Nukem or Barney the Dinosaur plug-ins for Doom. It would take four or five hours to download a 1 Meg file. Such was the life of a computer game geek in the early 1990s.

Then there was Gopher and FTP. Brand-spanking new ways to download even more crappy games and waste more time.

Phase 3 was discovering interactive bulletin boards. I heard about this one called ISCA and decided to check it out. I ended up spending the better part of six years on it before it folded in the early 2000s. At one point, you could get on there and talk to any one of more than 1,000 people. The last time I logged in, there may have been 25 people online.

Along came the World Wide Web. This was cool. When we could get it to work. On the dialup accees to the Engineering VAX, we could run this program called Lynx and read all kinds of cool stuff from around the world. I cited a Department of Defense paper on Hezbollah that I found online in a paper for my Political Terrorism class once and my instructor asked me, "What's this? WWW? How did you access this?"

Then the levee broke. Graphical web browsing. You would hear that someone had gone in and put something called Mosaic on the the third computer over on the fifth desk in the second floor computer lab; or on the fifth computer from the door in the library lab. Massively cool stuff. Trying to get the same stuff on the computer in the apartment was another thing. Dial in to the VAX, start Winsock, initiate your TCP-IP stack, start up a SLIRP connection - I may be missing a step.... and I'm taking a long time to get to the point of this post, so to wrap this paragraph up - I've discovered that my newest computer toy has given me a totally new outlet and new outlook.

A friend of mine from church wrote an interesting article on Facebook a few weeks ago that was published in one of the local weeklies. It was on how she has started to think in terms of status updates.

What's your status?

I am thinking that .... I am going to sleep.... I am frustrated about... I'm wondering when someone is going to...

Ok, yeah. I've started doing that pretty frequently lately. I will see, hear, or experience something that I will then react to with a "that would make for an interesting status update or an interesting blog."

Now I know people who are on Facebook that could care less about getting on it more than once every couple weeks. I know people who spend several combined hours on it throughout the day. Left to boredom, I could probably spend the better part of at least several continuous hours on it.

I have the potential to spend a lot of time on it since I keep up a few Facebook pages for our college -- post photos, update events on them,etc. But I'm usually content for a few minutes on it to skim first thing in the morning, on my lunch break and once I get home from work. Then probably at least a little time at night.

So, again, I'm constantly going over in my mind "What would be a status update that would be funny, or interesting -- what could I say to make people laugh? what could I say to get a reaction out of a particular person?"

I got a Blackberry a few weeks ago that has Internet access. I realize that could potentially be a bad thing. I'm already checking Facebook on it when I get bored waiting on a prescription or pumping gas, situations where there is no real risk of death involved.

Today I was driving down one of our busiest thoroughfares in G-vegas when I noticed a local bank had, programmed into their big LCD along the roadside, a screen that said "Say no to TARP". My first thought was "Awesome! Gotta mention something about that in my Facebook status."

So I reached for my phone -- and then I realized: No, this is bad. I'm reaching for my phone to update my Facebook status while I'm driving. Not good. On various fronts.

I immediately put the phone back. Although once I got to where I was going I broke the phone back out and keyed in a new status before I had the chance to forget to do it.

Not that anyone really cares about what I think about the bailout or about opposition to TARP from an actual bank.

So despite the fact that I may not always be in a position to update my Facebook status, it appears that it's become a new outlet for my creativity to unload at random times.

I probably need to get a new hobby to keep my mind off of letting people know that my mind is on Facebook rather than on going to bed. Maybe I can talk my wife into letting us get a dog. Good luck to me on that though.

Oh, I just forgot. I've got an Atari 2600 emulator in the living room. Maybe if I start spending more time on that, I'll forgot about getting on Facebook so much and letting the world know that I just got a new high score on River Raid. Who knows.