H.I.T.S.
Recently, I was channel-surfing and saw part of an episode about Facebook on South Park. It was hysterically funny because, as usual, it covered all the silly aspects of Facebook that you see on a daily basis — requests to play the “Farmville” game and fertilize someone’s “crops” or people becoming annoyed because they send a “friend” a request and think the person is ignoring them if they don’t immediately reply.
It’s interesting how Facebook and other so social-networking sites have taken over part of our culture in such a short period of time. I’m as guilty as everyone else for participating, but I find it fascinating to see this mass cross-section of local people posting all kinds of things that show such a deep insight into their psyches.
You certainly learn things about people that, otherwise, you would never have guessed. Sometimes, it’s shocking when you see the arguments that flare up on Facebook because, obviously, in that format, miscommunications and mistakes are going to happen.
You can easily post things that others may take completely the wrong way. What I’ve learned to do is to bite my tongue and just observe without posting a comment, unless it’s the most light-hearted of asides.
On a local basis, it serves as a way of learning about all kinds of local events, etc. There were two recent pages on Facebook about the St. Mary’s School closing and the fire at Vinny’s drive-in eatery.
I must admit to being addicted to Facebook and I often click on the links to the Herald-Standard Facebook page. In fact, I signed up for Facebook via the Herald-Standard “upload winter pics” page after our short- lived “winter freeze” last year.
I only play two games on Facebook: Music Challenge, which interests me because you can have fun naming songs, and my current fave, Cartown.
In Cartown, you start off with a small garage that you can develop via a system that gives you money to hire “workers” (other friends on Facebook). You can also furnish your garage with lifts and tools. By going through different levels of points, you get a bigger, fancier place with more workers. You can even buy fancy models of cars, hotrod them and race other friends. It definitely is addicting, even when you’re pushing 61.
Recently, thanks to Facebook, I found out that my old elementary school in England is being knocked down and a new school will be built in its place. Without the information that I found on a page from England, I would never have known about it.
I contacted one of my old friends in England via e-mail, as he had also attended the same school and he had no idea. I told him that the school was having a final, one-day open house for old students and he promised to attend, take pictures and send them to me via e-mail.
All of this would have been almost impossible without technology. I can’t wait to see the inside of my old school again, even if it is only in pictures. Of course, with modern digital cameras now being so reasonably priced, the pictures that you see online are often better than those old-style 35mm camera would have taken.
The same is true of video. One of my guitar heroes was an Irish guitar player named Rory Gallagher, who passed away in 1995 at age 47. I remember being stunned when I heard the news on BBC Radio, which, at that time, was my only link with home.
Then came the Internet and fast-forward to 2010. Now via a Facebook page for Rory Gallagher fans, I see videos on YouTube.com spanning his long career. It brings back incredible memories of living in England and seeing him play there. The sheer volume of clips with him playing just stuns me. It grows every week — and that’s just one artist.
This week, I hooked up one of our complimentary boxes from the cable company to one of our TV sets. As you may have noticed, they went all-digital on Sept. 21. If you have cable and have channels missing, you need to contact the cable company.
They’ll give you a small kit of a cable box that you hook up to your TV and a new remote. Once you install it, you’ll get most of the missing channels back.
I think there may still be a few reception “glitches” on some channels (or at least there are on our TV), which, hopefully, will not occur during the next Steelers game — or Mrs. Schulze will become rather annoyed.