Status update

I promise not to write about Facebook all the time, but since I've been on it now for a week, I thought it was time to do a bit fairer assessment of the site than stick with my kneejerk assessment.

All right, so I haven't spent an obsessive amount of time on it, and I've been very deliberate in my use. That as much as anything is probably responsible for why I've kept a low profile on it. No family members have found me. No students, current or former, have found me.

In fact, I've only received three friend requests, one from someone I "know" via Twitter, someone I've known since junior high, and the mother of a friend since seventh grade. (At the suggestion of a friend, I friended three individuals I've known since junior high days, which is likely how I popped up on the radar of the two who made requests.) In other words, there haven't been any majorly weird or difficult judgment calls to make, although I suspect those will arrive in the days and weeks to come.

I find the news feed to be terribly cluttered and not particularly easy to follow with the same items jumping back to the top on a regular basis. Keep in mind that I currently have a pretty small friends list.

Finding people through search isn't nearly as easy as I expected it would be. (In some ways this is a relief.) I refuse to let Facebook troll my e-mail to find potential friends, so I may be making things tougher than it should be. Still, the number of people who share names can make it hard to find the right one, especially if the primary photo isn't helpful.

I am surprised (and kind of depressed) by the number of people I know from high school who are using their senior photos to identify themselves. (In fairness, I'm using my Mad Men-ized cartoon avatar.) The let's-relive-high-school aspect is something I have no pressing desire to do. Those years weren't miserable for me, nor were they the best of my life. Regardless, I'd like to think I'm more interesting now.

I've not posted or liked much, which probably makes me a bad Facebook user. All of my hang-ups about the site aside, at this early stage as a user I don't find it to be as enjoyable as Twitter. I don't plan to duplicate my Twitter posts on Facebook because it doesn't feel like the right place for them, even though that's public and my Facebook is for friends only. Twitter is part parlor game, part personal news wire, and part communication tool. Facebook is...a virtual yearbook? I'm tempted to liken it to an anchor, but I've not used it enough to level that charge.

Will I warm up to it more? That remains to be seen. Ask me when it gets sticky.

Flashback

I don't feel a need to apologize for yesterday's reactionary post about signing up for Facebook. I've resisted the social network for a variety of reasons, some better founded than others. Yes, I resent feeling as though I'm obligated to be on it while having to sacrifice certain amounts of privacy. Yes, I realize much of it has to do with my hang-ups. That is why I also feel as though I should put my objections in some context.

I am well aware that I did not have the enthusiasm for big social events and that on some occasions my parents forced me to attend them. Primarily I'm thinking of regional church youth conferences or similar types of events in which the onus was on me to meet new people. I don't know that I would describe myself as solitary, although there's likely some truth to that.

Anyway, one of the fastest ways to get me to shut down is to require me to do something I'd rather not do. I admit that I can have quite a stubborn streak, especially when I feel like my behavior or reactions are being dictated. For instance, I hate, hate, hate organized icebreakers, usually silly or potentially embarrassing activities that are structured to lower defenses among strangers. For some it is a pleasurable way of getting to know others, but it is definitely not my idea of fun whatsoever. Really, most requests for forced conformity and prescribed spontaneity put me on edge.

Facebook revives some of those old feelings and thus my wary approach to it. I don't want to feel like I'm 15 or 16 again, which is kind of what I fear it will do. I already feel like it was a big step for me to set up shop on the site, to just be there, but that I have to watch my attitude. Sure, it's one thing to submit and say, fine, I'll go, but carrying a chip on one's shoulder the whole time doesn't benefit anybody and makes the bearer look like a jerk. Guilty as charged.

So I acknowledge that these are my problems and that no one has put me in a difficult position (at least not yet). There are reasonable criticisms to fire at Facebook, but let's not ignore that what I fear in it is partially what I fear in me.

I'm not who I was twenty years ago, and I think that's a good thing. I'm not implying that that old self was bad, just that it was a rough draft. Chances are, though, that I will have to face off with that old version while navigating the social network. Hopefully the current me can do a better job of dealing with it.

If you have any advice for using Facebook, I am curious to hear it.

Surrender

I've done it. I've caved in. I'm on Facebook.

Like it or not--OK, I don't like it--I realized that it is more or less necessary that I join the social network. If I'm going to be on it, though, I'm going to do it on my terms, as long as I can figure out all of the fine controls and settings that I need to set. For the time being I have it in a relatively locked down mode, I think, and I've posted minimal information about myself. (For now I'm not including anything related to religion, politics, and relationship status.) We'll see what horrors I discover as I get familiarized with the site.

I do not intend to connect with work colleagues or students. It may sound like a harsh line to draw, but I'd like to keep my place of business separate. (Alumni will be on a case-by-case basis.) As far as I can tell, Facebook doesn't allow one to distinguish between "friends", so the easiest solution is to abide by a blanket rule. If it's something I have to explain to these people, so be it. Honestly, the potential infringing of my privacy by these groups is the primary reason why I've resisted joining in the first place.

I do not intend to friend anyone and everyone from my past. I realize that's how most people operate on Facebook, as though they're collecting former classmates and acquaintances like baseball cards, but that doesn't feel like a way I'm comfortable with doing things. Will I make some people angry? Perhaps.

I don't intend to publicize my presence on Facebook, and at least for now I don't intend to search aggressively to find people on there. (Yes, I realize there's an inherent contradiction in me blogging about it, but how many of you know who I am?) I will fess up to being curious about how many or few friend requests I receive. I suspect it will be toward the lower end of the scale, which would probably be a relief rather than having to make a bunch of judgment calls. As for my family, we'll see how long it takes them to find out I now have an account. I'm not going to avoid them there. I just want to take my time with it. If family members want to friend me tonight, that's fine.

I'm not even sure how often I plan to post anything. I go into this very uncertain and skeptical about Facebook. I don't plan to post much in the way of photos, especially of me. I've disabled the tagging and face recognition options, not that there's much to recognize from my Mad Men-ized cartoon avatar.

I imagine this all sounds very passive-aggressive and controlling. Look, I've signed up for it grudgingly, and I'm trying to get these gripes somewhat out of my system rather than spew them on Facebook. I can see how quickly the site can produce massive amounts of inferiority and complicate who knows what. Aside from staying off of the site completely, which I'd done until today, the only things within my power are the information I provide and who I grant access to it. I intend to be vigilant in both areas for my own sake.

Or to put it another way: I really prefer Twitter so much more. Make whatever sense of that as you please.

Plus

Is this what's it's like for older folks with technology? I'm not on Facebook, for the time being, but thanks to an invite from a reader, I'm on Google+. And I am hopelessly lost.

OK, that's overstating things a bit, but the fact remains that Google wants to collect everything I use my main Gmail account for and put it in one tidy spot. I, on the other hand, want to compartmentalize. Apparently you must link your Google+ and Picasa to sign up. (Boo!) Most people wouldn't find that problematic. I do. All of my knitblog photos are there. I have them classified as limited sharing, and I think that keeps them from being visible in Google+. I'm not 100% certain, though.

At least upfront it seems so overwhelming. By the service being "helpful", it's creating more problems than if it just let me manually add everything that I want and not try to share my footprint on the web, at least with Google services.

I'm imagine I'll come around on it once I figure it out, but for the moment I feel more like older relatives who have no desire to go online at all or struggle to understand how it works.

In the year 2000

Every now and then I have to stop and marvel at what technology gives us. This evening I was in my parents' basement watching the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State football game with the sound down. My dad pulled up the Dayton-Marquette basketball broadcast over the internet. I considered bringing up the Blue Jackets radio call on my laptop. My mom watched a movie she was streaming from Netflix. My brothers were upstairs either playing a game on the Wii or watching Notre Dame and Southern California on the gridiron.

There's nothing all that remarkable about what we were doing. I suspect many other people in this country and around the world do the same. That's what is so amazing if you stop to think about it.

Where to begin? I don't remember exactly when we got a computer at home, but the IBM-compatible with the 5 1/4" floppy disk drive (maybe two) didn't appear there until I was in high school. I recall typing some papers on an electric typewriter, so I'm guessing that it may not have been until my junior year. Compare and contrast that with tonight's set-up. I count four computers, two of them brought by us kids. That doesn't even include the Wii or my iPod, both of which have more memory and processing power than that old computer certainly possessed.

The availability of entertainment, movies in particular, has changed dramatically too. I remember being excited when we got a VCR. It was 1985, if memory serves. Home video libraries were basically unheard of as the market was definitely rental-driven. Now you don't even have to leave the house to have a wealth of movie options at the press of a button.

It used to be that if you were beyond the broadcast signal of your favorite sports teams, you couldn't listen to the games. At best you wouldn't have known the scores until later that night, if not until the next morning. Now it practically doesn't matter where you are to be able to listen or watch live.

Granted, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but stop and think about how amazing this is. Technology becomes so invisible in our lives that we lose sight of the fact that we're living in the future of our dreams, minus the flying cars and personal jetpacks.

Here I am, a couple hundred miles from my childhood home and current place of residence, yet I can find out how my favorite teams are doing as they play. On a whim and without leaving the house I can decide to watch movies that I might not have been carried at a local video store. And I can write about my amazement and share it with readers worldwide as soon as I'm done. There's plenty of awful news out there and plenty for everyone to be concerned about, but seriously, isn't all of this pretty cool? Our twenty years younger selves would lose it over things we don't even blink at.

Fitter Happier

How silly of me to blog about my history with notebook computers yesterday of all days, when the iPhone was made available to adoring throngs. Time will tell if the new Apple device will be as revolutionary as claimed.

Knitting time has been elusive this week, but I do have a way of tying it into the tech talk. Bear with me.

Technology is all about moving onward and upward. What we're able to do today without thinking twice about it is pretty incredible. Maybe that's why I've been on a bit of kick reading books about advances in global communication.

Aside from music's vinyl collectors and analog purists, more often than not we tend to favor the latest, greatest thing over old technology. I remember listening to a General Electric AM/FM transistor radio with a single earphone to bide the time as I mowed yards as a kid. It might be nice to still have it out of some sense of nostalgia, but if you think I'd trade it for my iPod, you're crazy.

The reasons for preferring new technology aren't difficult to understand. If we can do something better, faster, or easier, why wouldn't we do it? Sure, the rotary dial telephone might work perfectly well, but how many of those do you see in use?

And then there's knitting. Making something yourself certainly isn't faster or easier than buying something off the rack. Depending on how good of a knitter you are, the finished product may not be better. It might be cheaper to handknit something, but let's call this justification a push. This begs the question of why one should knit at a time in history when prices and production make the craft unnecessary for fulfilling basic needs.

The answers vary. For me it's about learning a skill that allows me to relax, feel a sense of accomplishment, and make things for others. I like how it connects me with my heritage, what little that I know of it, in that my grandmothers sewed and quilted. I've also found that knitting is a way of joining a community. From a purely practical perspective, there's no reason for me to be doing it, but that's often true of anything that could be called art. I'm sure that those of you reading have similar reasons and some I haven't mentioned.

We are at a point when our time is so valuable that we feel we must maximize it or make sure that it's profitable in some way. I know I'm as guilty as anyone in doing this, although I've been working on it. Creative pursuits can defy how we define success (money, acclaim), but lack of riches or accolades don't make such activities a waste of artistic energy. In other words, sometimes things are worth doing for their intrinsic value regardless of practicality or technological advances.

Here's where I should bring these thoughts together with a grand statement or two, but this is a riff than a treatise on modern life. Umm, knitting=good, new notebook computer=good. How's that?

OK, computer!

After hemming and hawing about purchasing a notebook computer, I took the plunge today. I've been wanting to get one for awhile. The time and price were right. I paid attention to the advice of others and deliberated until I felt like I had the proper plan of attack.

I decided to hold off on getting additional memory. Despite warnings of Vista being a memory hog, what can it hurt to use the machine and see how it operates before swapping out both sticks? And Donna's mention of her own memory installation experiences gives me some confidence that I can manage it without causing irreparable damage. (There is a basis for my hesitancy, though. I had a computer one of my brothers had put together. I attempted to add another stick but put it in backward. It was instantly fried, although the computer still functioned.)

The wireless router was installed without too much difficulty. I had to get one of my brothers to talk me through the process over the phone as I have two routers in my set-up. (The other one is for Vonage.) And just like that I can access the internet anywhere in my apartment!

I didn't intend to get a printer, but it was just $11 more. I already had a printer, but I haven't been able to get it to print properly in spite of following every protocol the manufacturer recommends. A commenter to a Salon.com tech article suggested that, when taking into account the exorbitant price of ink, it is cheaper to buy a new printer than getting replacement cartridges. It's hyperbole...kind of. I just got this printer for less than half of one ink cartridge for my old printer, so in this case that was true. For that matter, the ink that came with this printer probably costs more than the hardware.

This is the first laptop computer I've owned since the Bondwell B200 I bought prior to entering college. It was so much more convenient to have a computer of my own than to hope for access on one of the two(!) in the dorm. Ah, the luxury of using DOS, WordStar, and a Star NX-1001 dot matrix printer.

Needless to say, my new notebook can do a bit more.

Decisions, decisions

I've been considering purchasing a laptop computer--scratch that, a notebook computer--for some time. (I read somewhere that PC manufacturers have switched the terminology because the machines get so hot that they discourage use on laps.) I've made some extra money that I've intended to put toward the notebook, and the final piece arrived when the full security deposit from my old apartment came in the mail.

As luck would have it, one of the Big Box electronic retailers is having a sale on the model I've had my eye on. It couldn't be any easier, could it? Wrong, wrong, wrong. I asked my family members for their opinions and got more feedback than I probably needed. Still, they were helpful to a degree.

I felt relatively sure about the decision, but what I hadn't exactly taken into account was all of the extras that need to factored in. I will need--or want, to be more accurate--a wireless router. Everything I'm reading and being told is that I should upgrade the 1 GB of memory to 2 GB because Vista hogs it. If I have the store install the memory, there's another hefty charge. (I could probably do it, although I would hate to fry a new computer because of my own incompetence.) The price that was looking pretty good suddenly has all these other costs associated with it. And I haven't even mentioned purchasing Office because new computers get loaded with those infernal Works programs. (I could probably get an academic discount but still...)

Of course, one needs a bag for carrying the notebook. It's been suggested that I knit this satchel if/when I get a notebook. That's not a bad idea, and the extra cost would provide some pleasure that buying the other stuff wouldn't.

I went to the store and a Competing Chain to take a look at the notebook and check out prices for routers and memory. Hello aggravation. One place didn't have it, and the other had its functionality locked down so that I couldn't play around with it to see what I thought. I couldn't find the memory sticks, and heaven forbid a retail associate actually ask if you need help on that rare occasion when you do. I'm half tempted at this point to say forget it and not bother getting one at all. (The Big Box store lost a sale of a desktop computer to me three years ago because I couldn't find anyone to get the machine when I was there to make a purchase.)

And I won't even go into the difficulty in understanding my VOIP provider's obviously outsourced Indian call center employee when I contacted them to learn what I would need to do if/when I hooked up a wireless router.

To top it off, that enormo-sock is still on the needles, and I've done precious little knitting because of it. Blah.