Reading: old pulp stories
Music: off the NPR app
TV/Movie: Love an Death
Link o' the Day: TRS-80.com



Granted, I live in a special world. I sent my first e-mail in 1985. I remember relying on packet mail. I was a regular on various systems around the world (thanks to telnet) by 1989. I still miss PINE for the VAX/VMS.

The point is I've been online for almost 25 years. There are a lot of folk who have been online longer, but in terms of the general population--I'm an old timer. That said, I think I can appreciate some of the aspects to the Internet today that are pretty dang cool--despite the occasional nay-sayer. Here are five things that still impress the hell out of me online:




1. Facebook: A social network system that gets it right. MySpace for adults. I'm always surprised when I hear of some kid telling their parent they're "too old" for facebook. Sorry, junior. Go back to MySpace, why doncha. Facebook is more than just catching up with high school chums after 20 years, or looking at your cousin's babies. It's a pretty dang fine networking tool and gives me a broader sense of what's happening in the world-of-my-interest at a glance than any number of old Usenet groups or Yahoo mailing lists. Naysayers deride it for security issues--I say it's like anything else online. Think before you post. You get what you put in. That aside, I've found it nothing but a positive experience.

2. Twitter: This gets a lot of grief because the 140-letter limit and accusations that it's short-attention-span theater of the uninteresting. Again, it's what you put into it. Sometimes I am interested in what a friend of mine had for lunch. Many of my friends on Twitter are writers and publishers. I get to keep up on a lot of publishing news important to me, and I find I get even more inspired to write when I see other writers talking about their own current projects. My Twitter setup also includes a frequent newsfeed from the local newspaper, job listings, and highway reports. I can casually stalk a few celebs if I want (there are a few: Kevin Smith, Wil Wheaton), but mostly it's folks I know to one degree or another. And anyone who has experienced scrolling through 100 tweets in one sitting knows it's a little more than short-attention-span theater.

3. eBay: I can never find tenor banjo strings around here. The music stores just don't cater to the folk crowd much. On eBay I can find tenor banjo strings for a fraction of what they would cost in stores. Hell, I've done a lot of Christmas shopping on eBay and saved myself the hassle of malls, stores, and traffic. It's great for hard-to-find items like out-of-print books and music. That alone makes it applause-worthy. And Have I ever been burned? Sure, once or twice. In each case it was my own fault for not reviewing the seller's ratings and reviews. I've been burned at over-the-counter transactions as well. Pound for pound and dollar for dollar, eBay has been a pretty valuable experience.

4. The "Blogosphere": Like with Twitter, sometimes I am interested in what people had for lunch. Moreso, though, there are a lot out of blogs that are interesting and thought-provoking (my blog not included). Like with Twitter, I read those by writers and publishers mostly, but on occasion I delve into political commentary, and film. I could do without embedded videos, but people are writing, and people are reading--and how that be bad? Maybe it's not all gold, but it's hardly a world filled with teenagers uttering obscenities over and over. You want childish? Look for some old SIGs from BBS days. Yeesh! Mind you, some of my entries may seem questionable at times. On Tuesdays I make up rumors and half-truths (with the occasional real fact), and on Fridays I have a fictional mailbag. But for me, it's all an exercise in writing and creativity. As for medium--I tried livejournal but it wasn't really for me. I keep a WordPress blog set up at johnteehan.com which is mirrored at my first blogsite, Journalscape, and RSS fed to my Facebook page. I get a surprising number of hits.




5. Netflix/Hulu: Okay, I've never heard anyone criticize these sites. With Hulu, the price is right if you don't mind putting up with some ads. For Netflix, the cost is pretty reasonable considering what you get. Want to watch the first three seasons of Buffy for free? Head to Hulu. The Gregory Peck version of Moby Dick? Slacker? Recent episodes of Family Guy or The Simpons? Hulu, baby, Hulu. On Netflix I've caught old Woody Allen movies, various Britcoms, cult flicks (some quite obscure), anime, and incredible documentaries. All you need are a decent computer and a high-speed connection. I know folks who've cancelled their cable and this is their entertainment.

Gotta love 'em all.

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Because I started out getting all misty-eyed on the Internet of the 80s, today's link takes you to TRS-80.com--your one-stop site for anything related to the Tandy line of computers of which I owned several different models from the old TRS-80 model II up to the Tandy 1000 T/L2. (The picture is of a Tandy pocket computer with programmable BASIC and a whopping 16K of memory. I still own one of these.)

Cheers!