One of the most ominous lines in the original Star Wars trilogy was uttered by James Earl Jones as Darth Vader clenched his fist, and declared, “You don’t know the power of the dark side …”
Okay, okay, so I’m a nerd. I can’t help it, I’m a Star Wars fan, particularly of the first three movies, and the most recent ones too. (We could skip the three in between, although I kind of liked “Phantom Menace” … but I digress.)
The “Dark Side” that for years I had been trying to avoid (clearly in futility) was that of Facebook.
I admit it (imagine my head hanging down …) that I am now a contributing member of the Facebook community. My thought was just recently that someone like my colleagues April or Leslie could say, “I’ve created a monster!”
I suppose the catalyst for all this was two-fold: we’ve been pumping up our online presence and use of social media, plus my Ancient Dinosaur Blackberry finally died, necessitating me to go to a retail outlet to get a “real” smartphone.
I enlisted the help of a colleague, who did a bit of research first to see what sort of handheld electronic device would work for me and would assist in my work, and thus I ended up with a new phone that works really well, so far.
I’m on a bit of a learning curve here, I admit, but it’s been fun actually, with a phone that can reach into all sorts of areas that I couldn’t before, and can do video besides.
With all of the functions that this device has, it’s not just a phone, which is more or less what my Blackberry was. Technically, it was a smartphone, but it didn’t have much memory storage ability in it so putting data capability on it wasn’t actually an option that would’ve been practical.
Basically what I could do was make or receive calls (with no caller ID) and text. I had music on it, and a good contact list, and through the magic of electronics, I was able to get the contact list transferred over to my new phone. This was a good thing, because otherwise I would’ve had to find a whole lot of names and numbers all over again.
On Friday night, I was out watching the lightning and not really getting much for photos, because it was mainly sheet lightning up in the clouds, so at one point as the storm was parked over the city, I tried doing a video of all the bright flashes filling our skies.
The video worked way better than I thought it would, and I posted it on our Facebook where, as of Tuesday morning, it had 10,643 views and 3,646 engagements. My mind boggles that this many people had seen it, and then the video clip I did of fireworks had over 1,000 views in less than 12 hours.
Cool! I kind of like that … so maybe a monster has been created, and what’s more he’s now on the Dark Side of things. Hopefully this won’t be too scary for you guys.
