Who is your friend and who is your Facebook friend?

I know that time flies, but seeing that I haven't posted in over a month and the fact that it seems like yesterday I made that post, only reaffirms that adage.

Anyway, for my post I'll talk about Skype, becoming cross-eyed, and birthdays. Cell phones revolutionized how we communicate, and Skype doesn't so much revolutionize as evolve how we talk to each other.

Skype blows my mind. For starters, the fact that you can call almost any number in the world from your computer is amazing. But it's the features of Skype that make the program excellent: for example, you can buy a number in a foreign country for about $30 a year. People in that foreign country call that number and it calls your Skype account and pay what it costs to make a local call, rather than spending on long distance. Then, you can change the settings so that all calls received to your account are forwarded to another phone, such as your cell or landline. But wait, there's more! Let's suppose you have a cell carrier that doesn't have long distance. Instead of paying to call long distance, you can get a free SkypeOut local number (as long as you're paying for Skype Pro, at $3 monthly, which includes a myriad of other features) and you call that number -say a 507 number- which accesses your Skype account and you can use speed dial or enter any number, domestic, national or international. With SkypePro, you get free unlimited calls to anywhere in the US, but if you don't pay that $3 a month then it costs $.02 per minute, with other countries varying form $.02 a minute to up to $1.50 or so. There are also special Skype phones that have most of the features the Skype for computer has, but you need to be in a Wi-Fi hotspot to do so. But ultimately you can use the SkypeOut from your regular plain-jane cell phone. In effect, you have Skype wherever you go, regardless if you have a computer. Revolutionary or evolutionary?


That's shameless promotion for Skype, but once you have it and experience all its glory (other features such as voicemail, SMS, webcamming, instant messaging, and a strange feature - SkypeMe - in which you can call random people across the world and talk to them).

Skype certainly isn't the first application to take advantage of these features, but what it did was Apple-ize it, or, take those features, improve upon how the other apps failed at implementing them, or did them poorly, and Skype made them better, user-friendly, and squeaky-clean looking. Skype isn't perfect, that's for sure, as I have problems making calls sometimes using SkypeOut from my cell, but overall Skype is the PowerBook of an all-in-one telephony and instant messaging application.

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One reason that print media will never go out of print, despite all it lacks when compared to snazzy online media, is the fact that it is very comfortable to read and look at. It can be very difficult to look at a computer screen for an extended period, and perhaps my biggest complaint about most online text is that it's too small. WAY too small....even when i adjust the setting on my computer, it's still too small. I always increase the size of the text, but usually that goofs up the layout of the page. I don't think my eyesight is -that- bad yet, but it might be that I just spend too much time in front of a computer and my eyes begin to hurt, my contacts dry and I start going cross-eyed, unable to control the muscles in my sockets. I wonder what animals think when they see us staring at a rectangular box with light flickering in our face? I remember seeing a comic one time, and I wish I could find it, but it has a family sitting on a couch after the power has went out and instead staring at the TV, they stare at a nail in the wall, and it has a good punchline. I wish I could remember it, but TV has killed many of my brain cells, including the one that remembered that joke.


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So, today is my birthday, and although I got many salutations and "happy birthdays" in person and over the phone, only one person, my cousin, wished me happy birthday on Facebook. Not that I feel sad, but I just think it's funny how dependent we've become on technology. The thing is, I didn't have my birthday displayed on my profile until 11:30 p.m., on purpose, and I changed it so anyone seeing my profile would see my anniversary of life. And what do you know! As soon as I put public my birthday, I get a birthday wish from someone who I haven't talked to since last summer! For those of you not in the Facebook loop, the site compiles the birthdays of whoever's completing that day and puts a little birthday reminder section on the homepage. That way you can see birthdays of everyone in your network, and most peoples' networks consist of anybody from best friends to minor acquaintances and internent-only friends. Now, I don't expect acquaintances or distant friends to remember my birthday, but it just goes to show how much we need Facebook for birthday reminders, if anything else. Since I've had a Facebook account I've put public my b-day, and every year I'd get at least 30 birthday wishes, maybe even much more, and it irritated the hell out of me. I get all these people who, one day a year, decide to send me a brief wish for a good year and bla-bla-bla, and pretend to care, but the other 364 (or 365) days, when that message really would in fact make my day a little brighter (I have enough family and close friends wishing me a happy birthday as it is), those so-called friends don't decide to care. It's like Black History Month: you can care about it for one month, but the rest of the year blacks don't matter, according to Chris Rock. That's one of the reasons why I'm a little uneasy with birthdays. Oh, and the happy birthday song is annoying. I'm not a cynic, and I like good food, good company and a few presents, but it just makes me wonder how dependent we're becoming on technology to do stuff for us (ie, birthday reminders, or have an excuse not to make physical contact with someone and tell them in person, or the phone, to have a happy birthday).

I'll wait and see these next few days who sends me a belated-Facebook-birthday wish after making the connection of my birthday, the fact they didn't wish me a happy one, and the fact that I got few wishes on the Wall: in lieu of the belated birthday card, it's the belated birthday message on the Wall. That way, people will care (even if it's minimal and to the extent of writing a one-sentence greeting lacking punctuation and capitalization) when I most need it.