I am an internet junkie. It started way back when in the late 1990s when I discovered chat rooms. The very first time I ever logged into a chat room, I had a hard time believing that there were real people there. There were. The first dialogue I ever had in a chat room:
I said "Hello?"
Someone responded "hi".
(Oooooo...this is COOL!!!!)
I was hooked. Real people!! They had cool names and used colorful fonts and letters and I could talk to them and they talked to me back. Well, type to them, anyways. I spent countless hours in various chat rooms...made a few friends here and there that I chatted with on and off while I was there, but most of the people in there were not regulars. I became a regular after a while. Some people I chatted with outside of the chat rooms; Yahoo Messenger was a popular medium of conversation, and I utilized it often. Hours and hours were spent chatting about anything and everything amidst various emoticons of smiley faces and sad faces, lols and brbs. I met one of my closest and dearest friends in a chat room over ten years ago, to be honest. Little did I know that it was those early days that would suck me into the internet for good.
Then I discovered IRC, short for internet relay chat. It was like chat rooms on steroids. It was there I learned how to exploit websites and gain access to their content for free. The people who taught me how to do this were ex-programmers and system admins, and they were among the best on the planet. They had cracked more websites than I could count and were responsible for general mayhem and chaos. They were the elite hackers of the planet, and I was under their wing. I was soon an @ there, which is the abbreviation for operator. I could kick people out of our channel, add people to our ranks, ban the newbies who didn't follow the rules, and various other benefits.
It didn't last long...I got bored and left the channel I belonged to, and have all but forgotten how to use the tools I was given. The tools are still out there...somewhere. I just choose not to use them anymore. Too risky nowadays with Big Brother breathing down our necks.
Then came the advent of social networking. I enjoy it because it allows me to talk to family and friends I normally wouldn't see or hear from for years at a time, both foreign and domestic. Facebook, Twitter, and countless others encompass billions of people across the world, and it seems that nobody is immune to their grasp.
And then...MMORPGs. Or, massive multi-player online role playing games. Yowza...I couldn't possibly know where to begin here. World of Warcraft was my poison...people have nicknamed it 'Warcrack'. I spent hundreds of hours in front of my computer. I won't go into detail because I could go on and on for days about Warcraft, so I'll spare you all this time. I still play here and there, but not nearly as much as I used to.
Now, I subscribe to many different news readers and groups and am constantly reading about the latest in gadgets and electronics, business, politics, games, humor, and many other things. I'm hooked but I don't want to quit...I don't think I could if I tried =). I'm still a junkie, I guess.
Where will computing go next? What else is out there that we could possibly discover? How much more is there to invent? We may never know. Not in our lifetime, anyways.
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