Sunday, December 28, 2014

School's in, Lessons by the 4 Professors

For years I've called them the 4 Boys. Not exactly a crazy name, as that's what they were. But after knowing them for 16 years, the kids have sort of outgrown the 'Boys' part of the 4 Boys. My new name: the 4 Professors.

On Saturday night we all met up at Big Buns for delicious "burgers" (I had a fish sandwich) to all catch up. At which point, I got schooled. I heard about life in college, life as a Jeep owner, life as a college athlete, iPhone hacks, life on instagram and the Joys of Working Retail (actually, I used to work retail - not much has changed). It was awesome, and quite an education!

I finally got a full introduction to the world of SnapChat. SnapChat is one of those basic apps that people in my generation only think they get, and are quick to scoff at. Operation is pretty basic: snap a photo, add one line of text, send it off to one or many of your bestest buddies. Your buddies get to look at the message twice, for 10 seconds each. And then the message is gone, poof.

It seems custom built for sending inappropriate pictures, and of course, that's probably what it gets used for.

Any crusty old trend watcher would look at an app like this and say, aha! young people have learned from the sins of previous generations and now don't trust the archival nature of electoric communications.

But, as my teachers explained, snapchats can be trivially captured and archived for later by using the phone's screenshot capability. The fact is, SnapChat is fun, and compared to attaching images to an SMS, far faster. Turns out, mixing images with text does make for a potent combination.

I did feel a bit like an old person this morning when I tried to send Brady a SnapChat but hit send before I typed my message. D'oh. At least I can still outprogram these kids, though I don't think that will be the case forever.

Such good times!





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