The End of July

We've made it to the end of another July. Now comes August when the pace of life will pick up, the heart will flutter, and life begins again.

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About

BY Nathan Barry
22 July 2009
Wired

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.

That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …

Audio-Visual Entertainment

1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to today’s teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio b0rk this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming

18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet

35. NCSA Mosaic.
36. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
37. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
38. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
39. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
40. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
41. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
42. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs
55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets

57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.

Everything Else

70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil to break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100.When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

My thanks go out to all of my fellow GeekDads for their contributions to this list.

http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/07/100-things-your-kids-may-never-know-about?npu=1&mbid=yhp

Down South

It was fun driving to Auburn and back yesterday. The temperature only hit the mid 80's. The campus was quiet. Such trips and weather relief make July tolerable. It was raining when I returned to Shelby County. We need the rain (as everybody reminds me).

The End of July

We come to the last half of July, and I am ready for it. My pulse starts to quicken as we move to August.

We Learn as We go Along

When it comes to computers and technology, we learn as we go along.

You get a new HP laptop, and you learn that Word no longer comes with PCs but instead you get Microsoft Works, which is OK but you find out you can't expect a recipient of a Works document to download it unless the recipient also has Works, which is not likely because Word is the word processor of the realm these days. So if you're serious about attaching documents, you must eventually have Word, which you have to purchase separately.

Then you find out that your new laptop will not install with your Epson printer without downloading an install from the Epson website (the install disk you received with your printer will not work with a 64-bit computer), and it takes an hour in a convoluted threeway conversation with HP and Epson tech support to find this out and by then you are so disgusted you hang up.

By the end of this Friday afternoon, my nerves are shot.

Do I Dare Eat a Cookie?

T. S. Eliot once asked, "Do I dare eat a peach?"

But here is my question: Do I dare eat a cookie?

At the library, we have been discussing whether you would eat a cookie that a stranger offers you. This question arose when recently a co-worker was offered a cookie from a patron, and he refused it. Most of my co-workers say they would do the same. However, when I was asked this question, I unhesitatingly said I would eat the cookie.

Coincidentally, just a few hours later, a patron offered a cookie to one of the librarians. She said no. He then offered it to one of my co-workers. She took it, but absolutely would not eat it. I told her I would eat it. She gave it to me, and I popped it in my mouth. It seems the patron had been carrying it around all day, wrapped in foil. He said his wife made it.

I have asked others whether they would eat a cookie offered from a stranger, and most say they would not. I am surprised at this response. How can you turn down a free cookie? Why are people so fearful of cookies?

I understand the concern of not knowing what was done to the cookie or who the person is who offers it. I do not have these worries, though. I am not burdened by this paranoia. Maybe I am too trusting. But I think maybe our culture is not trusting of others enough. What does it say about our culture that we are so fearful of others to the point of not even eating a cookie?

Amazed

The girl who works at the Hoover Shipley Do-Nuts just graduated from Pelham HS. She's worked there for last couple of years and so I've talked to her before. What are you going to do now I ask her. She says she wishes to go to art school---art is her thing, but she tells me that she's an illegal alien and so she cannot get into the Art Institute. So I am amazed to learn that an illegal alien can graduate from Pelham HS! I did not know this was the case.

A New Laptop

Fred Hudson is in the market for a new home family laptop computer. He is looking at a Dell 17 inch screen model and an HP 16.5 inch model. Does anyone have an opinion?

Desperados in Tuscaloosa

Yesterday Freddy and I had lunch at Desperados on Highway 82 West in Tuscaloosa. It was so good especially the cheesecake. Try it sometime!

Summer Rain

It's good to wake up to overcast skies and some rain this morning. As Jimi Hendix once said, "Summer rain taps on my window." May it continue.

This 4th will Pass

This 4th will pass like all of the others. The passing of the 4th of July is the first turn of summer. Now comes the rest of July and then will come August 1 when the heart quickens in anticipation of Fall.

Moyna prepared a great feast for us yesterday and we enjoyed the day. It's cloudy early in Shelby County and we hope for some rain today.

We watched part of the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci Fi channel yesterday. That was fun for a while. We watched the fireworks from Red Mountain and other 4th specials.

This 4th will pass like all of the others.

You Can Tell it's the Day before the 4th

Not as many people are out and about. It seems a bit cooler than yesterday---if you call 94 rather than 99 cooler. Freddy came up yesterday and today he's off to Tennessee to visit friends in Maryville. I had a sinking feeling this afternoon but then I ate a banana and heard Johnny Cash singing "Ring of Fire" on the radio and I perked up. It's amazing how little things can sometimes spark your spirit.

July is Here

July is here---summer in all of its glory. I wonder if it were this hot when I was growing up in Winfield in the 60's. It seems so much hotter now, and we didn't have AC then, either at home or in the car!