After my brother enjoyed punishing me for a year or so on the Hanimex game console, We noted new, better, color games appearing. These units were at the local milk-bar. The first table I recall was Space Invaders. It was 20c to play, and you got 3 “lifes”.
It was a gigantic leap forward from the pinball machines we were playing previously. There was also another game table out at that time, some yellow thing called PacMan that ate stuff. It was not anywhere as near as cool as shooting aliens though!
httpv://youtu.be/DHaQ3XSyaXk
The fire in me was well and truly lit. I was hooked. Video games were the greatest things in the world to me. In 1978 I heard about a new game console called Atari.
I started seeing them in the mail out catalogs from K-Mart. The games looked great! The first time I saw one in the flesh was my cousin….again. We played “Combat”. We each had a tank, and the object of the game was to shoot each other, which I thought was awesome. Because I had never played one before, and he owned the unit, he too took great enjoyment at thrashing me. I didn’t mind though. This was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Because it was hooked up to their color TV, this one really was in color.
httpv://youtu.be/4Ri37_KhsRw
This was the beginning of the golden age of video games for me, and the beginning of a very long and enjoyable relationship with the Atari 2600.
I am writing this article using a dual quad core Intel Zeon Mac Pro – this thing has 8x 3.2 Ghz processors. 10 Gigs of Ram, 2 Terrabytes of Hard drive, with a 30″ Cinema display, and I LOVE IT! I also have a new Macbook Pro, it too has mind blowing specifications. 4 Gigs of Ram, 500 Gig hard drive, Quad core Intel chip, but only 4x 3.2Ghz Processors.
And here’s Sir Stevie with the 30″ monitor – IT’s HUGE!
But last night I got to thinking, it wasn’t always like this………………….
(insert picture/video of the screen blurring, and imagine we are going through a time warp back to 1977……..seriously…..)
Ah yes – I remember it well! 1977 – I was six years old!
Bet you can’t guess which one is me…….well…..maybe the red circle gives it away. The teacher was Miss O’Hara, such a long time ago! My father was a fireman back then, and one night he came home with a really weird looking cardboard box – It looked a lot like this:
I had NO idea what a “Electronic TV Game” was. I do find it interesting now looking back that the box says “COLOR”. Color what? Colored box?
My first memories of television were in black and white – It was a HMV set – His Masters Voice – The dog looking into the funnel thing. I cant find a pic of anything close, but the closest I can find is this:
Our TV had two BIG ROUND dials, and it required considerable force to turn them to change the channel. Clunk Clunk Clunk, with each channel number you would pass. I remember Mum getting SO cranky when we played with the brightness and contrast buttons. Dad would take of his belt if we went around the back and twisted the horizontal and vertical hold dials. I was never sure why the dog was looking at the funnel:
But now, I expect the dog was thinking “Where the heck is that noise coming from”. I also understand why they didn’t have a Labrador, because that funnel would be bent, broken, chewed……hehehe:)
Colour TV happened in 1978 for the us. Dad bought it from Don Gard’s in Liverpool. Again, I cant find a pic of the set, but it looked a lot like this:
As cool as we were in 78 with our Rank Arena colour TV, in 77 we had the HMV Black and White. Now, when we opened that “Electronic TV Game” box, we saw a space-age plastic and silicon anomaly from the future – what on earth is this?
I give dad credit for buying this, but in our part of the world, I expect the gun was a “add on”, and he didn’t buy it. I found out later that my cousins had the gun, and more pissed off about it I could not be, but I will save that anger for another day. Anyways, My sister had no interest in this, because she was 16, and this was a kiddie toy. My brother was interested, and if it was good enough for him, it was a gift from god to me. My brother was a master of the universe to me. So once we plugged it in and turned it on, he took great pleasure in pulverising me at squash, tennis, hockey, and whatever the other game was, that we couldn’t play because we didn’t have the gun.
My brother and I waged war on each other, and he always won! I didn’t care though, my older brother who always hated me for hanging around all of a sudden found a use for me. This was not only my introduction to technology, this was pretty much THE introduction of “technology”. Life was pretty simple back then. This device was the dawning of not only a new era, but a new way of life.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you “TENNIS”, on the Hanimex game console circa 1977!
All web sites need a good robots.txt in my opinion. For those reading (Ha….what a joke!) who don’t know what that is, a robots.txt file is simply a text file that tells search engines what they are allowed to tell the world about, and what you dont want them to promote. Now, you might be thinking “I want them to index every page on my site”, and that’s a fair call, but what they can also do, is promote the folders and files that exist behind the scenes of your site, that you would prefer to keep private for reasons such as privacy and security.
If you are new to the web/site design, and this is all news to you, and you have realised there are some folders on your server that contain files you don’t want the world to find through a search engine, you can easily generate a robots.txt file using the free robots.txt file generator at McAnerin HERE. Once you have told the generator the directories on your server you want to keep private, copy the code it generates, and then create a new text document on your computer, and paste it in. Call the file “robots.txt” (without the exclamation marks of course) and then upload it into the “public_html” folder of your website.
Now, for those of us who use WordPress, there are quiet a few directories that I think should be blocked. There are also others who have the opinion that your WordPress site ranks higher if you don’t use one. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about the internet, and this is one of them. Until it is resolved, I personally will continue to use robots.txt.
So for now, below is my robots.txt file I use – If you think I have missed something, or if you think the whole robots.txt idea is junk, please comment! I’d love to hear your thought’s for and against.
I guess the Guarddog was sleeping, or chewing on a bone, because a few emails from domains and addresses I have blacklisted are still coming through. I blacklisted On-One Softwares domain name (Good software, but they send a LOT of emails once you download a trial), and after receiving another email from them a few days later, I black listed the actual address the email come from. But alas, they are still coming through. I got two more from them today. There have been another few domains that sneak past the Guarddog, but On-One is the main offender. I will start tracking them no as well.
I have forwarded the messages to MXGuarddog, so we’ll wait and see if they respond.
I saw this picture today, and not only did I think it was pretty funny, I thought about how much I think “The Cloud” is a dumb idea. Its considerably slower when using apps (Have you tried Photoshop Express Online? What about Premiere Express Online?), and if you are storing files “In The Cloud”, what happens if the servers crash, or the company disappears before you can get them back (Happened to me and thousands of others when Bubbleshare and Video Egg went away). You might say, “Well you have to keep a local backup copy!” – Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of “The Cloud”?
I am not a fan! It reminds me of how it used to be cool to back up your sites and databases on your server within your site. That was a dumb idea too!
Upon building a site for a client who wanted different backgrounds and headers on his site for different occasions, I came across the Chameleon CSS plugin. Put, very simply, it allows you to automatically schedule the use of different CSS Style sheets at different times (Time, Date, Day and Month). Its compatible with WP Super Cache, and is really easy to use.
Check it out now in the Plugin Directory – Chameleon CSS.
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httpv://youtu.be/28lv3K0pje0
httpv://youtu.be/DHaQ3XSyaXk
