The Final Inspection is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning… uphill… barefoot… both ways… yadda, yadda, yadda. And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in I was going to lay a bunch of stuff like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But. now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You’ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a darn Utopia!

And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the darn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen! Then, you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our a-s! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3′s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself! Or, you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and the tape would come undone… cause – that’s how we rolled, dig?

We didn’t have fancy stuff like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it!

There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make or receive a call. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. OH MY GOD!!! Think of the horror…

And then there’s TEXTING. yeah, right. You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And, we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, or a collections agent, you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600, with games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… forever! And, you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were s—–d when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your rear and walk over to the TV to change the channel! NO REMOTES!!!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning. Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-brats!

And, we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!

That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled. You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd

Under 30′s – The Spoilt Crowd is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

A couple of mornings ago, I was sitting in the kitchen with my wife, eating breakfast.

The extractor above the stove top was still running, and I got up to switch it off.

“Is that annoying you?” said my wife.
“A little”, I said adding that we seem to live in a world of constant noise these days.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like conversation, I like music, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world of silence.

However, I recalled when I was a small child, and we used to visit my great-grandmother, and also a great aunt. In the pauses between conversation all you could hear was the ticking of the clock. A ‘real’ clock too. This was long before the age of digital anything!

Now as we sat there in the kitchen I could hear, that extractor, the refrigerator, the air conditioning and the washing machine. Outside someone was running some power tools. Many times on top of this cacaphony is the babble from a television that no-one is watching.

The only thing I couldn’t hear was the relaxing rythmic ticking of a clock.

The Ticking Clock is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

‘Someone asked the other day, ‘What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?’
‘We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,’ I informed him.
‘All the food was slow.’
‘C’mon, seriously . Where did you eat?’
‘It was a place called ‘at home,” I explained. !
‘ Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.’

Slow Food is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Were you alive in 1955? Your parents, or perhaps your grandparents were? They might have said some of these things…

‘I’ll tell you one thing, if things keep going the way they are, it’s going to be impossible to buy a week’s groceries for $20.00.
‘Have you seen the new cars coming out next year? It won’t be long before $2,000.00 will only buy a used one.
‘If cigarettes keep going up in price, I’m going to quit. 25 cents a pack is ridiculous.
‘Did you hear the post office is thinking about charging 10 cents just to mail a letter
‘If they raise the minimum wage to $1.00, nobody will be able to hire outside help at the store.
‘When I first started driving, who would have thought gas would someday cost 29 cents a gallon. Guess we’d be better off leaving the car in the garage.
‘I’m afraid to send my kids to the movies any more. Ever since they let Clark Gable get by with saying DAMN in GONE WITH THE WIND, it seems every new movie has either HELL or DAMN in it.
‘I read the other day where some scientist thinks it’s possible to put a man on the moon by the end of the century. They even have some fellows they call astronauts preparing for it down in Texas.
‘Did you see where some baseball player just signed a contract for $75,000 a year just to play ball? It wouldn’t surprise me if someday they’ll be making more than the President.
‘I never thought I’d see the day all our kitchen appliances would be electric. They are even making electric typewriters now.
‘It’s too bad things are so tough nowadays. I see where a few married women are having to work to make ends meet.
‘It won’t be long before young couples are going to have to hire someone to watch their kids so they can both work.
‘I’m afraid the Volkswagen car is going to open the door to a whole lot of foreign business.
‘Thank goodness I won’t live to see the day when the Government takes half our income in taxes. I sometimes wonder if we are electing the best people to government.
‘The drive-in restaurant is convenient in nasty weather, but I seriously doubt they will ever catch on.
‘There is no sense going on short trips anymore for a weekend, it costs nearly $15.00 a night to stay in a hotel.
‘No one can afford to be sick anymore, at $35.00 a day in the hospital, it’s too rich for my blood.’
‘If they think I’ll pay 50 cents for a hair cut, forget it.’

In 1955 is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Nostalgia ain’t wot it used to be is it?

It’s probably not good to live in the past, and most of the time I’m forward looking. However it’s nice to take a look back every so often, and reminisce about byg0ne days, news, and events.

So, this afternoon, I sat back and watched again, the first four episodes of ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years‘ which was was a BBC television show broadcast between 1985 and 1994.

Each thirty minute show focused on a different year each week, starting with the year 1956 and ending with 1989.

Although many folk bemoan the state of the world at the present time, when one watches these shows, one is reminded that as well as happy times, death and destruction, war and violence, are ongoing themes through history.

One is reminded of how unhealthy we were back then, with factories belching black smoke, and the majority of the population smoking.

Civil rights, in many parts of the world were, at the start of this series, almost non-existent, including the American South of course.

The Cold War was at its height, the United States, USSR, and the UK were conducting atmospheric H-Bomb Tests, and there was a real fear that the button would be pushed by either side.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years, being from the BBC, takes a look at the world from a British perspective, but takes in world affairs from each year.

Some notable happenings in the first four episodes (1956 – 1959) included The Hungarian uprising in 1956; Sputnik’s launch in 1957; The tragedy of the Manchester United Airplane crash of 1958; and Castro’s Revolution in Cuba in 1959.

If you get the opportunity, and you like the music from the 50′s, 60′s 70′s and 80′s, and also the news from those years, it’s a series worth seeing.

The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

I really was thin once, and not that long ago, either!

This was taken in West Ashley, SC, in 1998

I Told You, But You Didn’t Believe Me… is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

• All the girls wore gym slips
• It took five minutes for the TV to ‘warm up’
• Mom was at home when you got in from school
• No-one you knew owned a thoroughbred dog
• You’d reach down in the mud to pick up a penny
• Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces
• All your male teachers wore ties
• All your female teachers had their hair done every day, and wore high heels
• You  got your windscreen cleaned, oil checked, and petrol served,  without asking, all for free, every time. And you didn’t pay for air. And, you got trading stamps too!
• It  was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner  at a real restaurant with your
  parents
• Bottles came from the corner shop without safety caps and hermetic seals
• When being sent to see the principal  was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at  home

And with all our progress, don’t you wish, just once, you  could slip back in time and savor the slower pace, and share it with the children of  today.

Are You Old Enough To Remember When… is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Any of you that follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed or Brightkite will know that I was not at home yesterday evening.

That means I couldn’t watch Jared W Smith’s Serious Business on UStream.TV

However, I did find time to sneak in a viewing session (in a couple of sections) between working.

Do you remember the 386? It was a 386SX (the crippled CPU version) that I first used to venture onto Windows with. Jared talks about, and demonstrates his in show, and it was an interesting trip down Memory Lane.

My computing history started some years before that though.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-81. It came with 1K RAM (yes that’s not a misprint – 1K). It had a rubber membrane keyboard – wel rather a keypad.

I did splurge, and buy a 16K RAM pack extension for it, because even back then (1982), you couldn’t do much with 1K

Programs were installed in one of two ways. You either type the whole lot in from a magazine listing, or you connected a cassette recorder to it, and loaded them in from a data tape.

I had a chess game for mine. There wasn’t enough power for the computer to display the board AND computer your moves at the same time, so while the computer was ‘having its go’ the screen went blank. It was a computer with a similar amount of processing power that was installed on the Lunar Module that had landed on the moon some thirteen years earlier, back in 1969.

Pretty soon, I moved onto a Commodore 64. This was really a useful machine. I had a number of games for this, which considering the power of the machine were really quite entertaining. It was also the first machine that I went online with.

I joined a Commodore based service called Compunet, and purchased a modem, that slotted in the back. It had two speeds 300/300 and 1200/75. The 1200/75 rate was actually quite useful as it allowed faster downloads, and, generally speaking, and even to this day, most users download far more than they wish to upload.

It was dial-up, and long-distance at that, and I used to run up huge phone bills, as I could never resist going online during the day, when the phone rates were a lot higher than after 6 and at weekends.

I could write much about the fun and discovery I had with the C64. About 3 years later, in 1987, I got my first PC. The choices at the time for me, were either a PC, or a Commodore Amiga, and as I was more interested in computing than I was game playing, and as I perceived the PC to be more about professional computing than the Amiga, I went for the PC.

It was an Amstrad PC2086. Specs: 640K Ram, and a 2086 CPU, running at 8Mhz (which was way cooler, than the standard 4.77MHz of the time). It had a 30MB Hard Drive.

It was quite innovative too. It had a 3.5 inch floppy drive, so I could get those smaller discs, which held a whopping 720K of data on. At that time, the 1.44MB drives weren’t on the market. It also had VGA graphics, and I had a 12 inch color monitor. VGA standard was 640 x 480 with 256 colors. Still, after EGA, it really did look quite impressive.

I remember the frst time I downloaded a color photograph. It took 40 minutes.

I was already networking too. I was a member of Fidonet, which was an international network of Amatuer Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) started by Tom Jennings in San Francisco in 1984. My own BBS was “The Beer Garden” with a node number of 2:440/7. If you didn’t want to run a full BBS you could still link to a BBS, and receive email that way.

Typically, sending an international email from say, the UK to Australia and getting a reply, would take 4-5 days.

If you’re interested in the History of Fidonet, you can read more here

Are you new to online shopping?  Well, my first experience of it was back in 1993. Sort of. I actually purchased a used computer in response to an advertisment placed on Prestel, which was British Telecoms online network in operation at that time. I called the guy up, and went to look at the machine, as he was only 20 miles away. I had that computer for about 4 years. The pace of technological advancement was not quite as frantic as it is now!

I’d recently got an internet account proper, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, as something called the World Wide Web was being touted as the next biggest thing.  I never did join any of the proprietary services such as AOL, or Compuserve, or MSN, none of which were connected to the Internet itself, or even each other at that time.

The 386, had a whopping 85MB Hard Drive, and 8MB RAM. WOW.

My first experiences of the Web were quite underwhelming. There wasn’t really a whole lot to see at first, but of course, it soon caught on.

Now, 16 years later, we have a whole generation out there that have never know life without the Internet, and can’t imagine a world without instant communication.

When I was a teenager, to be able to go out for the day, and take photos, and post them online, and share them with the world before you even got home, was beyond Star Trek fantasy. Now it’s all taken for granted.

Still if you’d like to join Jared and his trip down Memory Lane with his 386 then go check out the latest issue of Serious Business!

A Trip Down Memory Lane is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

For The Fallen
With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

And At The Going Down Of The Sun… is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog