Looks like the world is waking up again to the greatness of Apollo again. Perhaps my dull space related ramblings herein will be scoffed at less now. Perhaps not.
Anyway, I was watching some of the various Apollo/Moon related coverage last night (who's surprised?) and a question occurred to me.
If you could choose, would you rather be the first or last man on the moon?
You may jump to an immediate answer of saying "Armstrong". Yes, OK, he's now historically famous but he's also famously not all that bothered about that. Thing is, I think my answer would be Gene Cernan. Here's why...
Apollo 11 for all its historical significance did little else than land, stick up a flag and get back. I'm not playing this down at all but, from the point of view of the astronauts they spent on 21 1/2 hours on the moon and only 2 1/2 hours outside the LM on the surface. As individuals they have spectacular, if very short, memories of the moon.
Compare with Apollo 17. They spent longer wandering about the moon outside the LM than Apollo 11 spent on the surface in total. They also drove the lunar rover. They had a lot more fun and had much more to remember. As a human experience, it was surely better?
I suppose the pseudo-philosophical-bobbins question is, would we choose a place in history over a better individual experience while we're alive? (Not that I think any discussion of hedonistic intent is ever sensibly applied to the space programme.)
The person to ask would, of course, be Buzz Aldrin. Give that he never got the top billing he wanted (although he's still a household name) he may have preferred the memory of days on the moon?
In the end, the desire to be the first was more related to the test pilot adrenalin junky thing. They won't have been bothered about only staying there for a few hours (although, after landing they refused to sleep and wanted to get out asap, so the excitement of being there did happen).
Being first meant you got the squeaky bum landing and the "Right Stuff" way that Armstrong landed the Eagle. The pinpoint landings that followed (Apollo 17 was only 640m off target) were, by that time, a bit too easy from a fly-boy's perspective. So, at the time, there would have been no question, 2nd is nowhere. But looking back now, I would wonder if more time on the moon would have been worth trading.
At risk of being accused of the geekiest blog post ever, I give you a very good punt at the title. (Although this is perhaps more autobiographical/social history than full-on tech gunk.)
In the beginning there was only silence. As an 11 year old boy I sat at the my ZX81 and black and white portable TV* and played Quicksilva Scramble (all hail @zoupdragon) in a very quiet room. I wasn't even into music that much then. I had an old 60's boxed record player with Bakelite arm. It was ace. I played B. Bumble and the Stingers and Lieutenant Pigeon, old hand-me-down 45's from the 60's.
Other than that, the only sound you would have heard was the scream when the 16K RAM Pack** got bumped at the end of long 2 hours typing a program listing out a magazine.
Yes kids, in those days, you didn't get highly produced demo discs on the covers of magazines. You got BASIC listings that you had to type in yourself. That were all shit. And rarely worked.
I did occasionally write my own programs. In true "Wester Hailes Child of the 70's" style the first two programs I ever produced tried to pick the winner of horse races (it always picked the favourite and was a big fan of Lester Piggott) and calculated the winnings from a bet (it took ages to type in the bet, my Dad could do it quicker in his head).
The world of the ZX81 was that of Harold Lloyd. Silent, black and white and fell over a lot. But you never quite get over the first time you type:
10 PRINT "SCOTT" 20 GOTO 10
And then I got a ZX Spectrum. I was lucky enough to get a 2nd hand one for my Christmas as a friend at school was upgrading to a BBC Micro. They were the hot ticket item of that year. They were very hard to get as Christmas approached and some poor individuals couldn't get one and ended up with an Oric 1.
Wow! There was colour. Wow! There were some occasional beeping sounds. Ok, so each screen in The Hobbit took an age to load. Ok, so the keys were inexplicably rubbery. But it was (and still is, I bought one recently) a wonderful machine.
I still remember very vividly the day I got Jet Set Willy. Giddy and awestruck, we played it for hours, mapping each screen on increasingly large amounts of line printer paper. Remember, there were no save games, no chance of redemption. Each new try had to get further, you had to go better. It punished weakness. I played it so much that day I went to sleep dreaming of Quirkafleeg. It was my first exposure to what became known as the Tetris Effect - seeing blocks fall in your sleep after extended playing - long before Tetris was born. Perhaps the "Willy Effect" might not have been the best name. Now that Matthew Smith is no longer missing, he should campaign for the effect to renamed.
For all the splendour of the Spectrum and the hours I spent playing Ultimate games, nothing really compares what came after and the wonder of the Commodore 64. Yes it had a proper keyboard, yes it had a lot of great games, yes it had joysticks and other paraphernalia but, and finally getting to the point, it had the SID Chip. Everything else was a progression on what had come before. The SID chip was brand new. Suddenly the world had sound worthy of the name.
I'm not going to say anything in great detail here about the SID chip, I would do no better than to recite the information of the excellent SID Chip Wikipedia page. So go read that.
I loved the music on the C64. Remember, I grew up listening to instrumentals from the 60's and, by this time, had stumbled over Jean Michel Jarre. I know, doesn't exactly paint the teenage me as Mr. Super-Cool. But facts are facts.
The leap from beeps to full 3 channel sound was huge. It was bigger than it needed to be. But that is what Bob Yannes set out to do.
The first extensive programming I ever did was with the SID chip. It was a fairly labourius process in BASIC. You had to set up the sound each channel would make using an ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain Release) envelope. They look like this, for those who like their graphs. The range of sounds you can get from variations of this simple envelope is amazing. Typically you would use 1 channel as a kind of bass line, one for the 'drums' (drums is perhaps a little grand, it was more of a white noise/phlegm kinda sound when I did it) and the final voice for the melody. Listen to any C64 tune, you can usually pick out the 3 channels.
Then you had to play the notes. To do this you would POKE the frequencies and note lengths directly into memory. Doing this in BASIC was extremely tedious and fiddly. It took quite a while. I once did a passable version of Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat (if you ignored the phlegm).
I never reached the heights of the true master, Rob Hubbard. And, in particular, my own personal favourite, the Monty on the Run theme. Presented herein through the miracle of blip.fm. I can still remember the first time I heard it, in a freezing cold house in Inverkeithing. The then home of certain linguistics guru (and source of much of our C64 related fun). And for that, I dedicate this post to him. Cheers JR.
Have a listen and think "that's crap, you're weird". You had to be there. And be me.
Because of the culture of cracking at the time, much of the music was extracted from the games and presented as standalone programs with funky graphical backgrounds. I had many tapes of these that I would load and listen to. Long before the MP3 player was even considered, this music was kicking about and being shared digitally (albeit on C90 cassettes).
You may think that I am singularly weird in my love of the SID chip. Nay not so. Much of the music is still available now and there is even a band that does rock covers of the tunes. In fact, compared to many devotees, I retain only a passing, misty-eyed interest.
What I find sad about these days of ever rapid technology progress is that there really isn't anything all that new any more. It's just improvements and variations on theme. More of this, faster that. I really hope that sometime soon we get another major transition, moving from silence into a world of 3 channel noise. I'm looking forward to the next SID chip. Whatever it may be.
* my daughter is astounded by the notion of black and white TV, she asked recently "Was all the world black and white then?" Actually, it was brown. ** not a typo, that is 16K, yes
With the football season over and the transfer window in full flow, there is a dearth of real football news so you get a lot of speculation and nonsense instead. It don't half bring out the clichés. So I was reminded of an oft repeated conversation between me and @khev, there are rules in football reporting. Certain things can only ever be described in one way...
The Football Transfer Window always 'slams shut' - it never just closes...
Footballers are 'snapped up' - not just simply bought
Football managers always 'run the rule' over players - they never just have a look...
Goals are always 'chalked off' - not plain old disallowed...
Any clash of heads in football is always 'sickening' - not just a bit sore looking...
Footballers always have 'blistering' pace - no other adjective is allowed
You can only ever have a 'sweet' left foot - sweet right feet don't exist
I know there must be hundreds more... let's be 'avin' 'em!
Thirst for content can, from time to time, expose a lot of bland nonsense. There are sites/content authors that mistake lists of obvious blurb for content. We all know who they are, I don't need to name and shame (the list would be too long). A large part of the reason for this is the democracy of access. Many sites make it very easy for people to become content authors, which is a good thing. Except when the content purports to solve an issue but instead, to quote Mr. Cleese, is 'Specialist subject - the bleeding obvious'.
They look like they might be trying to help you do something but instead barely scrape the surface of the issue. You go looking for help with something and you end up trawling through pages and pages of the same banal crap and platitudes.
Photo credit: me from morguefile.com Image added with new Crop and Post on MorgueFile.
It seems that, rather having any genuine insight into a problem or issue, many people settle for skipping over the top of a problem by regurgitating self-evident tripe.* It doesn't help that there appears to be an army of uber-idiots who go about commenting on these lists/articles saying "hey - that's great". Stop it. You're just encouraging them.
As an over-the-top example of what I mean (and to stop ManicMorff of accusing me of too many 'serious' blog posts), here's my Web 2.0 style, 'look at me I'm a content provider'...
Top Ten Tips for Learning to Drive
Buy a car, you'll need this. Recommend getting one with four wheels.
Petrol is important, try to get a good price, look online for cheap garages near you.
Sitting nearer the windscreen may help you see more of what is going on but it will make pushing the pedals harder so don't do it.
If you see the Google StreetView car follow it to make sure you get snapped but don't crash or you'll end up on the @gsightseeing website. Alternatively crash into the StreetView car as part of your holistic marketing plan.
Make sure you find the biting point of the clutch before pulling away. There is no way I can communicate what this means to you through text but I'm going to tell you anyway.
If you're going to hit a pedestrian, try not to hit a pedestrian.**
Get a driving instructor who has the same first language as you. Translation adds to thinking time which will make it difficult when also using your iPhone.
Don't drive with a sheep or any other livestock in the back seat.
Nothing the A-Team ever did to a van is appropriate to most road going cars.
And finally... the smell of lavender is calming, try to drive by fields of lavender on your route.
( I love this, "Perhaps the first necessary thing to do when trying to learn to drive stick [shift] is to simply sit in your car." & "Remember to use the right gear!" Genius.)
I promise you, you could publish Viz Top Tips as a set of serious articles and some Muppet*** in the US would say "wow, that's great, you have a unique way of looking at the world".
So, in an attempt to drive more pointless traffic to my blog...
Top 10 tips for getting more Web Traffic
Submit your site to search engines.
etc...
You get my point...
I've nothing against people having their day in the sun and having some articles on the web****. The big issue that it all gets in the way of genuinely useful content when searching for answers. A lot of these big content sites have, not surprisingly, high page ranks so you invariably you get them first and have to trawl through the nonsense before you finally alight on something useful. With the amount of content being generated each day, it won't be long before the shit will drown the fan with no hope of a re-emergence. Unless we all learn to go straight to page 2 of the search results. Top tip, position 11 will soon be king!
StumbleUpon has, for many years now, been my way of finding new, interesting stuff on the Web. The stats today show that I have 'Stumbled' over 25000 times. It solved the problem of getting stuff you might like 'pushed' to you and removed the need to go looking for anything specific.
StumbleUpon always said that the more you rated the more accurate the match of pages you were given would be to what you liked. I've never been entirely convinced of this, it seems that pages you get are very much within category, I've seen no signs of refinement.
Over recent months, I've noticed my source of new, interesting stuff has shifted from StumbleUpon to Twitter. A great number of people of Twitter share an even larger number of links.
The key difference with this way of getting new content is that, rather than the StumbleUpon category approach, people you follow can offer up pretty much anything. So, rather than getting 'pages you might like' you get 'pages that people like you like'. If you get the right followers, there can be a group of people who see the world like you offering you content. Therefore you can get off-category stuff that you still find interesting, simply because they think like you think.
This means that, once you refine who you are following accordingly, the quality of links you get via Twitter is higher than those delivered by StumbleUpon because they have already been filtered as 'interesting' by someone who you have decided know their eggs from their sulphurous smell.
A good example of this is @Sheamus, I started following him recently and he provides a good flow of stuff that I find interesting. There is a demographic match (of some sort) that makes this work. On the flip side, you will follow people that offer up stuff you don't like. But that is easy solved.
The other aspect of content pushing that Twitter does well is when content providers themselves have a Twitter account and feed their new articles out. If you're like me, you tend not to visit a large number of sites routinely, so it is very easy to miss lots of good stuff. Take a site like Smashing Magazine. They provide a large amount of quality design stuff which I'd miss if it was left to me to look. But, through their Twitter account @smashingmag, I get pushed their new stuff as and when it is published.
The only issue with this Twitter fed push content is keeping up with the volume. If you don't look right away, there is a chance that a lot of good stuff could drift away up the timeline.
So here's a service/feature idea for free. Have some way of storing links in Tweets for later use/viewing. Could be a service ( TwitLinkbank? ) or, perhaps better, a feature of a plug in like TwitterFox, it could store links in Tweets from a set of users in a Bookmarks folder so you can check them out easily later.
