I decided that since it was too cold outside to do much more than run to the truck that now would be a good time to try to restore my old Ms Pac-Man game.

But first, I need to figure out what’s broken. When dad gave me the game a couple years ago I was told that it was working in the break room until one day it didn’t. Sounds about normal for pretty much anything that breaks. Right now when I hit the power switch I get a pale glow from the monitor but that’s as far as it gets. Since there isn’t any game play or sound I’m leaning towards a board issue. But this is all new to me.

So far I have checked all the fuses and jiggled a few wires, but not much else. This weekend I’ll see if I can get electrocuted playing with electricity.

Ms Pac-Man

Dead screen

Inside

I just finished reading Sex.Com by Kieren McCarthy and the #1 takeaway was something we have known for a very long time, Network Solutions sucks as a registrar. For those of you unaware of the drama, here is a very brief history:

• 1994 Sex.Com was registered by Gary Kreman
• 1995 Sex.Com was transfered to Stephen Cohen by NSI (wrongfully)
• 2001 Sex.Com was finally returned to Gary Kreman
• 5 more years of drama follow until everything is finally settled

Sex.Com was the holy grail of domains in the early days of the internet. There were no search engines to help you find what you wanted and most people found things by simply typing domains names in to their browser and hoping that it went where they wanted. With the huge number of pervs in the world, sex.com became a license to print money. Money in the millions of dollars.

Kieren pieces together the years of courtroom drama, constant changing of lawyers, and staggering amounts of money spent to determine who really owned Sex.Com. The story itself can be dull and a bit boring, but it shines a light on the early drama of owning domain names. This could never, or at least I’d like to think never, happen with a modern registrar, and this case is one of the primary reasons for the rules that we have in place today.

The book also shows how indifferent Network Solutions was to the entire ordeal. In a historical example of NSI’s arrogance in the early days they could have resolved the entire issue in a matter of days, but in an effort to protect themselves and their monopoly on domain names, they chose to fight against the person that they should have helped. For those of us around in those days it’s a shock to see how hard they made it for us to do anything “except” for one of the most important, or at least valuable, domains on the internet.

If you are a fan of early internet history you will find this book to be a good read. But I wouldn’t recommend it to a casual reader unless you like crime dramas.

Misfit Domains

I admit it, I collect things.. Comic books, swords, cars, domain names, whatever I feel like at the moment.. I always intend to do something grand with whatever I collect, but in most cases they just end up collecting dust and making my wife mad..  With me restarting everything  around here fresh I was going through my domains, wow, it’s amazing what you end up with  when you set things to auto-renew and forget about them..

My old company, that hasn’t been in operation for 6 years or so, NeoTek had a website. I saw that and thought, huh, been paying $12/year for 6 years so my wife can keep her email address that she used when she was publishing engineering papers. I thought I would just let it go. Then I realized, hey, that things has been mine for 11 years, why not “do something” with it.

But what to do?

Cheesy link directory? Nah, already have a few of those.

Porn site? That would be cool, but I like my stuff and I have a sneaky feeling the wife would take all my stuff and send me out in to the cold naked if I did that.

I could start another silly blog like this one.

Then I thought, hey! I haven’t been an affiliate, uh, specialist yet. I could do that. I could sell things like Slankets on it and then when the next big thing came along I could move on to that and eventually build up an As See On TV empire of useless crap! Everyone loves useless crap, that’s why it sells so well.

Yeah, that’s the ticket! I’ll be an affiliate Guru and just watch the money come pouring in. Or maybe not. Anyone have a great idea for an old, unused, domain?

Let me start off by saying that I am not an Apple fanatic. I started out an an Apple II way made in high school, but never really got hooked on them. I was a Tandy user for the most part. Maybe it was the price. Maybe it was the fact I could ride my bike to Radio Shack and play with them, whatever the reason, I still don’t own any Apple products, but that might change as I decide between the iPhone and the Blackberry.

iWoz is the story of Steve Wozniak, engineer, teacher, inventor of the personal computer, pilot, and co-founder of Apple Inc. Personally, I have a hard time with just the title of the book. iWoz, how original along side iCon (Steve Jobs book), iPod, iMac, iPhone, and iDon’t Get It, all I can think of is I Robot. Is that a bad thing?

iWoz is written by Steve from his point of view. And his point is often much more interesting than conventional history would have you think. The book follows Woz from his early childhood with an engineer father, through young adulthood, and through on to current day Woz. Along the way he expresses himself with humility and candor, something I found refreshing when compared to some of the very dry Apple histories.

My favorite part of the book is seeing how, through his whole life, he just wanted to be an engineer. Everything else was simply extra and he was quite content to make great electronics, and maybe play a practical joke along the way. Woz also sets a few things that are considered Apple lore straight as he saw them. Woz’s skills as a teacher are seen clearly as, along with Gina Smith, he takes some of the most complex events in computer history and presents them in a way that is easy to understand.

iWoz is more than a fanboy book, it’s a great read about a time in computer history that it seems fewer and fewer people truly understand..

Hey good buddy, did you know that CB radio, or citizens’ band radio, is the great-grandfather to synchronous conferencing, also known as online chatting. In the 70’s you couldn’t get away from CB radios, they were everywhere from the trucker’s cab to mom’s trying to keep tabs on their kids. They took cruising in the 80’s to a whole new level where you could not only drive around all night on 60 cent a gallon gas, but you could chat any other car on the strip without actually seeing who you were chatting with. The first online dating? Could be. But at least it was voice and you knew that the person on the other end was the right gender.

In 1980, CompuServe executive Alexander Trevor unveiled to the public the CompuServe CB Simulator. CompuServe, the first major commercial online service provider for the United States, created the program with the then popular CB radio in mind; the program had forty “channels,” based on the number of channels used by CB radio, as well as CB radio’s controls such as “squelch,” “tune” and “monitor.” The CB Simulator laid the foundation for today’s online chatting in many important ways, particularly in its use of channels; the forty channels based on CB radio’s would later evolve into chat rooms, thus setting up the schematics for what we know as internet chatting. The CompuServe’s CB Simulator gained a great deal of popularity, even being used to host the first online multimedia conference in 1995 with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones; as of 1995, CompuServe had over three million members making it the then largest online service provider.

A few years after CompuServe launched its groundbreaking program, PlayNet integrated chatting into one if its most popular online games—chess. From 1984 to 1987, New York based PlayNet offered online service to owners of the Commodore 64 computer. One of the perks offered by the company was its extensive list of games, which were only available to subscribers of PlayNet. When PlayNet programmers realized the versatility of integrating chat into its popular chess game, they began work to make their idea a reality. Their hours of development paid off as thousands of PlayNet users began taking advantage of chess-chat. As was the fate of many pioneering online companies, PlayNet experienced a short lifespan. In the late 1980s, the company was purchased by Quantum Computer Services, who took PlayNet’s online program and used it to base their own online service, named Quantum Link. In 1989, Quantum Computer Services changed the name of its online service to America Online.

America Online launched its chat service primarily to function as a social network, integrating many features that CompuServe’s chat service did not have. One such improvement was the use of proprietary software instead of the terminal program used by CB Simulator. With the proprietary software, AOL provided its subscribers use of a graphical user interface, or GUI, that proved to be more user-friendly than the outdated command lines of past service providers. AOL also further refined the chat room, expanding it into a more diverse and developed communication tool. Users were now able to take advantage of “private rooms,” “conference rooms” and “auditoriums.” The private rooms, usually created by a single user, accommodated up to twenty-three people and were not moderated by AOL. Conference rooms, necessitating AOL’s permission to setup, held up to forty-eight people and were moderated by AOL. Auditoriums, also created in consent by AOL, comprised of a “stage” and unlimited amount of “rows.” The happenings on stage were viewable by every member of the auditorium chat room, while the separate rows were permitted to converse with one another–up to twenty-seven members of a single row. With these developments in chat rooms and emphasis on users and communication between users, AOL soon became the leader in the internet chatting field with as many as ten million subscribers in 1999.

During the summer of 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) at Finland’s University of Oulu. At the time, Oikarinen was employed by the Department of Information Processing Science, where in his spare time he began development of a communications program meant to interface with OuluBox, a Finnish Bulletin Board System (BBS). IRC, designed specifically for group communication, offered the facilitation of channels that could be set to allow only pre-authorized users to join and use, whereas OuluBox was designed more for one-on-one communication. After the initial development, Oikarinen continued to refine IRC and began to pass it along to anyone who would use it. As the active users began to grow in Finland, Oikarinen set his sights for the United States. After meeting a few interested parties through a MIT messaging system, he was able to develop a small base of IRC users in the states. The system soon grew in popularity, and the number of servers running IRC outside of Finland climbed rapidly.

No one is really sure when it happened for the first time, but I would bet IRC saw the very first use of A/S/L by a lonely male nerd, which was promptly responded to with 19/F/Philly by another lonely male nerd trying to be funny, or desperate.

1996 saw the release of the first internet-wide instant messaging service: ICQ. Developed by Mirabilis, a technology company based in Israel, the program’s designers sought to give non-UNIX users (primarily those using the Windows operating system) the ability to instant message and chat in real time online—a need that had yet to be addressed. ICQ was released as a free downloadable program, and offered a number of advantages over other instant messaging services, including file exchange, email, and a long list of games. Within just two years of its launch, Mirabilis’ ICQ had become one of the most popular instant messaging services online; AOL, seeing the vast potential, approached the executives of Mirabilis and offered $407 million to purchase the company along with ICQ. Although ICQ is now owned and operated by AOL, it retains many of the features that made it so popular with users across the globe, while continuing efforts to develop and streamline the service.

With the evolution of online chat came important advances in instant messaging. AOL’s AIM was no longer the dominant service, as MSN and Yahoo both had introduced popular programs that many found to be comparable or better than AOL’s. MSN Messenger, now known as Windows Live Messenger, was introduced in 1998 as a basic messaging program that offered users a chat window and a list of contacts. It has since been updated every year to offer a user-friendly format incorporating the most important advances in instant messaging technology. Yahoo Messenger, introduced in 1998, has also come a long way from the simple text box and contact list of its beginnings to a much more user-centric environment complete with avatars, customizable message windows, and integration with other Yahoo services such as email and webcam hosting at live.yahoo.com.

Online chatting has evolved from text only and technology now allows for both video and audio to be added into the mix. One popular service, TeamSpeak, works much like IRC but with one important difference: TeamSpeak users incorporate headsets with microphones so that instead of typing, members within a channel are able to actually speak with one another. Other services, such as video chat and videoconferencing, take advantage of both audio and video to successfully replicate face-to-face communication through a webcam and speaker system.

Today, many different websites offer chatting services such as Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and the latest entry into the messaging field, Facebook Chat.

For us old people who actually used CBs to chat it’s been interesting watch the technology evolve to the point where 35,000 people can respond to your wildest whims with just a few button presses on a keyboard. Too bad so much of it is still A/S/L.

Wow, look at all the categories this one drops in to.

Just a quick note to let the loyal readership, all three of you, that I’ve decided to expand my company again and branch out from a single customer jeweler / web guy and hang out my developer shingle again..

Large Orange Pop is the name of my new internet marketing company and will be a sub division of SG Design Studio.. I’ll be offering internet market help, SEO, and web development as appropriate and needed.. While I have no real intention to stop “doing the jewelry thing” I find I miss the fun of helping build up a new business online and look forward to working 90 hours a week again.. Well, maybe not that last part so much..

I expect the marketing / SEO parts of this website to be absorbed in to LOP shortly, and hopefully this site will go back to being a little more fun with some geek stuff and generic weirdness..

I’m off to get my intravenous caffeine port hooked up –

Ok, so I may not be completely up to speed on all things WordPress so a lot of people already know about and use this great title tool.. But I just discovered it and wanted to share the love a little more..

The SEO Title Tag plugin for WordPress allows you to override the default titles for pages and posts, and allows you to have decent titles on your pages.. Best of all it can be used to strip the blog name from the individual posts and pages allowing for a much cleaner title..

SEO Title Tag for WordPress

Tab Mix Plus

One of my biggest complaints with tabbed browsing in Firefox has been the inability to right click a tab and open it in a new browser.. Tab Mix solves this and several other issues for me..

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Definitely a good add-on to add to FireFox.