Floating over the pomegranate skies
A land awakes and the sun dries.
Slipping away time like a third handed clock
Stopped to take stock of the moment.
A land close beyond the skies.
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“In public speaking, I always do my best right before I start talking.” ~Dan Delyon
Symmetrical Tears
Mira looked down at the two pieces of bread held out by the stranger, either unable to comprehend that someone would give away food, or wary of the gift, but in the end she took it and devoured it.
A few tears slipped down her cheek. She had never been given such a present.
She was the first of the children to be given food that day and was followed by twenty or so other starving people. They were all that were left of her village after the flooding and disease.
She looked up to see the womans tears flowing as she watched them all eat, overwhelmed by what she saw. She had never seen such need before.
It wasn’t the food that kept Mira going. It was the shared tear.
Authors note: I really do hate tear-jerkers. I always have.
The purpose of this is not so that you will have something to cry over and then feel better about your life. I should think that you can figure out the purpose with a few moments thought.
Space Empires 4 Cheat Trainer
I have thought to myself for a while that someone needs to make a Trainer for Space empires IV. It get’s really tedious to type “Money” a hundred times, but to research faster, you need to. I made a macro to do it for me, and just thought I’d share. It’s an exe file, so to be safe, I would scan it with a virus protection software before using it. I promise it’s virus free, but you probably don’t know me, so I recommend you error on the side of caution.
To use it, just double click on the exe program, and it will sit and wait for you to open up the window you put the cheat in. Once it sees it, it should hold down the control key and start typing. The worst it will do is nothing, and if it doesn’t work for you, let me know in the comments and I’ll try to make it more universal.
A tingly feeling inside.
Doesn’t it just make your day when you get something done that you’ve been meaning to do for forever?
Take today for instance, I’ve been “fixin ta” clean my car for about 4 months. I had a day off so, what better time to do it than the present?
While cleaning my car, I found a steering wheel cover that I had meant to put on my car’s human interface device roughly 2 years ago.
Now my car is half clean and my steering wheel gives more of an “Old Man” impression than it did…but it doesn’t burn my hands as much and grips better. A great trade says I.
My old mans car just got older.
And yes, I laced the cover to the wheel instead of wrapping it. It’s more comfortable to the grip that way.
Internet Down Time
In the down time that is the in internet as of late, it has been very difficult to get the news out that the internet is down because of a natural disaster in the far reaches of Swaziland. It seems that an African bombardier beetle battled a water buffalo, which trampled a laptop computer that was connected to the mainframe at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a secret government program was in development. This program was being designed in coordination with the department of defense in order to suppress the entire internet globally in a matter of minutes. Our sources tell us that this new technology works much the same manner as the hydrogen bomb, but declined to provide any details as the program is still classified. The current damages from this dilemma are estimated to be approximately $12,098,473,221 dollars so far, but may rise in the near future…in much the same manner as a mushroom cloud.
Full content in Word Press Categories.
Problem: In wordpress, themes control whether a category page displays an excerpt, full content, or just the link to the post. For some weird reason, twentyten (2010) only displays the title. Here’s how you change to full content in 2010, and I’m sure it will be pretty much the same in every theme that doesn’t have a control for this built in.
You’ll find your answers on Kdari’s WordPress blog.
Down came the rain
And washed the spider out.
Took less than 15 minutes to go from sunny with a chance of rain (according to the weather channel) to Raining with a chance of drown.
Why do they call it run off if it stays in one place?
Of Literary Creativity and Restraint Pt.2
The topic of todays discussion is Literary Creativity.
I mentioned in the last post that the idea for this series came from a film adapted from Agatha Christie.
This is mostly true, as the film got me thinking about how one can be creative and restricted at the same time. As a writer, I would feel partial responsibility if my plot for a murder intended to be pure entertainment were the inspiration for a real murder. That’s why I have to guard what I write. To the same degree, but less drastic extremes, I also have to make sure that the characters who display evil traits don’t influence my readers toward evil. As a Christian, I have that responsibility.
How on earth does an artist create things when his or her creativity is in such chains?
So that’s a tree hugger?
The answer lies in two facts.
First, you’re already in chains, and second you’re already in chains.
Let’s take a look-see at the first one. You’re already inside the restrictions of your art. If you want your reader to see a scene, you can’t just show them a recording of the spot you’re thinking of (this is especially true of sci-fi) so you have to use words to convey a sense of the surroundings. If you have the talent to paint or draw a picture or record a movie of what you want your audience to see, that’s all well and good, but you are then working inside the restrictions of the arts you can perform.
Along the same lines, you’re imagination is limited to slight modifications of things you are already familiar with. And if it wasn’t, there would still be no good done in writing about it, because your readers are limited to slight modifications of what they already know. If you want to describe something to me that doesn’t exist right now or I’m not familiar with, you have to use terms I am familiar with to describe it to me. This is a tedious process that can be made enjoyable only though a lot of skill on the part of the writer.
In short, I’d say “Get used to it and write what you know, unless you don’t know anything, and then you should consider politics.”
And yes, you can quote me on that one.
Now that you’ve got that concept firmly in your memory buffer, lets move on to the part where you are already in chains.
I was reading the preface to Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and in it there was mentioned the plot to one of his plays. There was a man who realized that his life was being narrated and so he decided to go to the author to change the outcome of his life’s story. I didn’t make the connection until today, that this is essentially the same plot used in Stranger than fiction.
Now it’s possible that the author of this movie had never read this story…as a matter of fact, it’s more than likely that he reinvented the same wheel that worked so well a few hundred years ago.
Which brings me to a quote by Albert Einstein. “Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources”
— Albert Einstein
So, from the available data, I would surmise that the secret to creative writing is two fold.
- Realize that you aren’t all that creative.
- Copy obscure material and modify it so that it is truely your own.
~Dan Delyon, Author in waiting.
Don’t Compromise Your Whole Computer!
I’m not just being dramatic here.
Trojans are awful!
I was going along, minding my own business when up on the screen pops a box telling me that my version of java is out of date and prompts me to download the update. My first inclination was to get straight out of the site, but I didn’t follow that inclination. I downloaded the program file, scanned it with AVG, and finding that it didn’t contain any threats, I opened it.
Two minutes later, I was the proud new owner of a NeoSploit Trojan virus.
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The best thing about a trojan is that it knows how to party. True to it’s nature, it invited a few friends including Generic 13.
Fortunately for me, I knew that the longer a Trojan has access to the internet, the more friends it can bring over, so I disconnected and ran the two programs I had at my disposal; AVG and MalwareBytes.
Neither one of them could take care of the problem, even in safe mode with the system restore turned off*.
Let me just add, that if you don’t know how to turn off the system restore, you are better off formatting the drive or getting a nerd to do the virus removal, because you’re going to be in over your head otherwise.
To make a long story short (took me more than 48 hours spread between 4 days.), I used Reg run Reanimator and Combofix to take out the exe files** and MalwareBytes and AVG to mop up the random .dlls. Then I downloaded Bit Defender just to be on the safe side and used fport to check and see that no open ports weren’t waiting to trick me. (Had to watch a video to make sure I knew what to look for.)
*You want to turn the system restore off because trojans and some other viruses can hideout in the system restore and come back to haunt you after you blow them away. This is a classic example of windows trying to be helpful, but failing. System restore is great for undoing stuff you did to yourself, but is useless against trojans. **Remember how I said that you better know a good bit about windows before you attempt this? Combofix and Regrun Reanimator both opperate on low levels. Lower than your typical virus or malware protection. As such, you can easily kick out the pillars of windows if you don’t know what they are. Reanimator has a way to just assess the damage and send the report to their professionals instead of doing anything you would regret, but I can’t attest to their effectiveness, and I don’t know whether they are free, since I didn’t need the help.