Hail, Serpentia!

This is the working prologue for the sci-fi epic. It's a little sampling from the holy book of the sleazy ass priesthood of the 'evil' country of Perentia.

It's basically an easy way for me to intro the world, get some geography in your head and outline the sense that things work very different on the world of Mirabilis. I would also note that writing with a semi-scriptural style is incredibly laborious and mind numbingly tedious.

Like listening to music through a brick wall. Such is life I suppose, kudos to the crazy old goatherds who wrote the bible though. Must have been quite a chore.

Heigh ho, let us begin!

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Serpentia

Book I: The Fall of Deas

In the darkness before time and life there was only Deas. From niether egg nor womb did Deas come. He simply was and always had been. Alone in the void he gave birth to Order. Through Order Deas created time to mark his passing and drew a circle in the void which he could fill. To the vast boundaries of reality he pointed his finger and commanded "This far, and for this long."

Order grew weary in the darkness and pleaded with Deas to create light to guide them. Though Deas thrived in the Darkness he created angels and appointed to each a glowing star in the ether. Numbered beyond reckoning the shining stars filled all of creation with pure and unwavering light. Thus was the power of Deas lessened.

He created the world and the seas also.

Upon the world Deas placed all manner of creature. Mena he placed highest for they shared his love of the stars and disdain for chaos. To each Mena he gave no star but a soul to thrive and hunger for life, truth and all that is good. As the Mena multiplied so to did the number and power of their souls.

Thus was the power of Deas regained.

Deas loved the Mena and bestowed riches upon them. All the stars dwindled and flickered as Deas tended to the Mena and neglected his angels. Every Mena had food, drink, cloth and shelter. Life was long and good for many lifetimes. As Mena became strong and happy the stars grew so dim that Deas had to spend half the day tending to his angels. Thus night came to the world.

When day kissed the face of the world mena hungered for light and goodness, as was their wont. Darkness proved too great a temptation for the mena to resist. Wickedness ruled the mena as soon as Deas turned his back to them. Thus did Deas soon weary of his favored creation.

It was then that an angel called Legion beseeched Order to save and protect the mena from their angry father. However, Order was a slave to his master's will and could not. Thus did Legion intercede to save the mena from destruction.

Mirabilis was the greatest and purest star that shone, brighter than the star of Legion. When Mirabilis learned that Deas intended to destroy the Mena she wept until water covered much of her face. To Legion she gave her light and offered herself as sanctuary to any mena that could be saved.

Seeing her noble sacrifice, Cala gave her light to Legion as did her sisters Bria and Streya. Legion outshined all darkness. And though the lights of Mirabilis, Cala, Bria and Streya were extinguished Legion reflected upon their diminished faces with gratitude.

"For we are many," he proclaimed. Thus was Deas made wrathful. All mena suffered terribly for an age.

Though celestial lights shine eternal the mena lived and died beneath them. Faced with this end the mena turned their love away from the stars and towards their children. However bleak and fragile the world became it was children who shouldered the burden of Hope.

Deas sought to undo that hope and poured his vengeance upon the world.

Knowing his place above the mena Legion appointed a champion to counter Deas in his jealous rage. Thus did Ander Perenti arise in his twenty-fifth year. And though the lights of heaven shook and shattered in the battle Legion overcame Deas and Ander rescued what mena Legion deemed worthy.

They left the world and came to Mirabilis in a mighty ship of silver, through the waves of darkness riding the winds of light. Legion, in his great struggle to destroy Deas, had grown weary. At the sight of Ander waving from his silver ship Legion felt renewed and cast the ruined body of Deas onto the face of Mirabilis. In shadow and sickness Deas cast off his body and hid himself in the night.

Having lived for so long in the light Deas plotted his revenge, sowing chaos and fire throughout the night. Mena could not comprehend the terrors of poverty and illness that Deas wrought. Again, Ander was called to fight.

Enough light and life had been granted for Ander to rule the mena in peace for as long as the stars could shine. In the darkness he lead his people against the evils of Deas. For one hundred and fifty years Ander ruled and strengthened the mena. He stood as a shield between the mena and the evils found in the darkness.

Despite the unwavering light of Legion and the uncanny strength of their king there remained one fear that has ever haunted the mena. Using the fear of death Deas poisoned Ander's followers and advisors against their king and their god, who is Legion. Since Deas could not incite the mena to challenge the light of day they instead rebelled against their noble king.

Ander fled his kingdom though the borders of Perentia stretched across the entire mainland. His shame and sorrow covered a much vaster territory, wider than all of Mirabilis and deeper than any sea.

So great was Legion's wrath that he fell upon the night and tore his father off the face of Mirabilis. Great mountains stand now where Deas clung to the world. Into the darkness Deas fled to sow his discord among the heavens.

In scorn Legion pursued Deas, slaughtering any angel who dared give refuge to their traitorous creator. All the while the mena were left alone in the permanent night. Crops and animals fell to death and madness. Nine of every ten of all the mena on Mirabilis perished in the struggle for what little food remained.

Upon the face of the void Legion captured and destroyed his father, scattering his ruin across the heavens in great globs and smears. None could challenge the might or goodness of Legion, and none ever will.

Upon his return Legion saw the desolation and chaos that had come to his realm during his absence. He wept deeply and swelled the seas ever deeper. To calm his grief Legion sought for his favored champion but Ander of Perentia could not be found.

Disaster loomed for all who yet lived and the mena might have perished forever. However, just as Legion always illuminated those who had served him well, he broke himself apart and showered life back onto the face of Mirabilis, last sanctuary of the mena.

Mia rained from the heavens and filled the bellies of all who remained. Though it gave life to the hopes of many all wondered why Legion's voice was silent when they called for Him in song and prayer.

Thus was Legion's voice divided into all that gives life, including his star. This sacrifice, greater than any other star, allowed the mena to survive even though it meant he would remain forever invisible.

The last words heard by the great light were these: "Where is Ander of Perentia that the world might be healed and its peoples united again? I leave you now, my children, as stewards of your own fates in the hope that you will grow and wise enough again to rule yourselves as Ander once ruled you. Though my voice falls silent now your eyes will never greet the day without my light, my love, and my favor.

Glad I bought a Honda!

So I ran across this, a prime example of consumer pwnage that I just had to share.

This should sum it up nicely.

The first two times Jason brought his truck in to his local Toyota dealership for service, he noticed that someone had taken quarters from his change compartment. He complained both times, but was ignored. So the third time he brought his truck in, he placed a video camera on the passenger side. The dealership didn't ignore him this time.

Jason was originally only concerned about the missing quarters, but his camera also captured Hampton Toyota employees sifting through his medication, using racial slurs, and watching porn in Jason's truck. Jason emailed us a copy of the letter he sent the owner of Hampton Toyota.

What's crazy about this, and reading Jason's email will rip your gut up a little, is the youtube clips embedded towards the bottom.  I mean the behavior of both guys stealing coins and examining the pill carrier are so frickin' ROTE that you know these goons have been up to much worse.

I'm gonna have to start counting my change before I take my car in now.

Why isn't this on the front page of EVERY FUCKING NEWSPAPER ON THE PLANET!?!?!?

John Singleton figured out how to make radio waves travel faster than the speed of light.

FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT.

Are you fucking kidding me? Everyone on planet earth is worried about Michael Jackson, Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and the crap going on in Iran when this...THIS has been announced!?!?!!?

Read the article.

And for buddha's sake remember today, I know I will.

Something for the stumblers...

Something a little different for the geekier side.

Not listed but still worth mentioning is the Stumbleupon toolbar. You'll want to snag Firefox first, my favorite browser (and I have tested all of them to some extent.) Be sure to give the blog/this post a thumbs up if you like the list.

23 things no IT guy or girl should ever live without.

1. Azureus/Vuze - Ah, the wellspring from which my torrents flow. I used to use uTorrent but find the interface and performance of Vuze just kick tail.
   
2. Open Office - Mo' bettah than MS Office unless you're using some proprietary CRM or PM software that requires Outlook for mail or letter merging from Word. I love that it's a full featured software suite that's tiny compared to its bloated MSFT counterpart.
   
3. AVG - It's free anti-virus software. What's not to like about that. It's also fairly unobtrusive and acts as a vigilant sentinel without spamming you with notifications or eating all your RAM while you're trying to work. Not as good at killing as I would prefer but it serves as an excellent vaccine against viruses and rootkits
   
4. Malwarebytes - My single favorite Anti-Malware program EVER. Only about 3 megabytes but packs the punch of a tactical nuke in close quarter combat.
   
5. Ad-Aware - The spyware equivalent of AVG. Also free and better as a deterrent than a cleanup tool.
   
6. CCleaner - This program is tight. Scrapes all the junk out of your system and cleans up the registry with little or no fuss. Really useful if you're cleaning up your box or shredding a lot of programs that leave crap behind.
   
7. Smart Defrag - Faster than windows BS defragging capability and can be scheduled or run continuously in the background.
   
8. SIW - Useful for spying on people...err, I mean for digging out information about a system's mobo, pci devices, memory capacity and type and passwords.
   
9. Asterisk Password - A limited range of functions but really good for dumb asses that forget their password to certain programs. Also neat for spying though I would never do that myself...really.
   
10. Logmein - This program is a staple of my existence. It's really handy for keeping track of all the systems that I have to look after or maintain (ie those of friends, family and friends of friends who don't seem to understand the concept of work boundaries)
    
11. Real VNC - Another tiny ass kicker, this is best for remote access within a LAN. I install it on every PC I work on so all I need is a power cord and some Cat6 cable to access stuff in the office.
    
12. Crossloop - Handy for situations where you can't pre-install Logmein or VNC. Relatively easy to walk people through in a pinch.
    
13. 7-Zip - My favorite compression tool. Try it, use it, love it! Or don't, this is fucking America and you can do whatever.
    
14. VLC Media Player - All I can say is you need to try this for movies, HD or otherwise because it fucking rocks the house.
    
15. Robocopy - Windows Resource Kit Tools - NTbackup is a rusty spoon that ladles out your data to a backup drive. Robocopy is a tungsten-bladed nuclear powered steam shovel that muscles your stuff at relativistic speed. Super handy when combined with either Dropbox or Hamachi for an easy, reliable remote backup solution.
    
16. Hamachi - Need a VPN in about 2 minutes and don't have/want/need the hardware. All you need is Hamachi and an internet connection. Useful for intranet over the web, COD4 games, remote backups with robocopy, and much much more.
    
17. Ventrilo - Good for gaming but also good for remote meetings/conference calls in a pinch.
    
18. Filezilla - The best FTP client available. The server is pretty good but the client is just unmatched.
    
19. Google Chrome - I'm going to elaborate on this more so than the other programs because every dude on earth can benefit. I like Firefox much better but Chrome has a neat feature where you can activate an 'incognito' mode that doesn't keep track of history, saved forms or passwords. Best used for porn but other, shadier, pursuits could be sought along this avenue as well. Worth playing with but still not ready to replace Mozilla's warhorse in the browser arena.
    
20. GIMP - Free, small (notice a trend) and capable of doing a hell of a lot more photo editing than I will ever need. Much easier than fucking around with MS Paint and cheaper than Photoshop
    
21. Virtual PC - Another of my favorites for various reasons. And before anyone starts crying about VMware that's on my linux list. VPC is free, easy to use and handy for software evaluation, discrete data storage without the need for encryption and the saved state feature makes time-limited trial software no obstacle. My primary use of this is evaluating programs from shady parts of the web to see if they're really spyware/trojans. Call it ghetto sandboxing if you will, if everyone used a little more prudence this would be no problem.
    
22. Pidgin - Cross platform messenging program. Very useful for keeping tabs on friends that use different IM programs than you are used to.
    
23. Dropbox - Free online storage that is accessible from anywhere with excellent download speeds? Hellz yeah! I used to keep a bunch of stuff on our company FTP site in case I needed say, any of the programs on this list all in a handy spot. Now I use dropbox for speed, ease of use and easy customization. I definitely recommend everyone give this a shot for easy access, backing up documents and small files/programs. Also if you sign up via my referral link you get an extra 250 megs for free. Then you can coerce your friends into signing up for additional space up to 5 gigs.

Just click here and install it, takes about 2-3 minutes. Easy money. Also if you really like any of these programs a number are free but its nice for people to donate to the creators or to purchase at least one copy. Free software is wicked awesome and minor contributions can go a long way towards keeping a healthy FOSS ecosystem.

Behold the awesome power of google!!!

As you may or may not know from my last post there's a new blog on the tubes. Some might call it presumptive, some might call it lame.

Some might draw inferences about my mental state or sexual preferences but others will just experience the scrotum slapping awesomeness that is...

Brute Finesse

Now a curious component of the new blog was the adsense integration aspect. The actual setup was a snap, someone was kind enough to create a plugin for easy access to adsense and yahoo ads.

However the curious increase in web traffic via my grass roots campaign to tell everyone about the new blog must have trigged some alarms deep in the bowels of google's impressive computational infrastructure.

I logged into my ad account and noticed that in one weekend I had earned QUADRUPLE what this blog had earned in six months. I blame myself. Anyway what impressed me was one of google's identity verification systems.

Basically they had my phone number on file and needed me to dial in a verification code for them. They were even kind enough to provide an option for when to call. This was before work started on monday so I obliged and clicked 'now'

Boy did they mean it. No sooner had my right index finger popped off my mouse the phone rang. It wasn't instantaneous but that kind of response time is why I think robot customer service will put me out of the job someday soon.

Its good to know that at least one company, arguably THE company, is kicking ass and taking names with the kind of precision we should all expect out of our economy. When I read about the sheer magnitude of computation that google wields to such great effect i can only nod my head in approval.

If they ever merge with newegg.com I suspect that the density of awesome would bring a swift end to the world. An awesome end, but a swift one.

Kudos google, and no I don't have a botnet to spam ad clicks or generate new traffic, just the interest and support of my family and friends. And one day, the world!