It is 9:00 am, there is nearly a half of foot of snow on the ground, and I was violently awoken from a spectacular dream by the Super Mario Bros. 1 Theme song. God damn. As I lie awake in bed, Adam explained to me the situation of the snow, yet all I could think about was the tail end of the dream I had caught.
In previous psychology classes, my professors have stated that everyone has 3-4 dreams per night, as a cycle we go through many different stages, and there is no one who "doesn't dream." A technique to remembering your dreams, or consciously experiencing them is to wake up slightly before or after when you would normally, as your body can slip into a natural cycle of ending a dream just before you normally get up.

That is what happened today. I was awoken mid dream, and what it was was funny, and a bit scary. The setting is in a place that I have never been, Virgina Hall's Attic, and the earliest part of the dream I can remember included some of my friends who live there, and one not so friend. For some reason I wanted everyone to go on ahead downstairs before me, to which I stayed behind for a moment. I explored the area, as anyone would, and happened upon a small pumpkin shaped glass bowl filled with tangerine slices in a heavy sugar syrup. At this point in time, I broke from first person to third person as the "not so friend" decided I had spent enough time alone in an all girls dorm and began to walk up the stairs to yell at me.

Now being omniscant in a dream is what it is all about, I take her queue of walking up the first step, and moving in speed undescribable to me, I managed to jump down the four fleights of stairs to cut her off, apparently as silent as a ninja. Right as I was about to seek revenge Mario chimed in.

Before I had reached for the phone, I took a moment to quickly remember the dream so that I could relay this onto Apex, to which he replied "I get that you're a nice guy and all, but that is only because society has molded you into that. I can totally see you as a viking, with your horned hat slicing people and stuff." Now this is much the description of Marv's description in Sin City. However, I have always thought of myself as some sort of guard, perhaps a royal guard who protected the queen; and if reincarnation is true, that just might have been the case.

Now onto the point!

I have always felt a strong sense of duty and protection. Even from the tender age of 3, I felt the need to protect people. Of course, at the age of 3 the only people you know are your parents and odd children about your house. Now, I'm no momma's boy by anyones standards, when I was 3 I never wanted to go anywhere. Not with my father, or grandparents, anyone. I was aware at the time why that was, but I have never told anyone. I didn't want anything to happen to my mom, and I was determined to prevent anything from happening.

All 2 foot 30 lbs of me wanted to protect someone, I would have done a bang up job... but it didn't stop there. Throughout growing up I have found myself risking my neck to save someone else, stopping bullies, taking the blame, and so much more. This leads me to the argument of nature vs. nurture, are we merely what our genetics make us to be, or are we molded into the people we are?

For the sake of nature, lets tear down nurture, shall we? I was not raised to be a knight, or a protector of any kind. I was raised as a hard worker of a noble man and woman. They are not perfect, but they did their job and provided me with love. However, with teaching me to look out for myself, and with the media showing nothing but loners, and abadonment it seems unlikely I was molded to have this sense of duty. I am quite dumbfounded myself.

The Nature argument says that we are who we are, nothing can change our behavior because it has been ours forever. This leads me to wonder, am I a 6'2" 257 "giant" as some would put it, for a reason? Has my genetics realized that my brain is wired to want to protect and it allowed me to become a suitable size to do so? Who knows.

The only thing I am aware of is I only get this sense of duty around those who I actually care about. People can have millions of friends, but if none are close friends they are truly alone. My case is I do get close friends, and those are the ones who I wish to protect. As much as the website states, I assure you I am not psychotic, nor do I wish to be injured or die. I will, however, do practically anything in my power to prevent anyone from harming those who I care about; and if it leads to my demise, so be it.

So if you ever had the urge to hurt someone I care about, well... I'll see you on the battlefield.

Posted by PyroFly X at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It would seem today that the most common strife that people have is with their computers. It stems from partial ignorance and well no, just plain ignorance. People are mislead by corporations that there are magical programs that can do-it-all, and for the price that they charge they better damn well!

The sad truth is that they do not. In fact a lot of the bloated and expensive software is no better than free software you can find on the internet. For years I have read tech forums, proweled the 'net and have come to the short and simple way for you to keep your computer fast, clean, and protected.

Step 1: Ditch Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox: The main argument for people who want to keep IE is that Firefox cannot do some "things" that IE can. Perhaps that was true in FF's first release, however now it is no excuse. Firefox is just as intuitive to use as IE and is far more easily customized.
Get going.
Step 1.1: Get an Ad Blocker addon: The next best friend to firefox is a ad blocker. Firefox can natively get rid of pop ups, but an adblocker such as "Adblock Plus" can block inpage ads that do little more than eat bandwidth and memory.
Step 1.2: Configure Firefox: You cannot simply run firefox and be protected. You must first configure your program. Generally, a good setup is one that cleans all the memory and pages visited upon closing the browser. Having cookies set up to be deleted upon closing helps contain spyware to a minimum. There is a way to keep cookies permanatly for sites, which is what you would want to do for websites you frequent and know are clean.

Step 2: Ditch Costly Anti Virus Software: If you were a sinister programmer who specialized in viruses and worms, what would be the first bit of software you would purchase and subscribe to? The two "best" anti virus softwares, Norton and McAffee. Or atleast you would if you were intending to get around the two programs. Why should you pay for a service and program that is merely hacked around? Oh, it updates you say? So do the free ones. There are many free anti virus software that do the job just as good as Norton or any other. One is AVG Antivirus . It comes in two flavors, a Free version (to which I have linked) and a corporate version, which the only thing you pay for is technical support. Whoop-de-doo. They are both updated with the same frequency, and I have had both. The free version wins hands down.

Step 3: Get an anti spyware program: Computer running slow? Taking forever to get that start menu up? Perhaps you have programs running in the background you can't even stop. An anti spyware program should clean it up. These are just like the anti viral softwares, however far fewer of these are free. A very good program I have found, which isn't too expensive, is Trend Micro Anti Spyware

Step 4: When you move files You fragment your harddrive: It cannot be avoided and you MUST clean it up. Windows comes with a decent defragmenting software found
"Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter." It is best to defragment both before and after an install, after moving large files (even deleting them), or at the very least once a week. This will improve your startup time, folder load times and even file access times. Seems to me like you can't lose.

Step 5: Clean your registry file: Don't know what I am talking about? Most wouldn't, but your registry file keeps tabs on EVERYTHING. Every program, system file, everything. Even programs that are no longer used, or have been altered. This means there is a lot of wasted space in this file. However there are many programs that will clean your registry file at the click of a button. Such programs can be found Here. AMUST registry cleaner is the program I use, due to the fact that it comes with a harddrive cleaner that will sort your folders in order of size, allowing you to pinpoint where the largest files are being held (even if you didn't know they were there). AMUST also does backups incase your register file becomes corrupt, allowing for easy replacement.

Step 6: Got them Programs? Use them: The worst thing to do is get all these programs and NEVER use them. They should be updated and ran once a week. Mostly every one I have listed has an option to schedule its own running, it can be done at any time. I, for example, have every program run from 3am-6am. Why? Because I'm asleep and it doesn't interfere with my computing time.

Step 7: Use your head You shouldn't visit websites where you will have a high liklihood of getting a bad file. Stay away from Warez, Cracks, Hacks, Keygenerators, Free Versions of commercial software, free items, anything in a pop up. Avoid clicking ads where it says you are a winner, don't give out passwords, emails, any information to a relatively unknown site. JUST USE YOUR HEAD. Would you give any of that stuff out to a stranger? The internet is one big stranger, be afraid, be very afraid.

This is by no means a complete guide to keeping a computer safe. It is merely my advice to people, and whenever I am asked to "fix" a computer, it boils down to one of the preceeding, if not all of them. So Please take care of your computer!

Posted by PyroFly X at 05:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)