Diary of a Geek

New phone

2012-02-05T07:43:00.001-07:00

Picked up a new phone yesterday. Obtained the Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket and I've been very happy with it so far. Although i have to discover some way to convert my itunes media to the new phone if i wish to keep using that software to organize my music. The other option is to keep using my iphone as merely an ipod touch or dig out my old small ipod and start using it again. Although i haven't used the new phone for actually making any kind of phone calls yet, i'm still extremely impressed with its smartphone functionality.

If i remember to post other entries, I'll detail the various apps I've installed and what i think about them.

Fotamecus triumphant

2010-01-13T22:20:00.002-07:00

My wife was telling me a tale Monday (10/11/2010) about her experience when she went in to work. She described how when she got there, her watch was over 20 minutes fast compared to the clock in the car (which is always known to be fast anyway). It was good because it meant she got to work early. I asked her how often she took her watch into the office in our home where I have done the majority of my magick (at least, the magick I do at home). She reported that the Sunday before was the first time she'd ever taken it in there. I couldn't help but just start laughing.

My wife asked me why I was laughing, and more importantly, what had I done. I reported to her that time, at least in the office, was very... and then I struggled to find the word. She suggested fluid, and I agreed that was as good a word to use as any. She asked i that was why her computers in there could never manage to keep time, and the other clocks in the house were starting to have problems as well. I agreed it was quite possible. Then informed her that I had decided to join in the war against Chronos.

Once we got home from wherever it was we had been (I think watching the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus), I showed her the article that describes the birth of Fotamecus. I also explained to her, that the last time I had been out with Chaoyote, I publicly denied Chronos and issued him a challenge and joined the war as a soldier against him. I'm not sure if the wife will begin to call upon Fotamecus now that she has been introduced to him or not. But, she now knows why clocks inside the house can't be relied upon at least.

I've already decided to start looking into running my magickal workings on a more lunar cycle. I'm also going to start looking to get myself a nice time piece that I can destroy as a sacrifice to Fotamecus. As I've said before, Chronos' time has come and gone.

Paranoia Mindset: Be careful what you drink

2010-01-09T05:30:00.001-07:00

I noticed something I've done for the longest time (almost as long as I've been in the public work force) this evening. When I take a drinking cup while in a public place, I try to take a random cup from the once available. I grab a random number from the stack, and then sometimes take the last cup from those I grabbed, or the top of the new stack created. Sometimes I'll grab let the ones I pulled off the stack drop and then stop them after 3 or 4 have fallen and either take the last one to fall, or the next one that would have fallen. I do this just about anywhere I go that I have the ability to take more than a single cup at (convenience stores that have their fountain cups overfilled for example).

The big question is, why do I do this. The psychotic and sad answer is because I have this feeling of dread that something has been done to those top cups. There are various theories I can come up with, but they all lead to an overall idea. That being the idea that some form of poison is present and I'm surviving and living that much longer by not drinking from them. This is one of those "habits" that paranoid people eventually develop that cause them to start standing out in society after a while if they are observed doing it often enough. I'm lucky that there's never any one present when it happens for the most part. If there are people present, I can easily pass it off as having just grabbed the stack to hard and it happened to lift too many. No one thinks anything of that if they see it only once or twice.

Unlike most paranoid behavior, this isn't something I may ever get over or stop doing. This is one of those things that's ingrained. Even knowing what I'm doing I can't stop. If I try to do so, then I begin feeling ill. My pulse begins racing, my temperature feels like it skyrockets (and I can feel heat pouring out of the openings in my clothing). I get all shakey, and have to stop doing anything for a brief moment.

Paranoia Mindset: Locked door?

2009-12-26T22:58:00.001-07:00

Went out to visit the in-laws and do the christmas thing with them today. After pulling out of the driveway, I noticed a couple standing at a red light half a block away from my house. As I pulled up to a red light, I was struck with a sudden urge to turn around and go back to the house. Just to make sure that the doors were locked properly, and to ensure that the couple continued walking along the sidewalk and didn't stray towards my home.

I continued on to my in-laws instead though. One, I didn't want to alarm my wife that I was thinking such thoughts. Two, I knew that it was a symptom of my own paranoid delusions. The couple couldn't even know where my specific house was, even though my mind insisted that they were headed straight there. I wasn't even as concerned that they'd rob the place. It was more a fear that they'd enter into my safe haven. The place I feel most secure and at peace.

As usual when fear and paranoid delusions grip me, I use my own cognitive reasoning to reaffirm reality. Reminding myself that I am nobody important and that the strangers I see and pass on the street are just that, complete strangers who have want nothing more to do with me, than I do with them.

Paranoia Mindset

2009-12-17T23:01:00.001-07:00

A few years back I was sent to a shrink by my job because of some stuff I wrote in my myspace blog. One of the few things to come out of that was that the doc told me I officially had the paranoid personality disorder. Of course I've known for some time that I was subject to this condition. I'm starting a new series of posts here on my blog for two reasons. One, so people can get an idea what it's like to suffer from a constant irrational fear of life smallest day to day experiences. Two, so I can hopefully get a better grip on my own sanity.

I'll place all new entries under the lable 'paranoia mindset' and will possibly have something like that in the title of the entries as well. Things that will most likely fall under this label will be entries that show how my paranoid beliefs have impacted my day to day life. Not sure if it'll be useful information for others, but at least it'll be useful for myself.

Fossil Creek

2009-08-04T09:49:00.003-07:00

As I've mentioned on my twitter, the wife and I took the twins' to visit fossil creek. The entrance into the region is through one of the many state forests (can't remember exactly which one, possibly tonto state park), which is located roughly 90 miles north of Phoenix. Once you reach the entrance, there's is a 26 mile long un-paved road that is officially 25mph, our car had problems with anything above 10 though. On the way in, we were driving right along a very steep ridge. Essentially, there was a few inches of road, then a steep drop down a sheer mountain cliff face that led to an easy 200-300 foot drop. As someone with some issues with heights, I'm very glad my wife was driving instead of me.

Once we made it to the bottom of the road, we found a place to park at one of the many trailheads. Then we hiked the 50 feet or so to the creek proper. The twins had a blast swimming in the icy clear water. They even fought the current a bit and got a decent workout. The place where we reached the waters edge was a popular place it appeared. Someone had at some point tied a couple of ropes in the trees for people to swing out over the creek and drop into the water. I was going to include some pictures we took, but unfortunately, that's not as easy with blogger as it might seem. If I ever get around to putting the pictures online, I'll just link back to them via twitter.

Is it paranoia?

2009-08-01T04:52:00.001-07:00

So, I've been posting a lot of mundane information onto twitter lately. It's such a simple little thing. In fact, I started using twitter because the little status segment wasn't capable of a historical tracking, that and I didn't have the ability to update myspace as often as I can twitter. So as I started using twitter more, I found myself posting more and more mundane updates occasionally. Little things like "I'm headed out to the store" or "I'm leaving for work" or even "We're all going to a movie" ("we" including everyone in the house at the time).

As I finished posting the blurb about going to the movies, I immediately wondered if I should find some way to take it back. I began wondering, "If someone wanted to rob my house, I've just told them the exact time to arrive, and exactly how long I'll be gone." I know most people would just say I was being paranoid. But, I have to be. You see, my mind doesn't work like a "normal" person's mind. I have a security mindset. The link will take you to a wired article written by a security expert who explains in detail how the security mindset works. The security mindset described in that article is essentially the same thing as a criminal mindset. In fact, the only thing that sometimes differentiates between a very intelligent successful criminal and an extremely intelligent and successful law enforcement agent is morals and quite possibly, the law enforcement agent has a slight touch of paranoia that prevented them from taking the path of a criminal.

Does this mean that I'll stop posting such updates? Most likely not. I understand that most people wouldn't even consider that they could use that information for such. In fact, most of the people who would consider using twitter as yet another means of stalking and casing a place to rob would be targeting people with much more financial viability from their house (such as northern Scottsdale area houses).

Of course, there is still that paranoid part of me that makes me want to post updates on twitter that are slightly more vagu as to exactly how long or exactly when I may leave. I am helped in this by the fact that I can go long periods of time without updating and no one really knows if it's because I'm away from the house, or just because I have been focused on something else and haven't gotten around to updating in a while, which happens much more often than some may thinl.

One thing I do hope this information is helpful with, is to make others take just a brief moment before they post updates on twitter, facebook, myspace, or wherever that would make it so easy for people to stalk them, or to make a victim out of them.

Identity

2009-07-30T21:53:00.001-07:00

I'm starting to realize just how much my online persona of Matrix Mole and my real-life identity are beginning to mesh. When I first began using the internet, it was very easy to maintain anonymity just because no one really knew what the net was. Back then the few people who knew who you were in real life were similar people and you hardly ever used your real names, handles were the primary method of identity.

I've contemplated multiple times about creating a new identity. If I do manage to do so, that will be one more account to keep track of. On the other hand, if I do it properly, it would be completely separate from my r/l or Matrix Mole monikers. Alas, I know me, I'm a creature of habit. Those very same habits may make it moot that the new pseudonym quickly becomes known. Alas, I'll just have to keep contemplating. If I should ever get around to it, I hopefully won't announce anywhere what it is beyond in my own head lol.

CLI Torrent update

2009-07-30T13:52:00.001-07:00

I spoke over a year ago about torrent programs that can be run from the command line in Linux. I did eventually settle on one. I use rtorrent which has almost all the functionality of utorrent, but runs on the command line. I keep it running under screen at all times now.

Sigil update

2009-07-30T13:12:00.002-07:00

Wow, I've had so much happen in my spiritual life since my last sigil/magick post. Even when I made that post I had already developed my first servitor. That servitor, Glasytofren, is well on his way to becoming an egregore. I have made quite a few steps along the metaphysical ladder. I've begun to do serious artwork and every piece is a subliminal sigil in it's own right. Most of the artwork can be found on my deviantart page.

I've also begun to interact with a few online metaphysical communities, although as is my typical way I'm still finding it difficult to interact with others. Chayote has been a great teacher along this path, and I'm certain that I'd still be stangnant in the evolutionary puddle without his input and guidance.

I will continue to post updates to my deviantart page, and may well start putting out twitter updates when I add new artwork. The more people I can get looking at it, the more my rules of reality are inforced. I've got a few more pieces I've yet to scan and upload. Also, Chayote has stated that we need to go get me a right proper art book instead of the little rinky dink one I have now. Once that happens, this current book will become my full fledged sigil book. As opposed to the artwork sigils, I'll only use it for the sigils that I know full well what I'm making (under the proper subconsious fueling of sigils).

Reflections

2009-07-30T00:47:00.002-07:00

I was originally using this blog as a storehouse to dump magick and political information. For the more rapid fire updates and short blurbs, I created a twitter account. I'm finding my thoughts sometimes don't quite fit into the 140 character limitation for a twitter update. As such, I'll very likely start posting more detailed updates on here. Of course, that doesn't take into account the times when I'll go anywhere from a couple weeks to almost a year between updates.

Basically, anything that too long for a twitter update (basically anything that's more than a simple sentence or two) will get posted here, with a twitter update that the blog has been updated.

Another great loss

2009-04-09T20:30:00.001-07:00

I haven't added anything here in a really long time. I just need to point out that the world has lost another great soul as Dave Arneson passed away at the age of 61. With my 35th birthday have just passed, it causes me to stop and reflect on life and the great things that Dave and Gary provided which granted me so many hours of enjoyment. Dave Arneson, I may not have known you personally, but your influence was felt world-wide and you will be missed.

Telecoms awarded immunity

2008-07-10T07:40:00.001-07:00

ABC News: Spy Bill Passes: Gov't Free to Spy on You

most of it's provisions remain secret from the public and most lawmakers

So, we now have a law on the books that lawmakers can't even read. Meaning that a typical american can violate a law without ever knowing it. Even worse, you can be picked up for anything and told it's because you violated some secret law. How long before we have a special police force specifically for handling these secret laws that no one is aware of. Call them the Secret Savers, or just SS for short.

Yes, that's a blatant connection between our presidency and Hitler. I won't go so far as to claim it's strictly Bush, because I'm fairly certain that whoever follows him in office will be more than happy to continue down this slope we're on to remove all privacy and security from the general public.

Convert apple DRMd m4a/aac to mp3

2008-07-03T10:48:00.001-07:00

I've been trying for some time to figure out how to convert apple's DRMd m4a music into mp3 so I can use my legally purchased music anywhere I wish and since I have over 5 computers in my household that I could be using at any time, I can't simply authorize yet another computer.

The obvious solution is to burn the music to CD and re-rip it as mp3. Unfortunately, the burner on my laptop is dead (it can read CD/DVD but can't burn either any longer). This is a hardware issue that I'm not willing to spend the money to get resolved.

Another solution that was presented on a tech forum I occasionally read is to use linux and issue the following command:

faad filename.m4a | lame filename.mp3

Now I just need to find out what program/package provides the faad program and then emerge that into my gentoo box.

So long Internet Free Speech

2008-06-10T17:23:00.001-07:00

US ISPs agree to block access to child porn newsgroups

The Associated Press is reporting that all French ISPs have reached a deal with the national government to block subscriber access to content that includes child pornography, promotes terrorism, or fosters hatred. The plan would apparently involve a government-run blacklist of websites populated based on user complaints.

So basically, France has declared that the only sites on the net that can be viewable are Disney sites. Oh wait, disney can foster hatred as well so I guess there are no sites left on the net that any French citizen can view since pretty much anything can foster hatred. The main story also talks about "an online service not associated with websites" "known as newsgroups."

I find it hilarious that a service that has been around for over 15 years is just now being discovered by some people. I'm not advocating the use of newsgroups for child porn. It's just the fact that people are only now starting to realize that this service is around strikes me as hilarious.

Legalized Dos attacks?

2008-06-05T17:04:00.001-07:00

Threat Level has a report about MediaDefender performing a denial of service attack against Revision3, a legitimate torrent tracker. For some reason, there doesn't appear to be any huge backlash against them though. This type of deliberate attack is blatantly illegal, yet the FBI is dragging their feet and not doing any form of proper investigation. A couple of kids took down Comcast's webmail and homepage for only a few hours and the FBI along with a couple law enforcement agencies are seriously investigating this issue.

MediaDefender is basically a hired gun for the RIAA/MPAA. So basically, what this shows is that large corporations can get away with violating computer crime laws, but heaven forbid you get on the wrong side of those large corporations because then you'll sufer tremendously.

A worldwide DMCA on steroids

2008-06-02T14:33:00.001-07:00

The real ACTA threat (it's not iPod-scanning border guards) is an article from ARS Technica that reports on the Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement (ACTA ) that's currently being discussed in private among various government bodies (Canada, the EU, Japan, and US are listed in the article). There is very little known about the ACTA at this time. There have been some leaked documents, but not a lot of really hard facts about it yet. Most of the speculation has been about border patrols skimming devices as they re-enter the country for illegal content. From how the linked article presents the threat, it may be more geared towards sites such as The Pirate Bay and other torrent distribution points. What's really concerting is how much control it will give governments, allowing them to bypass existing laws and giving complete amnesty to ISPs who work with them. It even allows them to bypass World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) rules and provisions that were designed specifically for intellectual property issues.

Online training

2008-05-30T08:59:00.001-07:00

I've known for quite some time that there were resources online to learn programming and such. Thanks to Lifehacker I've been introduced to a few more websites that are great for online programming resources. Most of these sites come from the comments on a lifehacker article about google code university. To help myself, i've consolidated the sites here (and may update this list as I come across others).

MIT OpenCourseWare - Free online training and learning from MIT
W3Schools Online Web Tutorials - a great site for a variety of web technologies (javascript, html, xhtml, css, ajax, php, etc).
PHP|Architect - This is a site that has a variety of php information. I haven't actually looked it over to know how useful it is as of yet.
Google Code University - Google has some very detailed information for coders and prorgammers.

As I said, I'll add more to this list if I run across them in the future.

Net Neutrality really about online video content?

2008-05-23T15:58:00.001-07:00

Net Neutrality Debate Is Secretly All About Internet Television, Net Pioneers Say | Threat Level from Wired.com

Those inspections into internet packets beyond the first few outside wrappers, into areas that include content, means that broadband providers have access to private information. Furthermore, he argues because of the Supreme Court's decision that people have no Fourth Amendment protection in information given to third parties, the providers are free to share any of that data with marketers or the government.

This was taken from Wired.com's threat level blog. Normally, I agree with a lot of the information they present to the public. This is one of those articles I don't agree with as much. Not only that, but the quoted above statement really stood out to me. The overall article is about why we don't want a neutral internet because overall it will make it worse and more ineffective for people to obtain their video content over the wires.

As we get into faster methods of communications, I don't see the video "broadcast" over the internet as a real problem. As it is, most major internet providers are slowly increasing the bandwidth available to their subscribers. In my area, the primary cable internet provider has increased to an almost 9mbps/512kbps down/up speed for their average users (the downstream is up from 4mbps when I first signed up almost 4 years ago). If there was truly a problem with bandwidth from the ISPs, then they wouldn't be offering higher and higher levels. This argument is just a way of trying to get those who are incapable of educating or thinking for themselves more than willing to shell out even more money for a service that they are already receiving at a decent price. To quote a great comment from The Mentor "We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons..." and this just drives that point home ever so expertly.

As for the portion of the article I quoted above. The argument is that because ISPs are capable of intercepting the data and snooping out information in said data, then that data has been given to a third party (it sounds as though they are referring to the ISP as the 3rd party here). This could be very similar to postal mail. Say I send a letter to a friend. Just because I send that letter through the post office, does not indicate I have given the contents of that letter to the post office. The contents of that letter are still protected under fourth amendment laws and thus not subject to search or seizure. Obviously in todays society where our freedoms have been ripped away from us willy nilly, the government could very well declare that they are allowed to intercept said letters and do whatever
they wish with them regardless of constitutional rights.

Overall, the debate over net neutrality is about any form of interference of the data being retrieved by an individual. The article linked to above actually discusses the idea of spam blocking for most email being retrieved. The difference between that and the other interference that ISPs perform is that most people request the spam blocking. If someone didn't want the spam blocking though, they should be able to contact their email provider and request such and get all that lovely spam in their inbox. In fact, I personally say let each individual handle their own spam blocking. Of course, with the huge influx of spam on the market (I think i've heard that it's supposedly taking up 90% of email but that could be way off as most statistics can be) most people won't want to deal with their own spam blocking. Of course part of that is because most spam blocking software isn't very user friendly for anyone other than hard core techs/geeks.

Net neutrality is still something that is neccessary. ISPs and other network providers should not be allowed to interfere with any data. The only people that should be authorized to interfere with network conenctivity are personal networks and intranets within a company and their employees.

CLI Torrents

2008-05-20T22:10:00.001-07:00

LinuxHaxor.net has an article on command line torrent downloading. I've always been a big fan of command line work. I have in the past used the curses CLI client to bittorrent to download torrents inside of a screen session. I quickly discovered though that I didn't like the limitations of that client. I'm glad to discover that there are other CLI torrent applications out there.

I've tried transmssion on my Mac (have yet to use it on my gentoo box as of yet). I ejoy having almost the same options and power on my non-windows boxes as utorrent provides. I had been using utorrent under wine on my linux box for a while and that worked beautifully. Now I have an option to try out some more CLI power. I will definitely give each of the clients listed a try and report back on which ones work best for me. I've a feeling that rtorrent is going to win just based on the numerous options that were reported, but I'll have to try each of them out before stating which one I like best. I'll grab the most recent gentoo livedvd installer (2008.0) and see which client is preferrable.

In an effort to help LinuxHaxor find other CLI torrent progams, I've decided to skim through gentoo's portage net-p2p tree for torrent apps. It appears there are 22 apps that are specific torrent apps. A few of these I already know (azureus, transmission, bittornado) and some of the apps are designed for making torrent files (createtorrent, mktorrent, mktorrent-borg, gtktorrentviewer). Of the remaining torrent programs, some of them are blatantly not CLI apps (bitstormlite, ktorrent, qbittorrent, along with other GTK/Qt based torrent apps). This leaves a small list of programs to investigate:

btg - http://btg.berlios.de
btpd - http://www.murmeldjur.se/btpd/
ctcs - http://www.rahul.net/dholmes/ctorrent/ctcs.html - Not a torrent program by itself, but an interface for monitoring the torrents running under ctorrent, but still worth investigating.
deluge - http://deluge-torrent.org/ - Is python/PyGTK CLI only? That's why it's being investigated.
hrktorrent - http://henrik.unit5.ca/hrktorrent
lince - http://lincetorrent.sourceforge.net

Although transmission is in the portage tree, I don't see a cli version. Doing a quick equery -f transmssion shows /usr/bin/transmissioncli is among the files available (along with the man page for transmssioncli). That means that it is still available for usage even if it's not being actively developed any longer. Of course, I had to install the full transmission package to get the cli version, but transmssion is small enough that I don't think it's that much of a hassle.

This brings my list of possible CLI torrent applications up to 9 one transmissioncli, rtorrent, and ctorrent are added to the bulleted ones listed above. I'll post an update within the next week or so once I have a result on which program I found works best for me.

Napster now offers DRM-free music

2008-05-20T20:27:00.001-07:00

The blogosphere has been abuzz the past day or so with this news. I guess I could offer my own 2 cents on it as well. It appears that Napster now has music for sale without the DRM restrictions on their website. I've seen in some of the comments on various blogs that those who pay their monthly fees to use the download software still get restricted DRM-ladden music. It's only the songs/albums that are sold individually on Napsters website that will be free of DRM for purchase. Combined with Amazon's DRM-free music (which is the cheapest price I've seen for legal music downloads), it would appear that iTunes Music Store now has some true competition on the market. iTunes needs to get on the ball and offer a lot more music DRM-free, or they stand to lose quite a few customers to the Amazon/Napster DRM-free era.

A few of the sites I've seen this story on are:

Hands on: Napster's new MP3 store stumbles out of the gate (Updated)

MP3s: Buy DRM-free MP3's at Napster
Napster Launches DRM-Free Music Store: Over 6 Million MP3s | Listening Post from Wired.com

Net Neutrality and big media

2008-05-20T20:11:00.001-07:00

The New York Times Calls For Network Neutrality Legislation | Threat Level from Wired.com is an article that points out that the opinions page of the New York Times on Monday (5/19/2008) carried a statement in agreement with the idea of a law to preserve internet neutrality. With such a well known media outlet jumping on board with this, it puts heat on congress to quit stalling the bill that has been proposed to them and pass the legislation. I strongly encourage everyone to follow-up with their representatives informing them that the bill for net neutrality will put control of the internet back in the hands of the consumers where it belongs.

Corporate government

2008-05-19T13:43:00.001-07:00

We are now starting to see situations where corporations are telling government agencies "You have no power over me." This comes from an Ars Technica article titled: Best Buy: FCC has no power to fine us over analog TVs.

Best Buy, along with Circuit City and Sears-Roebuck/K-Mart are challenging the FCC in regards to fines that have been levied against them for selling analog only television sets without giving any warnings to consumers that those sets may no longer work after Feb 2009 when analog broadcasts will cease.

Best Buy has declared that the FCC has no authority to enforce rules it makes regarding the sale or distribution of devices that are used to transmit communications. I personally could have sworn that was the primary job of the FCC. They are required to regulate the creation and distribution of any device that is capable of communications.

More detailed information can obviously be obtained by reading the Ars Technica article linked to above. My question becomes, at what point will these corporations decalre that they are not beholden to any government power and thus can make any form of ruling they desire on their own. Thus turning them into their own countries in effect. Those who have read cyberpunk or played cyberpunk themed games recognize this trend and have seen some authors' spins on where such "progress" will take the world.

ScribeFire

2008-05-17T17:15:00.001-07:00

I just recently found a really interesting firefox extension that integrates into many multiple blogging tools/sites. As such I've installed it and may very well find myself posting many more blogs. I've found myself looking at various sites while reading RSS feeds and not wanting to actually bookmark the site (since my bookmarks are starting to get overloaded with information that I can't keep up with), but instead to merely temporarily document the page. This tool will allow me to do just that. So the extension is called ScribeFire. I highly recommend it for anyone who ejoys blogging. The link for the page is: ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging.

Linux security tools

2008-05-06T16:25:00.002-07:00

I've recently come across a site full of all kinds of really awesome linux based security tools. Offensive-security.com talks about, and links to, tools that Backtrack uses. Backtrack is a live-cd based linux distro that is designed to be booted and run from a CD/USB drive and focuses on security and computer forensics. It is also released by remote-exploit.org (a group of computer hackers in the classic sense of the word) as a penetration testing based linux distribution. Those who aren't using the distro can still take severe advantage of the tools and links that it provides on the page linked to.

More sigil work

2008-05-01T23:05:00.001-07:00

Well, I tried using the method I had mentioned. I found an image that had some meaning to the SOI, and then took a japanese mantra sigilisation of the SOI and embeded that into the picture. Examining the image gave off a feel that just felt wrong.

My next step will be to build a sigil image using either my kanji method, or going with a numerological manner similar to what I saw posted in a myspace forum. Basically, take the SOI after removing all the duplicate letters (and vowels by some sugestions), and convert the remaining letters into numerical format. Once the numerical format is obtained, chart the numbers on the planetary numerological chart(s) that correspond with the planet(s) that would be most controlling of the SOI. Once the charted lines have been made, if multiple planetary charts were used, them merge the lines from each one into a manner that builds a single geometric design. This is the official sigil. Once the official sigil is ready, then using steganography merge the mantra form of the SOI into the image.

For me, the primary method of charging a sigil is through meditation. By lighting incense that usually has some symbolic representation to the SOI, and meditating on the image of the sigil, I can charge it. As my meditation acheives that state of zen emtpiness, the sigil is fully charged and then I can "awaken" myself from the meditative trance. This in effect releases the energy of the sigil so that it can do it's work. Using the sigilized matra, I can use that while meditating to help keep my mind empty as I enter that meditative state.

Sigil hacking

2008-05-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

I've been getting into sigil work lately thanks to an introduction from Grant Morrison in his disinfo talk. I strongly recommend listening to it and letting it shape your life as well.

Anyway, there are a large variety of ways of developing sigils and how to go about charging and releasing them. I originally was working with taking the statement of intent (SOI) and creating a kanji of that, then removing any duplicate symbols. Afterwards, combining the symbols into what looked to be a symbol that I felt was worth charging as the sigil.

I've started looking at other ways of working with sigils. It's the hacker mindset, why use one method when you can discover 5 more that could be equally, if not more, effective as the original. Thus, I've begun looking at other methods of developing sigils. My next step to work with is going to be making a mantra from the SOI. First thing I would do is write out the SOI, then remove all duplicate letters and re-arrange the remaining letters. Then once those are randomly re-arranged, look at phonetic pronunciation of the word(s) that are left. At the same time find some imagery that invokes feelings similar to what the SOI does, or imagery similar to the intended results. Using steganography I can embed the phonetic sigilisation into the image. Once the SOI is embeded into the imagery, it can be printed, or used straight from the computer monitor.

Credit Repair

2008-04-25T18:21:00.001-07:00

I've begun looking over at various information on how to repair and clean up my credit report. Most of the information I've looked at comes straight from the Federal Trade Commission's website. Since I've been obtaining the information from the FTC, it's almost all legal and valid. I've seen a few other sites that provide other information that is quite useful, although I only read sites that provide information that can be confirmed on the FTC's site but is in more "human" language instead of the legalese that sometimes buries the information instead.

Once I've looked over the information a bit more, I will provide some links to the various sites I'm using. Two links I will provide right now are:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/menus/consumer/credit/loans.shtm and http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/include/requestformfinal.pdf

The first is a page on the FTC's site with links to various publications on credit repair and reporting information. The second is a link to the official FTC form for filing for the free credit report that is available once every 12 months per the FACT Act.

Geekery Rube Goldberg

2008-04-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

So, I've got a series of about 30 directories I need to rename. Rather than go through and rename them all by hand, I use a command line script from my linux box to rename them. Of course, first I need to do some serious mucking about with regular expressions before I can actually run the script. The really funny part of this is that it will take me almost twice as long to develop the script as it would to just go through and manually rename all the directories. So, in essence, I'm doing the same thing as a Rube Goldberg device, except I'm doing on the computer in scripting.

Ascension

2008-04-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

It appears that google has unblocked my RPG blo finally. I can use it for writing out public information for the memebers of my gaming group to be made aware of now. I'm really looking forward to being able to use that.

Back Again

2008-04-07T08:12:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like Google has unblocked this blog finally. They originally blocked it because it was assumed to be a spam blog. I don't know how since there's nothing here to indicate any form of spam anyways. Now if only they'd unlock my RPG blog since that's the one that will more than likely get used more often.

First post

2008-03-21T21:22:00.000-07:00

So I finally broke down and setup a blogspot account through google. It was actually quite easy since I am almost always logged into my google account anyways to just login to blogger/blogspot quite rapidly. We'll see how many posts I place on this page as well, since most of my blogs tend to get used for a short time before being abandoned for something else.