There is nothing quite like going from "this story is the dumbest thing I've ever seen" to "oh man, this is the most wicked awesome element EVER". There's nothing quite like it when you're reading someone else's book, but there's definitely nothing like it when you're writing your own. (What's equally cool that most people can't understand this until they actually start writing. Clearly you think your story is awesome to begin with, but then it's just a natural par-for-the-course effect that you eventually despise it and think it's crap, but if you give up at the first sign of trouble, you won't hit one of many EUREKA! moment and keep on chugging!)

In the shower, I was stuck. (On my story, not in the shower.) So I just thought about random things... What if this happened. What if that happened... What if I did something like this... What if this person did that? I just let my mind wander and I don't even remember half the stuff I considered, but then. BAM! It hit me. The answer to a story element that's been left unanswered since the day it all first came together. I've got lots of stuff to write about now, so I'll get cracking!

I've noticed two things about NewEgg reviews on computer hardware components... One is that if the device in question is in the least bit noisy (and I don't mean loud, I mean... if it gives off any noise), then it's 3 or 4 stars. Or eggs... Or whatever you want to call it. The thing could be absolutely rock solid without any record of crashes (according to reviews), but if it makes a sound. It's not perfect.

The other is that if the device in question doesn't support overclocking, it's also 3 or 4 stars, and heaven forbid that the device in question makes a sound and doesn't allow overclocking. On the bright side, if you buy only the best rated devices, you'll get quiet operation that lets you rev up your processors to run Stargate address correlation routines or even just blow it up, causing a artificially created black hole in your case.

I know it'll never happen, but can we please have reviews that rate the quality of the device instead of how loud it is or how much it does or does not overclock? Some people are looking for stability over speed. If most people did that, then hey! Windows would actually work for most people and we wouldn't keep hearing about your BSoDs in Windows XP. (That really takes talent, man.)

For example, a motherboard I'm looking at. The one previously mentioned on my dream computer list is no longer carried at NewEgg, so I'm looking at alternatives. I can't tell if this motherboard supports quad-core processors or not, because people are too busy talking about how it doesn't overclock. Does it support quad-core? Does it support quad-core well? Does it promise everything it claims? Good, then give it 5 stars. I really don't want your personal opinion on decibels bleeding over to your grand rating. If you want to tack it under "Other Thoughts", then go ahead. Loudness isn't a "Con", SATA failing to support RAID like it should? That's a Con and should affect the rating. It doesn't overclock very well? File that under "Other Thoughts" unless the thing actually advertises the ability to overclock. Then it's a Con and should affect your rating.

3 eggs because the fan is too loud? Not a Con. Go buy a new fan.

Honestly, there's this dual-hard drive external enclosure by Western Digital. 1 entire terabyte. Overall rating is 3 stars. That's pretty poor for hard drives. If they don't work well, I don't want them. I decided to click on it anyway because it was the one with the best ratings. It turns out that all the reviews were complaining about how loud the cooling fans were. Some people actually said "this hard drive is very stable, but it's really loud, so only 3 stars". It works fine but it's too loud, so it's 3 stars... Hard drives get HOT, mister. Have you ever handled one after a fresh shut down? Ouch. Putting two in a tight enclosure like that? Yeah, you're going to get some fan noise.

So I'm feverishly reading up on A+, Network+ and Linux+... In my massive 1000 page A+ book, we just touched based on networking. (Which I've already been reading in depth with my Network+ book.) The concepts are similarly presented and explained (except Mike Meyers is an awesomely cool writer and is much more fun to toil through)... Except for one thing.

Each chapter has a Q and A with answers that you're supposed to submit to your teacher online. Kind of defeats the purpose with the page numbers right freakin' there, but oh well. Here's a question for you:

Under ideal conditions, the 802.11g standard supports data throughput of up to ____ and has a range of up to ____.

A. 11Mbps/150 feet
B. 11Mbps/300 feet
C. 54Mbps/150 feet
D. 54Mbps/300 feet

Simple, right? (Bet you can tell there's a catch coming up.) Wrong. There's a chart in the book that clearly lists 802.11g at having a maximum theoretical throughput of 54Mbps with an optimal range of 300 feet. The book beats into you the fact that wireless throughput is entire theoretical and is subject to overhead and is thusly much lower than advertised, but he didn't say what the practical throughput was. Under perfectly ideal conditions, it should be 54Mbps and 300 feet, right? So that's what I picked.

Answer is as follows:

B. Under ideal conditions, the 802.11g standard supports data throughput of up to 11Mbps and has a rage of up to 300 feet.

Am I missing something? I could understand a typo if the question said 802.11g and the answers said 802.11b, but it doesn't... It's clearly tacking 802.11b's standards onto 802.11g. G is supposed to be faster, B is supposed to be slower. Router boxes say it, WAP boxes say it, the book says it, the other book says it.

Yeah, that bugs me, because putting down what's clearly the right answer is going to be marked as wrong, but if I put down the wrong answer and the teacher manually reads the work and goes "huh? this guy's wrong" without checking the book, it'll still be wrong.

So I ask you... Am I missing something?

My previous post was 621 words... Great.

At the end of this post, I will have written enough to be done for today if I was writing my book instead.

My previous post was 963 words. That's how much I wrote last night in the space of three hours for my NaNoWriMo novel before I finally just went to bed. I wrote this in about... What? 15 minutes? Because I had something to say.

I hear people say that 50,000 words in 30 days is no big deal. Yes, we know. Really, we do. But there's a difference between writing 50,000 words on something like a collection of blog post or forum posts or chat rooms. I'm not exactly sure what the difference is... I guess since you're usually discussing your own opinions, or what's happened to you in the last few days, or you're writing a report on some history, you've already got an idea for what you want to write! Everything's already thought out and all you have to do is put it into words. 1,667 words a day is easy peasy. I KNOW I write almost that much just navigating around my computers with the command line!

The issue with NaNoWriMo is that you're writing something that you DON'T have all planned out already. (Some do, and I did, but once I actually got writing, I've already changed so much that my plans are all gone.) It gets slow and it gets hard because now you're writing what's coming straight from your mind, and sometimes you just don't have any creative juice pumping. Your writing gets slow and bad because you're working hard to come up with an idea so you can reach your goal, and this makes for some pretty horrible plot points and conversations when you go back to read it. Frankly, it looks like a Harry Potter book. (Oh, yes, I so did go there.)

But see, writing a perfect novel isn't the point of NaNoWriMo. The point is to get down what ideas you DO have for a novel, and then see what happens when you toss a bunch of characters in and let them run around, as defined by a very loose intangible concept of a weak plot. They run around, they BREAK the plot, and you have to rewrite it. Sometimes you don't like the changes, sometimes you do. If you don't like the changes, don't erase it, just keep going. I've written myself into a dead end a couple of times and just went "PFFT! I'm watching Babylon 5 instead." Maybe that's what you need to do, because after I watched and came back, I knew how to finish the dead end, but... If you're stuck on a dead end for longer than you want. Skip it! Move ahead and write what happens next. When you go after the second draft, maybe you'll keep it or chuck it.

So this is just something I needed to say (which is also what makes writing so easy). I've heard the arguments for why NaNo is dumb, and I'm in the middle of week 3 and behind (like everyone else is) and think my NaNo is dumb, but... You know what? It's supposed to be. Tolkien didn't write Lord of the Rings in a month. It took him 40 years with much encouragement from friends. If you're doing NaNo and you think it's starting to seem dumb, don't worry! Lord of the Rings is one of the best stories ever written and Tolkien also thought it was dumb. If you're NOT doing NaNo because you think it's dumb... Then you just don't know what it takes to write a novel and there's no need to tell everyone else that NaNo is dumb, because, frankly, they're at that point in the month where they think it's dumb, too, and they don't need the discouragement.

Here we go again...

I remember when Blizzard Warden first came out. Everyone went insane over the fact that Blizzard dare install a program that scans their system! After all, a program that scans your computer could pick up your credit card information, right? Let's ignore the fact that... It doesn't, didn't and won't. The mere thought of something capable of doing that is worth the freaking-out-itude. Especially when said scanners "call home". Ah, such a powerful phrase. Call home. Anyway, people freak out that Blizzard was listening to their complaints and developed a program that scans for cheatware and keyloggers. (Cheatware: applications used willingly by players to achieve an unearthly amount of automation in an effort to... well... cheat! Keylogger: applications unknowingly installed on your system by poking around in warez or by social engineering that monitors what you type in to your accounts!) Basically, Warden made sure you weren't cheating and made sure you weren't getting taken advantage of. Prevention and protection.

Guess what? It worked. Accounts are banned at an almost alarming rate with a very, very low rating of false positives. Warden works, that much is clear. Eventually, the whining died off. They either canceled their account or they got smart and figured out that less cheaters and spammers in the game was better than whining about what the scanning software COULD be used for, but wasn't. (Honestly, who stores their banking information in plain-text in the first place? Only idiots. There is not a single reason for you to have your credit card information in scannable form on your hard drive.) People whined about the polymorphist nature of Warden, but, uhm. Yeah. If the program didn't change, hackers would learn how to bypass it. So Blizzard changes it a lot to prevent that. It works. Yes, it's the nature of a virus, but it isn't a viral feature.

Well, now Blizzard has strengthened Warden once again. I'm not even sure what the huge deal is. The article just spouted complicated phrases like "random hash algorithms" without actually talking about what they were used for, so I'm going to decipher it as much as I can, based on the general resulting outcry.

Either Warden has been beefed up in its searching (I know it uses a list of known hashes to detect cheating and keylogging applications) or its own checksum has been changed so that it could essentially be impossible to determine if it's really Warden or not. I don't know, but whatever it is, Blizzard can change this algorithm at their will. Apparently, this is given rise to a new batch of whiners who claim that a "rogue Blizzard operative" could use Warden to "harvest bank information" without anyone knowing. (As if the majority of WoW subscribers haven't already given Blizzard their bank and contact information, haha.) Warden is known to scan your registry and active processes and compare what it finds to the hash database it has and then transmit anything it finds to Blizzard. The key here is that it doesn't transmit everything it finds, only the problems it thinks it's found.

I don't even clearly understand HOW or WHY this is a bad thing, but the post I linked to is convinced that this makes it impossible to tell if Warden has been compromised... by someone at Blizzard... who somehow had total unmonitored access to Warden's code... and managed to push the new, malicious Warden out to all 7 million subscribers... and have no other employees notice. Somehow. That's the idea they're going for. That's all they have. Let's forget the fact that Blizzard has not done this and is not doing this and has absolutely no compelling reason to do this in the future. But that 1 in a 1000000 chance is enough to make people go "OH MY GOSH IT'S THE END OF OUR PRIVACY AS WE KNOW IT."

Fine. If that's what you think it is, and you think the chance of an evil Blizzard employee stealing your credit card information (stored in plain text) from your computer and receiving it via Warden is an all too real danger? Stop playing World of Warcraft. It's actually quite simple. You can even tell them  WHY you quit. Just say "I quit because I think that Warden is compromising my privacy" and be done with it... Because out of the 10 loudly outspoken people who think this is an issue, there are 6,999,990 people who think Warden is perfectly safe and who think Warden is an essential tool in stopping cheaters and keyloggers and we LIKE IT. Some of us have played other MMOs before that didn't give a hoot about who was cheating. Blizzard cares enough to hunt out these lowlifes and it WORKS. If there were people being banned left and right for false positives, I think they wouldn't hesitate to scream about it. We might get one or two people banned for some weird circumstances, like the guy who macro'd all kinds of moves into a single keyboard key (cheating) or the guy emulating WoW in Linux and Warden wasn't operating correctly. I think 2 out of 7 million in the entire time since it's been released is pretty good odds.

So in the end, yes. We know Warden scans our systems. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know it reports anything bad it finds to Blizzard. Thanks, we already know that. Yes, we know that Warden could, in some unimaginable circumstance, be used to harvest personal information. Thanks, we already know that. If it's bothering you that much, feel free to uninstall WoW. If you're not willing to do that, please, for the love of all that is good in this world, STOP TELLING US WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW.