Book/Series Title Changes

Well, for those of you who were wanting to know the name of my book [book one (1) anyway] well I have good and bad news. Bad news first, sorry you asked for it, you are going to have to continue to wait on the title of book one. The reason is the good news, as great and perfect of a title as it was for book one, it was even better as a title for the series, at least the first half of the series. Most likely the series title will carry for the whole series, but in grand ol' tradition of my home-boy Terry Brooks, there could be a different title for each arrangement.
As my home-boy did with his highly successful series, as you know there was The Sword of Shannara trilogy, followed by the Heritage of Shannara series and I don't have six years to list each arrangement of books.
Well anyway so to update you on the recent changes to the series as a whole that I have made. Currently I have changed the first storyline to a trilogy and a bridge book followed by a sequel storyline. This might not be new to some, but previously I was unsure if the story progression of this style would flow. The bridge book will take place approximately seven (7) years after the beginning of, the untitled, book one (1). The first book of the second suite will take place roughly another ten (10) years later or seventeen (17) years after the beginning of book one (1). As for the length of the second suite, I am unsure if it will be a trilogy or a set of four (4), is there a word for that? a quad series; a quadogy; Does anyone know? Those sound dumb.

Now the good news. What? You thought was the good news? Oh well then I don't guess I'll have to tell you that the title of the series or at least the first trilogy is Shades of Gray.

FoozBawl Town

Alright, well as many of you know, I grew up in what I always called or thought of as a semi- but mild football town. My evidence to this was that the town almost shut down on Friday nights for football games, which could be reputed due to the fact that the streets rolled up at 6pm anyway. However, fast-food places would, because it was obviously good for business, stay open for extra hours until well after the games were over, shops would post signs in their windows, "Go Wolverines!" etc. Other things, were just the town's general attitude when it came to football games. No biggie, I mean I went I'm not really complaining it was something fun to do on a Friday night; it was a social event.

Recently I had the opportunity to witness a true football town experience. Without naming the town I was in, except to say that is in the tri-state area, my wife and I arrived to the school/stadium quiet a bit early, a trait my late father would be glad to know that I have picked-up. We still did not arrive as early as I would have liked, but we had little trouble (probably be cause we had VIP parking) yeah VIP parking at a High School Football game... news to me. Anyway, so when we arrive, there are already people parking on the road leading to the school, well outside the gates, surprise surprise, Dade County never parked that far as far as I can remember. I know it is normal to not see any grass anywhere on school property and occasionally when playing North Sand Mtn they would park road side by the entrance but still on school grounds, when a DCHS football game is going on. Nope, here they were already parking way out off school grounds.

Once we got past the gates I found the VIP parking lots. Driving through to find our place, we noticed the most amazing thing I never thought I would see at a High-school football game, Tailgating. There was not just one or two people, nearly every car we passed was tailgating, the ones that were not tailgating themselves were partaking in their neighbors grill.

After we find our, VIP parking place, we then collect our belongings and work our way to the ticket box we hand over our VIP cards, not expecting to get them back, we did. Cool! This is like a season pass! So we then begin the arduous task of finding a seat not infected with too many teenagers that look like they would chat or create too much of a ruckus. Oh geez I sound like an old man. Being a HS Band Geeks, I also wanted to get a seat that met my aforementioned criteria yet still provided a good view of the band while on the field. I thought, as always, mid-field is a good spot to watch the band. Oh wait, from forty to forty, is, hold on to your hats -- get this, Season Ticket holders-only seating. Yeah ok wow! This is a trip! Other than all this, it was a normal high-school football obsessed game.

Honestly, I plan to start visiting these football games more often. I even checked it with my former high-school's schedule and luckily there aren't any real conflicts.

To Hades With It All!

Alright, I've had it.
I've done all that I can do.
I hate computers.
I am tired of working on them.
I'm tired of putting up with their stercus tauri.

I decided to put my mind on some other topic, so after being introduced to a firewall application that I could run on one of my old linux boxes, I thought 'hey that would be a fun project to get my mind off of all this.'
this being the problems I'm having with my primary desktop computer)
So i took out the old box that's just been sitting in a corner with a half-arse load of FreeBSD on it, popped in X-files DVDs and I dug out this great old blue box that I bought for $5, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, that was retail version of RedHat 5.2. I plug the machine in, make sure it POSTs. So, I put the disc in the cd-rom tray and hit reboot. I start the install, Stack trace!?! hmm, ok let me check something. I take the disc out do some checks on the BIOS settings, all looks good. I open the try and put the disc back in. After closing the try and hitting reboot, my computer stuck it's tongue out at me. The Cd tray shot back out. So i hit the button, it closed and opened again. I'm thinking ok, i have fat fingers maybe i'm double tapping the button so i real quickly punch the button. Closed. OPEN! OMG!! WTF!?

So after a few minutes of fighting with the cd rom, and it not working. As I am an only child, I did what I do best. I threw a temper-tantrum. Denting cases, bending chassis, and as a side note: i don't like that the plural form of chassis is chassis.
All-the-while doing a few other destructive things to the computers around me.
SO, this brings me to my point.

I have:
5 non-working white-box PCs
1 maybe-working Compaq PC
1 working PowerMac 7600 which I recently upgraded to MacOS 8.1
1 working Rosewill 19" Flat panel monitor
1 working 17" Mac CRT (Big-butt behemoth)
1 working 17" Dell CRT
1 sort-of working 17" Philips CRT (it pin-cushions every now and then)
1 working Sun 1U Netra X1 server
I think I may have a couple Toshiba Satellite Laptops (1 working; 1 not)

Anyone need some parts. Sold As Is.