Gray Wolf Blog

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

You can’t quantify reward. You can quantify risk.

We have to be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Be regular and orderly in your life so you may be violent and original in your work.

The first of the Jack Reacher series. Grabs you from the start. I don’t usually like the ex-military superman genre but this was ok. As you near the end, some twists seem forced but the writing is interesting enough to keep you involved.

Killing Floor

ArticleDashboard.com is another big dog in the AD world. Hundreds of other sites use the AD software to run their own directories. Interface is easy to use.

The .Net Random class works well on its own, if you just need one random number. By default it uses the system time for the seed value. Where problems occur is when you need multiple random numbers inside a loop.

When I called Random.Next within the loop, it would always return the same number, as the seed value was always the same, even using the millisecond property of Now().

My solution was to multiply the Random seed (milliseconds) by the loop value which resolved the issue.

1. Public Shared Function GetRandomNumber( _
2. ByVal iLowerBound As Integer, _
3. ByVal iUpperBound As Integer, _
4. Optional ByVal iSeedMultiplier As Integer = 1) As Integer
5.  
6. Dim Random As New Random(Now.Millisecond * iSeedMultiplier)
7. Return Random.Next(iLowerBound, iUpperBound + 1)
8. End Function
9.  
10. Example:
11.  
12. For i = 1 To 5
13. strKey = i.ToString & "|" & GetRandomNumber(1, 10, i).ToString
14. Next
15. Download this code: GetRandomNumber.txt

Weighing in at 600+ pages, this book has three separate sections: pre, during and post civil war. Provides a good deal of insight into Davis’ personality, but I was hoping for more information on his relationship with his western generals. Because so much of his and the confederate government papers went up in flames, there are definite gaps. Davis’ post war life was difficult and he endured a great deal of personal loss and tragedy.

Jefferson Davis, American

Peace will not come until we have mastered both sex and war. And, to master war, we must study it with at least the diligence of Kinsey or Masters and Johnson. Every society has a blind spot, an area into which it has great difficulty looking. Today that blind spot is killing. A century ago it was sex.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

In my opinion, ezinearticles.com is the best article directory. It has not been thrown together trying to capitalize on the AD craze. The gui is easy to use and has a nice template feature for the author signature. Stats are detailed and useful.

Articles I have posted at EzineArticles

If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon the world since the beginning of time right up until tomorrow it would not be in the terms of man’s animal hereditary, his instinct and his evolution. It would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes as he tries to deny his true condition.

Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual.

Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And, once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

Long Day’s Journey into Night

Who knows who might be the target of the well read man?

Fahrenheit 451

Death solves all problems. If there is no person, there is no problem.

This book is really well done. Much of the archive material was not available until the late 1950. Majority of stories are primary source, first person accounts. Interesting episodes like Morgan’s escape from prison in Ohio, the Confederate torpedo service, New York draft riots and other obscure incidents. Well worth a look.

Secret Missions of the Civil War

I have been submitting content to various article directories for about 90 days. I have submitted 80+ articles and variations to 20 or more directories.

One thing I have noticed from other boards is that it can be difficult to determine how effective all your work is. Some sites have lousy stats, others have decent stats but result in little traffic.

Obviously, if you are posting junk, you will get little traffic. However, I have taken the same article, re-written it several times, posted it to the various directories and had big differences in views and site visits.

Factors I am considering when reviewing an article directory:

If you are just looking to blast articles, this probably won’t be of much interest. There are plenty of spinners and auto submit services out there.

Hammer is running out of gas and so is Spillane. You know Hammer will always get the girl, money, bad guy, etc and this book doesn’t deviate. The plot is a little weird with 89 billion dollars up for grabs. Drags in places. Good for filling a hour or two at the end of the day. It is what it is.

Black Alley

Remarkable story of a mother and daughter’s survival in the Warsaw Ghetto and escape from a train to Treblinka. The mother wrote the journal immediately after the war and had it transcribed into English. Sat in a drawer for 40+ years until being found after the mother’s death.

A Jump for Life: A Survivor’s Journal from Nazi-Occupied Poland