RANDOM SMATTERINGS
from a meandering mind
Random Smatterings is a place for me to showcase thoughts, fiction and software. My brain doesn't work in anything resembling a conventional way and I have spent most my life pretending at normal. At some point I realized two things. It's ok to be weird and everyone is.
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I plan to exhibit some of my work here for my own sake. I do not guarantee it will be worth the gander, but if you do take the time to, I hope you enjoy it.
NICE TO MEET YOU
A Random Origin
Some years ago, I convinced my boss to send me to DEF CON, a hacker conference in Las Vegas. In an early meet-and-greet, we were doing introductions and everyone in the room had a cool hacker handle and some minor caper they'd pulled off. Then it came to me. I'm not, and never have been, a hacker but I didn't want to be labeled a 'fed' so I said, "I'm Random Smatterings. I was behind the 1999 Bank of America hack."
The name didn't stick (obviously) and I doubt anyone believed me, but 'Random Smatterings' was stuck in my head ever since. The Bank of America thing was real, but it wasn't a hack. It was an accidental Denial of Service situation caused by an ill-advised installation of the Entropia PrimeNet client on every computer at Bank of America. So at 5pm EST, all of these computers contacted the Entropia server, hosted at my tiny ISP, for the next block of primes to evaluate. The result was the shutting down of much of the bank's networking capacity and a visit to my offices by the FBI.
But I still like the name and I have the domain and, finally, I'm taking the time to use it. Click around and let me know what you think.