One of my favorite movies of all time is Legend which was released in 1985. This movie is a fantasy story long before the Lord of the Rings trilogy and holds up well over the years, it stars Tim Curry as “Darkness” a creature who worships the night and wants nothing more than to purge light and good from the world. Tom Cruise plays “Jack” a forest child who was raised by elves and forest creatures who is in love with a princess named Lily played by Mia Sara.

The movie is a romantic fantasy flick at its best, setting an fantasy world filled with orcs, goblins, unicorns, hags, faeries and magic. It is a Good versus Evil film with a poetic artistic style, one that really stands out is how Darkness himself has his heart empty and feels love for Lily himself willing to do just about anything to win her affection.

One day Jack wants to show Lily something magical and takes her to witness the last pair of unicorns in the world first hand, Lily though can’t just look and has to just “touch” one. Though there is no harm in touching the unicorn this allows the goblins to injure it with a poison and slay it by severing its horn.

We see that with one unicorn killed the world plunges into chaos, snow and ice freeze everything over and leave the mortal world in a frozen state. Darkness has Lily captured and brought to him while she tries to protect the second and final unicorn. Jack meanwhile with the help of his elven allies must arm himself and battle his way into the lair where Darkness is keeping both Lily and the mare.

Filled with sword and sorcery and one of the most disturbing creatures Meg Muckelbones the Hag, this film leaves you feeling like you watched a piece of art. Ridley Scott who directed the film did a fantastic job, and honestly I grew up with the American version of the film. Tangerine Dream was one of my favorite musical groups and their soundtrack is permanently burned in my head from this movie, I tried watching the European version fo the film and I didn’t not like it as much as the American version. The original didn’t have Darkness providing as much poetic speech as the American edited version which really helped give personality and presence to his character in my opinion.

This movie was and still is a 4 out of 5 stars in my book, though as a fantasy film is dark and a little slow paced for younger kids, but there is no real bloodshed and very little violence compared to more modern fantasy flicks.

-Dragon Blogger

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I am always looking for new anti-spyware applications and decided to try the trial version of ByteCrusher SpyDefy to see how well it fared, I am using Avira Antivirus and wanted to see if SpyDefy could find some spyware not caught by Avira. I downloaded the program and ran the installer. When you start the program it recommend being run in “Administrator Mode” so that it can have higher permissions to scan and clean out your system. This was reasonable if you want to scan and clean everything so I enabled the Administrative mode for the application.

Once it ran the program proceeded to download the latest updates and spyware definitions. The one thing I noted is that it took several minutes and didn’t really have a status bar on how close it was to being completed. Also it required a restart of the application when the updates were completed which was inconvenient for first installing it.

When it finally reloaded it started scanning and it was blazingly fast, within the first 2 seconds it found 2 spyware infections on my system. By the time it was finished it had found a total of only 2 infections out of like 400,000 files. Which wasn’t so bad as the only two infections found were tracking cookies from certain websites, no actually infected malware or trojans on any files in my system.

The program has a really good shield feature showing you how it protects against threats and spyware, internet, registry, process, startup and browser are all some of the protections it offers. It even has an exclude list so you can tell it not to scan certain files and processes. The program offers 20 scans and fixes off of the trial license and I encourage you to give it a try, ByteCrusher SpyDefy is very easy to use and worth seeing it it works well for you.

Now, I also decided to try the ByteCrusher Registry OptiMax product to see how well it would clean up my Windows Vista registry.

This program was shocking, I usually keep a pretty clean windows registry but I hadn’t run a cleaner in about a month. RegistryOptimax found 521 errors on just a quick scan of my registry. But where the product really shines is the level of details it goes into about every single error, it gives you some of the best descriptions of the problems I have ever seen from any product. Explaining why each registry item was flagged as an error so you can learn more about what types of errors are made in the registry.

See some of my registry errors:

Now the trial version only fixes 20 errors, so I couldn’t clean out my registry with the trial version, but I went to see how much the product cost and see it was $29.99 which is a reasonable price for a product in this range. ByteCrusher also offers you very good deals when you bundle several products together including RegistryOptimax, SpyDefy and Norton CA Antivirus you can save $60 or more by purchasing the products as a package instead of individually at local BestBuy or Fry’s Electronics stores.

Whether you are looking for a new Anti-Spyware or registry cleaning program or not, both the SpyDefy and RegistryOptimax Products from ByteCrusher have easy to use interfaces, 24×7 phone support and seem to do a good job of finding problems in your system. I have used other types of freeware and spyware, and think the user experience tends to be a little better and easier with the ByteCrusher products.

-Dragon Blogger

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So two days ago I received my first Google Adsense payout and it was $105 and some change, it took 5 months for my blogs to reach my first Adsense payout. I average about $7 per week from adsense earnings and I am still running that average. I am hoping the more articles I have, and the more content I publish this number should steadily increase but it certainly won’t be a big money maker. I have a friend who has run a website for about 4 years and averages about $90 per month from adsense. That is some pretty nice side cash from just leaving ads up on your site.

Meanwhile my blog analytics have been doing pretty well the last 30 days for Dragonblogger.com, my site is up almost 10% visitorship since previous month and averages around 400 unique visits per day according to Google Analytics. This is about 100 more visits per day than I was receiving in December, so my blog at 6 months old now is just shy of around 13,000 visits per month.

You can see though from my traffic sources that 50% of my traffic comes from Google searches, 20% from Entrecard (down from 33% last month) and 20% from direct traffic. A little bit from yahoo and stumbleupon there in the 2% mark. This is good, you want most of your traffic to come from google searches, not entrecard or a social media site. That means that your traffic would vanish if you were to remove or lose that social network. As 50% of my traffic comes from google, it means if I dumped Entrecard (which I am not going to do), I would lose only about 80 visits per day out of my 400 per day average.

If you think about it though, I almost always drop 300 EC’s per day, and to only get 80 visits per day back means I am not getting back nearly as many drops as I am giving out.

In looking at my keyword searches you will see that my blog is a Technology and Entertainment blog but clearly 7 out of my 10 top keyword searches are related to my NBC Heroes section. 2 are related to technology posts, and one is related to my Kung Fu Panda review. This only proves that entertainment is more popular than technology. My Heroes section is extremely valuable portion of my blog and has a large visitor base.

I should note that my #1 search result was for Shiny Search, this was a paid post I did for SocialSpark, so this paid post brought 221 visits in 30 days just to their product. To me that tells me it was a successful paid posting, as I probably brought at least 700 people to read about their website in the last few months since I did the post.

Those are my metrics for the last 30 days, I will do an earnings post when the month turns to March.

In Summary, I am right on track for about a 6 month old blog, averaging 400 visits per day and 12,500 for the month. My growth is a steady 8% and I hope to keep that kind of growth up as I try all different tactics. I am glad that only 20% of my traffic comes from Entrecard, this shows my blog is growing on google and I can be less reliant and dependant on the network. I love entrecard, but it is getting harder and harder to do 700 drops per day for all my blogs. I would like for them to stand on their own two feet without the forced traffic from the EC network.

-Dragon Blogger

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The recent publicity on CNN on how Twitter broke the news first about a bus crash in India just proves that the ability to write and post real time information makes Twitter an even faster tool for getting news and information to the public than even blogging. Though you need to follow up with a blog post to provide more details, for immediately broadcasting an event nothing is more valuable that being at the scene or witnessing it and reporting it live.

CNN and many other media sites now get most of their breaking news from the public who send pictures, tweets, or dial phone calls into the networks to report what just happened or is in the process of happening. News networks can barely keep up with the flood of information and have to filter what is “worthy” of being shown to the whole country, or what stays as just local news.

Twitter though with no clear direction on purpose or function it will have is actually starting to show what functions it will play,the real time messaging service shows where you can create entire feeds based on geographic location. Think like breaking Phoenix, AZ news, or Detroit, MI news. Where tweets with a certain keywords related to NEWS, EVENTS…etc are categories and listed by location.

Such tweets could be monitored and be faster and more accurate than turning on your local news channel for finding out what is going on in your area, and these rely on everyday people to report what is going on. By the time the news media gets it, it could be old news. One such thing that makes this not reliable is people’s ability to invent and make up stuff and it would take some time before it is corrected, but there is always the belief of someone posting something urgent and important that comes as 2nd nature.

Either way, Twitter continues to be in the news and bring massive attention as it becomes more popular and more a center point of online social networking lately.

-Dragon Blogger

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