Is it just me or are the security updates for Windows XP coming in more often than an a badly wired lawn Santa during the rainy season? Hell, I’d be really worried by now if I’d left my data and internet security up to XP and Microsoft.

Oh yes, and since you’re reading this, take a few moments to back up your documents. Don’t say I didn’t remind you.

Night Ya’ll

In my dream I’m walking through a familiar room when I hear a friendly, pleasant beeping from a device on a table. Not a beeping like a dump truck is about to back over me or the countdown on some massive underground secret weapon’s self-destruct is about to reach 0.00…more like the kind you hear when the popcorn in the micro is ready or the coffee has finished perking. But it seems to be insistent about its alert so I get closer and find a rather large button on the device that looked to be something that would cancel the alert, but pressing it never changed the beeping of the device. Turning it off, unplugging it, even dropping it to the floor from about 3 feet up (a standard troubleshooting procedure, trust me) changed nothing; the happy, cheerful beeping continued. So I unplug the device, still not sure of it’s function, and wrap the cord around it’s dark, rectangular shape and put it in a box full of quilts in the top shelf of a closet. As I walk away, I’m surprised to notice that the device is still beeping…but even more amazing, I can hear it as clearly as if I had it 3 feet from my ear.

The dream skips forward a bit, me taking the unit apart as best I can trying to stop the noise, but not having much luck. I begin to get frustrated, holding it by the power cord and swinging it in a high arc trying to smash it against a brick wall which, thinking back, was rather convenient at the time but belonged in the living room exactly the same way a Crecent ™ wrench does in a jell-o mold. This, however, only resulted in a large pile of bricks at my feet, which I began smashing the device into with both hands, then taking a brick in each fist, windmilling them against it in a Tex Avery fashion only to produce a bongo-like Foley sound in the background and a pile of sand at my feet.

At this point, the dream begins to speed up….John Cameron Swayze strapping the device to the landing gear of a C-130 filled with pianos which promptly crashes through an abandoned shopping mall coming to rest in the middle of a parking lot with a Sharper Image sign jutting from it’s cockpit but the unscratched device still happily beeping to the camera…a CNN news story about the millions saved by replacing the heat resistant tiles on the Space Shuttles with the amazingly resilient devices…property price in California skyrocketing because of the earthquake-proof dwellings now possible by using the devices as building blocks…patent wars over its origin and composition…it’s use all over the planet to create virtually indestructible vehicles, housing, spacecraft, buildings, walls, ductwork. Used in every corner of the planet for construction both magnificent and mundane.

And all with the constant, infernal, eternal, happy, cheerful BEEPING! Everywhere, all the time, every second of the day, every day of the year; but I seem to be the only one that notices it!

Then I wake up and hit the snooze button and the sound stops…funny how the enormity of a problem shifts once you change the way you look at it, ain’t it?

Vindication!

Die, Die, Die!