Zane's Top 11 Reasons it Would be Fun to Transmit

Your Enemies As Energy Via a Teleporter

11. Convert them to a wavelength of light used to grow a hybrid strain of hops used in a beer that bears their name.

10. Convert the energy into electricity, store it in a battery, then put that in a book light that the local dairy farmer uses while he's in the outhouse.

9. Use the energy it to power a UV laser and setup a kiosk in the mall to etch key fobs and friendship bracelets.

8. Toast a bagel then decide you ain't hungry and feed it to yer dog.

7. Power a kiln that you use to fire some handmade pottery that you intentionally break.

6. Beam the energy into one of those Easter eggs with the window in it so they can live in that little house.

5. Materialize them feet first into a quick-drying bock of concrete situated in the middle of a Port-O-John farm at a chili cookoff.

4. Aim them at the Christmas tree so they spend their last minutes all 'twinkley'.

3. Use the energy to power your woodburning project of copying the Gutenberg Bible onto hundreds of cedar shingles.

2. Fire them into the Waxahatchie Superconducting Supercollider, particularly if they were a NASCAR fan. WEEEEEEE!

1. Rematerialize them as felt material for use on the beak of one of those drinking birds that tilts back…and forth…and back…and forth…..forever.

So a new vernacular has entered the office, (courtesy of a coworker's daughter) as depicted by this illustration on my wall. The speach bubbles change frequently, but this one is particularly funny, IMHO anyhow...

Thanks Lita!

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!

****Rant Warning: The following words are the feelings and thoughts of our CEO, Founder, and Urinal-Cake Taste-Tester Zane T. Dark and in no way represent the feelings, thoughts, or infant daydreams of InZane Industries Incorporated, it's subsidiaries, sponsors, relatives, distant cousins, or anyone we are trying to impress to get lucky.***** 

This is an open letter to the low-life monkey-fisters who authored the:

'Your computer is broadcasting an IP address making it vulnerable to attack!'

...followed by, if you're willing to click on 'OK', an explanation of why you need the services and products of:

InternetALERT

..who then goes off on how they will save you from the evils of the internet. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for colorful and creative ways to make money as long as you're not hurting anyone or stealing from them; and I'm also the kind of person who tries not to let my vocabulary degrade into name-calling when I get upset....

But you pusillanimous bottom-feeding fear-mongers suck the shit out of a dead man's ass with a straw!

Playing off the fears of people to sell your product is not only opportunistically heinous, it's a cruel and morally bankrupt way of shocking people into buying your obviously low-rate bat guano load of code. And it's not that you're lying...but you ARE playing off of the ignorance of others;

1. 
   
   EVERY request made on the Internet is done through an IP address that is unique at the time. Saying that it's 'your computer' is misleading.
   
   
2. 
   
   Your claim that, using your amazing 'tracing' abilities that "InternetALERT can actually track down and give you a visual map of your Intruder's ISP location, allowing you to see where your attacker came from! This allows you to see where in the world your attacker is located.  NOTE: This is a map of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) that the attacker is using to get their Internet access." this is total gerbil droppings you lying sacks of ditch water! The folks you REALLY need to be worried about can't be caught this way anyhow, and this information only makes someone think they're James Rockford gonna go bust some internet heads. I can only hope that you get dragged into a lawsuit that stems from this information you intellectual pigmies.
   
   
3. 
   
   And last but not least, I hope a herd of grandparents descends upon you like a wave of professional wrestlers because you made them panic and they lost 28 megs of pictures they had spent all month scanning in because they reloaded the computer or turned it off in a panic because you purposefully made the ad look like an operating system alert pop-up window.

In short, you deserve to be taken out back and have the crap beat out of you with a burlap sack full of fresh East Texas roadkill. Had I the time and money, I'd have this little ad made into a plaque, and a thousand years from now, archeologists would marvel and entire degree specializations would crop up on the myriad speculations of how a plaque that large could fit up a human rectum. Your rectum.

Life, at times, is full of simple pleasures. Lately it's been blowing stuff up real good.

My other car just happens to be a Bonneville...if it only had the same weapon loadout; I'd be a happy man!

Just recently I've had to deal with some pretty despicable behavior in the workplace and my personal life and I really have the need to vent. I don't think it's fair that I only seem to be venting in this log these days...but I promise to get over it soon. I don't really dwell on this stuff, but there ARE times when it helps to type things out. I'm sure some of you have felt this, otherwise I wouldn't subject you to it.

For those of you who only know me from what I write, I'm much easier on the psyche when I'm talking to people in person. I try to be kind and helpful, almost genetically tend toward reserved and understanding even though at times I don't want to be, and though I HATE the word, I've been called a 'nice' person more than once in my life. Those of you who read this actually see and interact with a side of me that is not obvious to many. A girlfriend of mine once told me it was because I just needed time to get comfortable with people before I began actually *telling* them what they were saying was a load of shit instead of just thinking it and nodding understandingly. Of course, you could also equate it with not picking your nose in front of company, or trying not to fart in church. I leave that to you.

However, many people that I interact with through my job make the mistake of equating kindness with weakness; being helpful with being easily manipulated; understanding with gullible. Then when the door slams shut on long, protracted discussions....sessions of understanding dialog suddenly take on the air of hopping blindfolded through a high school gym filled with sharp-toothed bear traps, they get offended, insulted, and wonder where the helpful old me went.

They burn up their currency with me by being treacherous, lying assholes patting themselves on the back for how well they've mastered the proverbial 'mind-fuck' in the work place, too wrapped up in keeping their Amazon Mud Slide of deceptions from sucking them under while preening their egos in the perceived reflections of the insecurities of others that they don't even notice I've dropped them in the grease until they're checking their laces and notice that smell is them. And then they get angry because they thought they could 'trust' me.

Yea, trust me let you use me as a step ladder....stop yer whining Skippy...just a few seconds ago you were bragging about how you could talk anyone into anything, how weak minded people were. Now you're all done save the Lowrey's salt and you're crying foul?

To quote Bugs: "Think fast, rabbit." Because you are now ON the  menu.

I feel better now...thanks for reading this far.

The irony of Sunday gives way to the drudgery of a Monday; though at times, as endless as the problems I'm tasked with solving seem to be, I feel a bit like Jane Jetson complaining about her 'button pushing finger' , ya know. I mean, just a few minutes ago, I'm looking at images of a mudslide caused by Hurricane Lili pounding the snot out of the Caymans, I see the missing email addresses of thousands of people in my own company whom I know right now are probably *still* looking for a job, 4 people are gunned down on a bus in Kashmir, and after all, what is it that we *don't* know about Iraq that we perhaps should.

So I'm making an extra effort *not* to complain; things can be (and ARE for many) so much worse. I could wake up and find out that the internet was all just a program to control me so that it could turn me.....into this:

{holds up a silver crumb tray with brush he stole from the Whitehouse collection}

I considered leaving this private, but perhaps some of you have had this happen to you, so I'd like to share it with you if I may.

I just found a calendar for 2001 that had different family dates filled in. Anniversaries, birthdays, appointments, as so fourth. It was in my mom's handwriting. At first, I thought she was in the habit of doing this a year in advance...but as I looked over the calendar, I noticed times and dates toward the end of it that someone wouldn't have put on a calendar a year in advance. About the time I realized that she had probably picked up a calendar for the wrong year and had been filling it out (only the last few months had entries I realized), I got to December of 2001. Written in my mom's handwriting were the words 'Blue Christmas'.

The irony in the room is so thick I can't breath; I keep dreading the day that I can't remember what her voice sounds like and wondering when my brain will stop making connections to things like this. I suppose it never will...and would I really want it to?

Nah, not really.

There are times when I miss her so much I can't think straight; people usually see me like this and ask if I'm feeling well. To which I'll usually tell them I'm fine, or for my better friends, blame it on their breath and offer them a mint. Speaking of dark humor, the calendar was from a drug company and was entitled '2001: prevention, health, wellness'. What are the odds?