Right ON! An Italian doctor says Coffee is Good for you! So there!

-Z

…and now I’m down by one, because i broke one of them on Sunday.

Actually, someone else broke it for me. I took back what I said about her mother, but now I’m stuck wearing this brace for a month. This puts my guitar playing on hold, unless I use it as a slide… It also does not make me any friends driving down the road, perpetually flipping off the world. (Before I was just doing that mentally)

-Z

My will states that when I die I will have a viking funeral. My body will be loaded onto a longboat, which will be set on fire and pushed out into Lake Superior.

But Celestis would have been my second choice. For a reasonable fee, they will take a “symbolic portion” of your cremated body into space.

Their Earth Rise Service (Starting at $695) will lift your ash into space, and return you to earth.

Their Earth Orbit Service (Starting at $2495) launches your ash into earth orbit.

The Luna Service (Starting at $9,995) will send one gram of your ash to the moon.

The Voyager Service (Starting at $12,500) will send your ash into deep space…way past Uranus. [Editors Note: Sorry man, had to do it - Z]

Any of these options are better than being turned into jewelery.

-Z

Go here or call 1-888-382-1222 to add your phone number to the National DO NOT CALL registry. It won’t stop the following:

“political organizations, charities, or companies with which you have an existing business relationship.”

And it won’t stop your weird relatives from calling, but according to the website, it should stop ALL other telemarketers from calling! Finally, some tax dollars put to some good use…

-Z

I was unloading groceries from the trunk of my car when a large, bald butcher named Max (No, I’m not making this up) walked by and noticed that my grocery bags all proclaimed, “I (Heart) my CUB!”

Unfortunately, Max is from the local, independently owned and operated grocery store.

Just as Max the Butcher prepared to carve me into thin slices, my neighbor showed up. Fortunately, my neighbor is the friend whom Max was about to visit. My neighbor calmly reassured Max that I was simply lost, starving, drunk, and new to the neighborhood, and that I ALWAYS patronize my local small business establishments, and would NEVER make such a mistake again.

What does this have to do with this compelling Computer User article by James Matthewson? The article discusses the long-term effects big stores like WalMart have on our economy. If you are upset at poor customer service, overseas outsourcing of jobs, unemployment, and jobs with low pay and no benefits, you can thank businesses like Wal-Mart and the people who choose to shop there.

I guess I didn’t need to be threated by a large, bald, butcher named Max to realize that keeping your money in the community is a wise consumer policy. It won’t stop me from buying computer parts from Newegg.com, but now I’m much more conscious of where my money goes when I shop.

-Z

The Myers-Briggs Personality Test is an interesting bit of self-revelation. Based on your (honest) answers to a group of questions, the Myers-Briggs Personality Test lumps you into one of several personality stereotypes.

The test divides personality types into four primary categories:

• (I) Introvert vs (E) Extrovert
• (N) Intuitive vs (S) Sensing
• (T) Thinking vs (F) Feeling
• (J) Judging vs (P) Perceiving

I’ve taken many styles of this test (including the official version) many times over the years and the results for me have been very repeatable. My results proclaimed me to be an INTX – The “X” meaning a rough balance between the type INTJ and INTP, but always leaning slightly toward the INTJ.

The stereotype of the INTJ personality is the “absent-minded professor” I guess I put more stock in this assessment of my personality than my Zodiac sign…

Take the test yourself here for free: Myers-Briggs Personality Test

-Z

In response to those who feel the need to advertise their beliefs by affixing them to the rear of their vehicles, evolvefish.com offers some alternatives for those of us who feel the need to make fun of them.

-CZ

This blog post is intended for those prone to send e-mails containing confidential information; the rest of you can ignore this:

I recently received an e-mail with this thoughtful disclaimer/signature at the end…

“The information contained in this message is privileged and confidential information intended only for the use of the individual or entity named. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby on notice that you are in possession of confidential and privileged information. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. You will immediately notify the sender of your inadvertent receipt and return the original message to the sender.”

This may come as a surprise, but there is no such thing as “confidential” e-mail. That would be like “confidentially” yelling at someone across the parking lot at Burger King, or sending a “confidential” postcard through the post.

Furthermore, unless you have some kind of signed agreement with the recipient, any e-mail you send becomes the property of the recipient  as soon as you push the Send button, and they can do whatever they like with it. If they want to post it on a website, if they want to forward it to all of your friends to make you look like a fool, or if they want to pay Janet Jackson to tattoo it on her breast and then whip it out on national television, then expect it to happen, and no cowardly-half-hearted-attempt-at-ass-covering-pseudo-disclaimer is likely stop it.

With this knowledge, we can now reinterpret the disclaimer to read:

“I am an idiot who truly does not understand that e-mail is an incredibly insecure format that flows through the hands of many, many people, each of whom could quite easily read my communications and use them to get me fired, arrested, or (at the very least) publicly humiliated. I am hoping that you are as stupid as I am, and that this ‘disclaimer’ will trick you into believing that you have no right to ‘disseminate, distribute, or copy’ this e-mail.”

Please send “privileged and confidential” information by registered mail, or perhaps via encrypted/encoded e-mail, and take any ridiculous disclaimers like this off of your e-mail signatures. Honestly! Next, I suppose you will want me to sign a waiver before speaking with you at the water cooler…

-CZ

So I get this letter from one of my “fans”…

“…I was kicking around the net and decided to check out your site, and I have a question. Are you going to do something with it or is it an experiment, like leaving milk in the fridge for a couple or three years, to see if it becomes sentient and kills itself for lack of content?” -J.S.

Dear J.S. In answer to your query, it is not my postings that have stagnated. It is in fact, my Life which has stagnated and once I do something noteworthy (musically or otherwise) I will certainly post it.

Meanwhile, in order to stimulate less-unrecent postings, I have adopted Blogger to simplify website updates for this page. [Update 2008 - conradzero.com gave up blogger.com for Lent in 2008. The back-end has now been replaced with WordPress. -CZ] Here you will find disassociated ramblings, drunken discourse on morals and ethics, links to obscure websites, smart-ass answers to your smart-ass e-mails, and the usual stuff bloggers blog about:

• “Guess what I had for breakfast this morning!!!”
• “Here is the guy I always get mistaken for!!!”
• “Oh yeah, sometimes this guy too…”
• “SpongeBob Rulez!”

Blog on,
-CZ

Video Games in the Olympics? Of course the Olympics has primarily been for sports and physical events, but now that geeks rule and uncool is the new cool, I can totally see the following events being part of the New Olympics:

• Video Games
• Linux Networking Triathlon (Install Linux / Connect to Wireless Network / Connect to Print Server)
• Texting using a Cell Phone Keypad
• Info filtering Triathlon (Process 1000 RSS feeds for relevant content / Filter 1000 e-mails for spam / Identify phishing sites from 1000 pages)
• Hacking into Networked SQL database through Cisco Firewall

Spelling Bees are also gaining popularity in the media, (which tells you just how far down the toilet ‘reality programming’ has gone) so I guess that might be an event with some audience draw.

LARP-ing in the Olympics

I still think LARP (Live Action Role Play) should be an Olympic Sport. For those who don’t know what LARP is, watch this.

And this

Blog on,
-CZ