In which I voice my rage at the internet

There is so much stuff for me to be upset about . . . Where do I even start?

Maybe it is the ongoing chair situation which has me on edge. In order to "resolve" that issue, I stole a chair from a conference room. But to keep that chair through the occasional trip to the restroom or to get coffee, I taped a sign on the back which reads,"Please don't steal my chair. Seriously. If you do, I will hunt you down and kill you -- Probably by bludgeoning you with this very chair". This accomplished three things:

1. It got people thinking about improvised weaponry in the workplace. In that way, I've made my office a little bit more like a Ninja Training Center. (New Year's Resolution #242 -- Check!)

2. Someone asked me about the sign while I was sitting in the chair and I replied that it was on the chair when I stole it and that the original owner needed more follow through on his weak threats. This last bit I yelled over the cubicle walls as though in challenge.

3. Most importantly, no one has wheeled away with my chair.

Okay. I apologize for not being better about posting my progress about this, but yesterday I broke the 5000 point mark with Diet Coke Rewards. 5024, to be fully accurate, though I still have more to type in today sometime. I think I've actually replaced all my bodily fluids with caramel color and carbonated water.

There is nothing at all worth buying on the Coke Reward Points page. Really. Go look. They had a Nintendo Wii for about 15 minutes last year, but now there is just nothing. Also, the site is Flash-based and annoys the hell out of me. I hate going there and I hate drinking Diet Coke and I hate spending points on stupid sweepstakes. I'm only continuing to drink the stuff now so that eventually I can trade the points in for stock options. Or a replacement liver.

I've been working on some content for a web page a bit at a time. I hate having to test it in two browsers. In Firefox it looks okay, but if I open Internet Explorer and look at it through that it looks like crap. Also, the mere act of opening Internet Explorer probably instantly sends all my banking information to Al-Queda, formats the three closest hard drives and (from fifteen miles away) tells my cat that she has weight issues. I'll admit, the security bulletins about Internet Explorer seem to have melded into each other in my head and possibly mixed themselves with some especially paranoid Wikipedia entries. Here is the point:

The internet has standards. And by "standards" I mean a regular format, certainly not an ethical baseline. A friend talked to me about "Furries" last night and I fell asleep quietly weeping. Note: There is no link for "Furries" intentionally. If you want to look that up, feel free. I'm just not helping.

So, back to my hate-fueled rant, HTML should look the same in whatever browser a person uses to view it. I know there are work-arounds for content-creation people, and I use them. But I shouldn't have to.

AT&T says they will probably filter the internet traffic their subscribers produce, at the very least moving certain protocols up and down the traffic priority scale. Basic web? Sure. Email? Maybe. File sharing? Even the "C0mpl3t3 Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng Masterwork Collectors Edition Digitally Signed Open-Format Archive"? Oh, hell no.

This means, in essence, my right to distribute my personal writings is less important to AT&T than someone's search results on the term "Furries". My right to free speech is at least as important as that. Maybe.

And I'm upset that this news is from AT&T, because that means that the Comcast people (who already filter content in this way) are making sense to some demographic I fear may have the right to vote.

As a final note, my Spell Check really, really wants me to use a capital "I" when typing "internet".

No way, internet. Not until you earn back my respect.