I just dreamed I had a job working for TechTV’s The Screen Savers!!!!!!  And Leo was there… and Kevin was there… and Morgan was there… and Patrick was there too!  But Morgan isn’t even on TSS anymore, and Sarah and Jessica weren’t there, but whatever.  Wow, it was so cool!!  I guess I must really think of those folks as my pals after watching their show every day for so long.

I was working behind the scenes, doing gopher work or something.  I was talking to Kevin backstage, telling him I had to deliver something or another to the guys on the set; they were in the process of filming the live show.  Kevin hadn’t heard my music before and I happened to have a cassette (?!) on me, so I gave it to him to listen to later.  He was totally nice and cool, just like he is on TV.  So he led me to the edge of the set and I could see them filming. They were doing a desk bit with Morgan and Leo and some other person.  Patrick was leaning against the wall watching them in front of me.  He turned around and greeted me like he’d known me for ages.  I just watched the show for few minutes and then woke up and told John about it.

Later on the dream actually continued, which almost never happens for me.  I found out that Kevin had taken my cassette and given it to Leo and Patrick. And they played it the air!!  "Music by our own Edith Frost!!!" Of course they’d never do this in real life but they played about 4 full songs off it, including one of my brand-new ones.  I was a little mortified that they included that song ‘cuz I didn’t feel the recording was ready for prime time. I was in a state of happy confusion, very flattered that they’d done a surprise segment on me, but also confused because I wasn’t at home OR at work, and hadn’t seen it myself, I only found out via a phone call or something.  I was hoping I’d get home and find it waiting on my TiVo.  I tried to track down my dad on the phone to let him know, but we were both on cellphones so I could barely hear him.  I asked him… "where are you Daddy, are you still in the hospital or what?" Of course he had no idea what TSS is, but he thought it was pretty cool.  I told him I hadn’t even checked my e-mail yet, I imagined I must’ve have tons of messages from people visiting and posting comments to my site.

Finally I got home and opened up my mail, and… UH-OH!!!  Somebody was telling me my site had been hacked and I’d better go look at it right away.  I pulled it up and it was true, but it wasn’t too bad… somebody had just placed a giant background image on the front page, but all the text was still there, though it wasn’t very readable over the image. But they hadn’t even changed my password or nothin’; it was just some kid having fun at my expense.  The image was actually kinda cool, it was a collage of different retro-style pictures like something you’d see in the Desktops section of Chickenhead.  A guy in a Fifties-style hat, strange foodstuffs etc.

Reading the comments people had posted, I learned that the hacker had used a scripting tool to break into my site and insert the background image.  They referred to the tool as ‘chocolate’ and told me it was just a prank-tool, not something a serious hacker would bother with.  I looked it up and found out that ‘chocolate’ was just a nickname; the proper name of the tool was ‘crocodile’.  All it did was insert a background image on someone’s page, nothing else.  So I wasn’t too worried.  I went in and found all my stuff was still there untouched, so I rebuilt my index page and all was back to normal.  I then went to my site’s control panel to check my bandwidth, realizing that I might have gone over my limit with all that extra traffic.  WHOAH… I’d had over 20,000 unique visitors in the past few hours, and my bandwidth was through the roof!!  There was a red notice that I needed to contact Support to make payment arrangements, but thank god they hadn’t gone so far as to throttle my site.  Then I guess the dream was over and I never found out how much money I owed.  I’m glad, ‘cuz it was a pretty cool dream and I didn’t want to have to ruin it by worrying about money.  :-)