Welcome to Zen.

This little program is a simple "Fortune Cookie" application. It reads a bunch of
sayings from the file Zen.txt, located in the same folder as the application
itself, and spits one out at random. I have an alias of the program in my Startup
Items folder, so my computer greets me with a pithy saying every time I start up.

The Zen.txt file is plain text. You can modify the file at will. All fortunes are
separated by two RETURN characters (with no space in between).

This program is similar to "Cookie," the fortune cookie program first written in
FORTRAN for early DEC PDP computers, and since then ported to almost every
computer and operating system in the world. I myself rewrote Cookie in PCL for
DECsystem-20 computers back in 1984, and again in Z-80 assembly language for the
TRS-80 in 1985.

This incarnation started out as a test program to test the routines I was working
on for Onyx, the game of sexual exploration I've written. Onyx has a fortune
cookie built into it; the newest versions store their fortunes in an external
text file, hence this program. It's cute, it works, so I decided to release it as
a standalone application. Since it's different in flavor from the original
Cookie, which was strictly a one-shot, command-line program, and since the
fortune cookie is part of the Zen square in Onyx, I named it Zen rather than
Cookie.

This program is "neatstuffware," meaning that if you like it, send me something
neat...I don't know, a postcard or something. You may freely distribute this
program, so long as the application itself is unmodified and you include this
README file. You can also feel free to stop by my Web site at
www.xeromag.com/franklin.html to check out other fun stuff I may write, or drop
me a line at tacitr@aol.com.

Enjoy!

Franklin Veaux PO Box 290552 Tampa, FL 33687 tacitr@aol.com

http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html
