Solipsism Gradient

Mario Jorge Passos directed me (by e-mail) to Fastfame‘s website, apparently a Taiwanese manufacturer of PC motherboards, LCD monitors, and other goodies:

Fastfame is a professional manufacture of PC hardware process and assembly computer motherboard and interface card for electronic and communication as well as others.

At the bottom of the page there’s the company’s slogan:

Futer we make it brighter.

From the official site of The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference:

I am Mr. Laurent Mpeti Kabila, a senior assistant leader of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone.

I present to you an urgent and confidential request: I request your attendance at The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference. This is an excellent opportunity to meet your distinguished colleagues, learn new marketing techniques, and spend your hard-earned money. Attending this conference demands the highest trust, security and confidentiality between us.

…Keynote Address:

Dr. Hamza Kalu’s adds some historical perspective in his keynote address is titled, “From Postal Scams To Email Scams: We Have Come a Long Way Infant Child”.

…Workshop:

Grammatical errors: What’s the optimal number?

…”I AM FIRMLY CONVINCED THAT USING UPPERCASE LETTERS MAKES MY WRITING MORE EFFECTIVE.” – Mr. Ibrahim Ahmed

Now why didn’t I think of that…?

Regarding our previous discussion here (and a few posts before that), Erik J. Barzesky writes that he prefers .dmg files for archival purposes:

The time for DropStuff/Deluxe has passed. I find myself using .tgz on the command line for files I know to be safe (i.e. those without resource forks). StuffIt Expander will continue to be useful for at least a little while, but for now, .dmg is the way I intend to go.

I still use DropStuff (part of Stuffit Lite) for temporarily archiving installed applications or data files, but I agree with Erik that .dmg is the best way for archiving things.

Regarding software distribution, my experience is that most users also want to archive the original .dmg, so that’s what I use for my own products.

Preparations for our trip are in progress. Dorinha has gotten the (relatively expensive) Czech visa, which is the only one she’ll need; as a German citizen, I don’t need any. Passports are in order, and plane tickets also. It turned out that our agent (Fátima at Portal Viagens) managed to squeeze the flights between Belo Horizonte and São Paulo into the KLM ticket at practically no extra cost! Kudos to Fátima and KLM.

After some initial difficulties in contacting other members of the far-flung Brockerhoff clan, it seems that a general family meeting is scheduled in Düsseldorf for Saturday, June 28th. I’ll post the exact time and address soon…

Because of the meeting, it looks like we’ll drive counter-clockwise instead of clockwise, so the probable sequence is now: Frankfurt, Ingelheim, probably Konstanz, Vienna, Budapest, Brno, Prague, Dresden, Berlin and Düsseldorf, then back to Frankfurt.

I’m not taking my iBook, so I’ll depend on Internet cafés to keep up-to-date. My new digital camera is supposed to arrive this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to post photos as soon as I come back.

I’m testing GlobeAlive. Very interesting concept, although still rough around the edges – think “iChat with reputation management”. The Mac OS X GlobeAlive Desktop is still alpha-quality; after my Europe trip I may look into writing a better one in my copious spare time.

Yesterday I had occasion to chat with Mark Carey, another GlobeAlive user. He also blogged about our chat in Web Dawn; thanks, Mark! Be sure to also check out his Seinfeld page.

Doc Searls pointed at the Geek Test and of course I had to go and check it out.

Hmm… it seems I just scored “33.92505% – Total Geek” (the top scorer got “69.82249% – Geek God”). Of course, I had to go back and check where this surprisingly low score came from , and found out:

There’s no item for “takes frequent geek tests”

I checked only one of the “I play X, Y or Z game” options

I checked only one of the “I collect X, Y or Z” options

I checked none of the “I want to be X, Y or Z” options

I checked only two of the “I watch TV/movie” options.

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:
I’ve got The Crow as well, but I don’t think it was very accurate. That’s ok, it’s just a quiz in the internet, people vary a lot and it’s just impossible to make something like this that show up certain things about everyone. Nice tip, anyway.

Posted by Web Dawn – Rebirth of the:
Web Dawn – Rebirth of the Social Marketplace wrote

I have been talking recently about making blog comments more like conversations, more like discussion forums. Well, today I met someone who has taken the reverse approach by using forum software to publish a blog. Rainer Brockerhoff started with a…