Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I´m writing this in a very small Internet Café in Buenos Aires (three PCs and five phone booths). Amazingly, there´s a lot of those here in the city center, the average seems to be about one or two per block. And it costs between 1 and 1.50 pesos per hour (30 to 50 US cents).

This post will have to be very short as we´re due to leave for yet another tour in half an hour. Buenos Aires is a very interesting city – wide avenues, many old buildings, great restaurants, sophisticated shopping. However, the streets are dirty and many historical buildings are either abandoned or in terrible disrepair. I´ve taken lots of pictures and will post them as soon as we get back, in a couple of days.

Posted by AcronymBOY:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

Several modern browsers seem to be dropping the “www.” in front of domain names under certain circumstances (like auto-completion), so I was getting a certain volume of complaints that while http://www.brockerhoff.net/ worked, / fell through into my provider’s default page instead of redirecting or providing a 404, as is customary.

Yesterday I finally got through to support, and they promptly misunderstood, taking http://www.brockerhoff.net/ completely off the air (but making / work correctly).

Due to several circumstances I was off the net until today in the morning, when I was shocked to see what happened, and am now trying to have them fix it ASAP. If you’re seeing the “www.” in front of the URL, this has been fixed.

My apologies for the mixup…

Why would people even use the www prefix? It’s typing out a subdomain that is not needed at all. It’s just as silly as having www.forums.support.domain.com or having your mail server be www.mail.domain.com. It’s extra DNS work that could have been avoided had subdomains been used as what they were intended to be used for (mainly pointing to different physical machines all serving the same domain, useful for large insistutions like colleges, businesses, and such).

But I do like what you’ve done here with the blog and phpBB and including the entire trackback thing. I like it.

Posted by Renate:
Hahaaa,

I took this “original” IQ test some weeks back. Hark, my result was:

Congratulations, Renate!

Your IQ score is 129

This number … blah blah bla……. we can tell your Intellectual Type is an Insightful Linguist.

This means you are highly intelligent and have the natural fluency of a writer and the visual and spatial strengths of an artist. Those skills contribute to your creative and expressive mind. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your test results.

Well, I’m just insightful enough to not want to shell out the asked price.

However, I gave my e-mail address and have been swamped – until I unsubscribed – with all kind of invitations to take other tests. ….

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

Women’s words, Wagner … and who are you?

Clare Short’s real resignation this week and her statement (published in Tuesday’s Independent) restored some of my regard for the woman, almost lost when she proved me wrong just before the war.

Posted by Rafael Fischmann:

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

We’re packing for another trip… this time a short one, to Buenos Aires (Argentina). We’re leaving tomorrow (Friday, Aug.15th) very early in the morning and return next Tuesday (Aug.19th) around midnight.

Chances to get to an Internet Café are low, as Monday is a national holiday. But expect some nice photos to be posted later next week.

Enjoy and relax!

We’re packing for another trip… this time a short one, to Buenos Aires (Argentina). We’re leaving tomorrow (Friday, Aug.15th) very early in the morning and return next Tuesday (Aug.19th) around midnight.

Chances to get to an Internet Café are low, as Monday is a national holiday. But expect some nice photos to be posted later next week.

The subject of IQ tests came up the other day while chatting with a friend – and promptly I found some people linking to The Original IQ Test. It had been many years since my last such test, so I tried it. Some questions were extremely simple, and others were culturally biased – you need to complete some popular sayings, a couple of which were unfamiliar to me.

Soon I was rewarded with the message:

Congratulations, Rainer!

Your IQ score is 133

This number is the result of a formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on Emode’s Ultimate IQ test. Your IQ score is scientifically accurate…

…We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test, and according to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Facts Curator.

This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You’ve got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills – which puts you in the same class as brainiacs like Bill Gates. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your test results..

They asked for my e-mail address and several demographic data, and offered to e-mail me a 15-page report detailing my results. For $14.95; while I’d like to know which answers I’ve gotten wrong, this is way too much. I also declined an offer to get a newsletter containing horoscopes (!) and information about further tests such as Do You Have a Sixth Sense, What’s Your Superpower and Find Your Ideal Sexual Partner.

While the “133” figure matches about what I expected (an IQ test I took as a child came up 140, and I seem to recall that others I took later also fell into the 130-150 range), the overall tone is extremely phony – the insistence on “scientific”, the gratuitous invention of this “Fact Curator” name, the reference to “brainiac” Bill Gates (with an image, yet!), and the ubiquitous merchandising of other products make this a site not to be taken too seriously.

I’ve just closed a deal with a Brazilian website to write a more-or-less monthly column. Names, topics and URLs will be released around September 1st.

This will be a bilingual column. The Portuguese version of each article will appear on said website, while the English version will appear here (although in a separate topic). It’s a first for me; until now, I’ve written occasional articles and papers in English, and articles in Portuguese for Macmania magazine.

Writing the same article in two languages will be a valuable exercise, I think. My usual modus operandi is to read some reference material, let the information percolate through my subconscious until a few hours before the deadline, and then produce the article in a single (albeit somewhat panicky) sitting. I suppose this won’t work for two languages, and I’m busy reviewing some reference material on writing.

One of my favorite books about writing is Lyn Dupré’s “Bugs in Writing“, and it’s long overdue for rereading. By a coincidence, a post at Ronaldo’s Superfície Reflexiva led me to Crawford Kilian‘s Writing for the Web; Crawford is one of my favorite “alternate history” authors, although it’s been years since I found any of his books. Also coincidentally, he taught a webwriting workshop in São Paulo, Brazil, around the time I was there, and lives in Vancouver, a favorite city I visited a couple of months before that. Anyway, Crawford’s articles are a great resource for writers and I’ll be reading them most carefully…