The One with the Thoughts of Frans

Dear,

I know this mail may come as a surprise to you, since we do not
know ourselves or have any previous contact before now, my purpose of
writing you is this.
We believe that you would be in a position to
help us in our bid to transfer the sum of twenty-seven million five
hundred thousand dollars ($27.5m) into a foreign account.
We are
members of a special committee for budget and planning of the ministry
of petroleum, this committee is principally concerned with contract
appraisals and approvals in order of priorities as regards capital
project of the federal government. With our positions, we have
successfully secured for ourselves the sum of twenty-seven million five
hundred thousand united states dollars ($27.5m).
The present
government in my country are seeking the support of foreign
governments, so they gave directive to all federal parastatals to
compile and settle all foreign contractors being owned for contract
that has been executed, so our plan is to include the name that you
will provide us, as one of the contractors being owed in my
corporation, the Nigerian national petroleum corporation (NNPC).
What
we need from you is (1) a company name or a name of which to use as the
company that did execute the contract (2) an account even if empty into
which the fund will be transferred, this is because our code of conduct
prohibits government officials from operation or owning foreign
account.
It has been agreed that the owner of the account will be
compensated with US$8.3million of the remitted funds; we will keep
US$16.5million, while US$2.7million has been set aside to offset
expenses and pay the necessary taxes. It may also interest you to know
that two years ago similar transaction was carried out with one Mr.
George Brooks of (BROGE INTERNATIONAL TRADING CORPORATION) at number
135, East 57th street, 28th Floor, New York 10022 with telephone (212)
308-7788 and telex number 6731689, after the agreement between both
partners in which he was to take 25% of the remitted fund (fifteen
million united state dollars $15.000.000.) was duly transferred into
his account only to be disappointed on our arrival in New York as we
were told that Mr. Brooks was no longer on that address, while his
telephone number had been re-allocated to somebody else, that was how
we lost our money to Mr. Brooks.
This time around we need a more
reliable and trusted person or a reputed company to transact this
project with hence this proposal to you, so if you can prove yourself
to be trustworthy ready to partake in this project then we are prepare
to do business with you.
What we need from you is the assurance that
you will let us have our share after the transfer of the fund ($27.5
million) into your account.
If this proposal satisfies you,we can
advice you on modalities of the transaction, and note that all
modalities has been worked out and once started will take less than two
weeks with the absolute support of all concerned.
Note that this
transaction is 100% risk free and totally safe now or after the fund
transfer to your account. I will also like you to forward to me your
telephone number for easy communication. Please treat as urgent and
confidential as I look forward to your reply.

Best Regards,

From
Engr.Nelson Barth
N.N.P.C

I wonder if I should start a conversation fooling the senders of such mails sometime. I once saw this site from a guy who always replied seriously and got the scammer saying all kinds of brilliant things when he said he had received another similar offer. The scammer would explain all the methods used, but still said he was trustworthy himself. On the other hand, it’s been done. At best I’d get similarly funny results, so it’d be a waste of time.

I placed a reasonably big order at bol.com yesterday, basically combining a birthday present to self (The Wee Free Men) and a few things I wanted to order anyway. I would’ve ordered some of them earlier of course, but the sending costs are always € 1,95. This way it only adds about 40 cents per item. 😉

Aantal Prijs Totaalbedrag Titel Levertijd
———————————————————————-
1 EUR 9.99 EUR 9.99 Piranha, Game 2-3 weken
Controller Black
1 EUR 8.99 EUR 8.99 The Wee Free Men 3-4 werkdagen
1 EUR 7.99 EUR 7.99 Diamond Dogs 3-4 werkdagen
1 EUR 12.99 EUR 12.99 Smash 3-4 werkdagen
1 EUR 15.00 EUR 15.00 Mezmerize Op werkdagen voor 17.00
uur
besteld, morgen in huis

Subtotaal EUR 54.96
Verzendkosten EUR 1.95
Totaalbedrag EUR 56.91

Anyway, the funny thing is that Mezmerize is an “order before 17:00 on workdays, at your place before 12:00 next day”-item. The Piranha Gamecube controller was a similar item last week when I first considered buying it.

Turns out it turned into 2-3 weeks expected delivery time yesterday.

When I checked early this morning (around 8:00 before I left like 20 minutes later) it said Mezmerize and the Piranha controller had been sent. Expected time unchanged. Later when I just got home (10:30) a friendly delivery guy came by. He brought a pretty big package. As expected, it contained both the controller and the album.

I just thought it was sort of funny, considering that it still says that the expected delivery time is 2-3 weeks, yet it already arrived.

Of course it’s always better to say it will take a while and deliver it in a shorter time than the other way around. Perhaps game publishers could learn from that.

On a different note, definitely consider buying Mezmerize and Hypnotize, it’s basically a brilliant double album by System of a Down. The price for Mezmerize had finally dropped to an acceptable level and I will buy Hypnotize as well in a few months when it’s somewhat cheaper.

Since both Bol.com and I use Postbank (and thus have Giro) my online payment (which I make after arrival and checking the items) is always instantly. The system thus also updates and changes the status to sent without any extra information (about delivery time). So the funny thing has disappeared, alas. 😉

Twenty is a composite number, its proper divisors being 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10. It is also the sum of the first four triangular numbers, making it a tetrahedral number. 20 is the smallest abundant number that is not a multiple of 3. It is a Harshad number and a self number.

I thought it was quite good. It was sent a while ago, of course. If you didn’t receive one, happen to read this entry and happen to be close tomorrow, just drop by. Otherwise don’t feel disappointed, I didn’t invite you because I didn’t think you’d make it anyway. 😉

Geachte heren,

U bent met behulp van de data in onze computer geselecteerd als de meest intelligente en getalenteerde mensen in West-Europa. Daarom hebben we besloten U in te lichten over geweldige kansen die Uw leven kunnen veranderen, dit is geen spam!

Dit geweldige aanbod is slechts beperkt geldig en daarom hopen we dat U op onze bijeenkomst komt om de voorlichting bij te wonen. Deze is op donderdag 9 februari, rond de klok van 21 uur. De geheime locatie is Matenweg 6, “Patio Melba”, op de campus. Mocht U niet weten waar dat is, de route vind U op http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11

Mocht iemand U naar inlichtingen hierover vragen, pretendeert U dan dat het een “verjaardagsfeestje van Frans en Ivo” betreft.

Wij verwachten U op 9 februari te zien,

Hoogachtend

Ivo Stammis en Frans de Jonge

Or, in English:

Gentlemen,

With the data in our computer, you have been selected as the most intelligent and talented people in Western-Europe. Therefore we are telling you about great opportunities which can change your life. This is not spam!

This magnificent offer is only valid for a short while and therefore we hope to see you at our meeting. This is at Thursday February the 9th, around the clock of 21 hours. De secret location is Matenweg 6, “Patio Melba”, on the campus. May you not know where this is, you can find the route at http://melba.student.utwente.nl/index.php?id=11

If anybody asks what this is about, pretend it’s the “birthdaypartay of Frans and Ivo”.

Regards,

Ivo Stammis and Frans de Jonge

Tell me what you think about the image hover effects as demonstrated on my post about my music collection. I don’t really like it, but I’m not sure what else to do. I’ll probably write a behaviour which removes the CSS hover effect and inserts a clickable source link below the downsized image, leaving the CSS hover for people without Javascript. People with Opera, Javascript disabled and drag=255 will probably be annoyed though. You can’t have everything. 😉

I also added a line to my stylesheet for code as displayed in the user stylesheet I posted recently. I think it’s fine, but feel free to drop suggestions (smaller font perhaps) if you please. This is nothing new, I just forgot to add it to my “final” version of the stylesheet before.

I just updated to the latest WordPress version. The uploading took a while, despite multiple threads and my fast connection. Perhaps I should simply have put it to 50 simultaneous connections or so for this operation. Luckily not much has changed so that my custom Atom file (for 1.0 rather than 0.3) still functions fine. I noticed that the (in my eyes useless) TinyMCE editor took up most of the time however. I just thought deleting the files involved from my planned uploads would be harder than to wait a little longer while doing other things.

I thought I’d inform people who don’t know me a little better about the fact that I use valid HTML (and CSS etcetera). When I had done that I thought it would actually be much more important to give credit to a few people. Thanks Ethan and Tom, you’re mentioned on my about page now.

Who doesn’t love a new toy/tool? And best of all, it’s free. I consider the Opera 9 technical preview 2 to be far more exiting than IE7 beta 2 or the latest Firefox nightly. “Living on the edge” as I am, I will migrate my custom settings and start to use it as my main browser. Not that I ever felt on the edge with an Opera technical preview (except perhaps with the experimental BitTorrent implementation), so kudos for that.

I am not too sure about the new thumbnails if you hover over tabs. As I seldomly use that anyway I decided to enable them as well for ctrl+tab. It seems to slow down things a little without being really useful, but I’m going to leave it enabled for a while to see if I like it. Perhaps it’s useful if I have more than 30 pages open, but I seldomly have and in the few cases I do have so many windows open, I consider the windows manager the most convenient way to deal with them in Opera.

Then there’s the addition of widgets, but you should know that I uninstalled Konfabulator quickly after trying it once it became free. For now the only widget I considered interesting enough to enable was the analog clock, which is not interesting at all, especially since I use the ASD Clock (don’t mind the design, I’ll be involved in creating something good looking, semantic and standards compliant in the future).

Anne wrote about it. Tim wrote about it. Moose posted about his personal work on the internal stylesheets and, of course, updated the designer setup. I personally do keep the risky Javascript enabled however, so if you’re like me, keep in mind that you’ll have to edit that. Moose’s idea is of course to only enable Javascript on sites you trust and keep it disabled anywhere else except to enable it to quickly check something out, but I’m lazy for now. First I should update my site-specific styles to the new method anyway.

I don’t think there’s more to tell, except perhaps where to get it and where to read the changelog.

I only just noticed. The history is finally similar to IE’s history, which, as far as I’m concerned, is good.

I use MusicBrainz Picard to automatically give my files the right names and directory structure, based on the following formula: Artist/yyyy-mm-dd Album [filetype@bitrate]/Artist -##- Track

For this purpose I use this Picard rename script.

$if2(%albumartistsort%,%artist%)/%date% %album% [%_extension%]/%albumartistsort% -$num(%tracknumber%,2)- %title%

Which, as Picard puts it, results in Beatles, The/1965-08-06 Help! [mp3]/Beatles, The -07- Ticket to Ride.mp3

Everything following this is outdated.

To illustrate the procedure I use for ripping a CD, I will rip Heathen by David Bowie. I am currently in love with this album which has managed to somewhat hide from me, despite being in my CD collection for a couple of months. Everything I could find to download from the internet was low quality, so I had to rip it.

To do this I use CDex. Development is apperently dead right now and it would be smart to replace the included lame_enc.dll by a new one to gain the advantages it offers.

After having inserted my CD I queried CDDB (or FreeDB, I don’t remember what I set it up to do). It now shows up like this and you could start ripping right away. But first you’d better adjust a few settings.

As I mentioned I’m in love with this album. The settings I selected are pretty much the highest quality you should ever aim for before going lossless with something like FLAC. 320kbps CBR mp3’s simply aren’t worth the size they take as they’re still lossy, despite having very few artifacts. For a CD you do not wish to experience on high quality you should select a more reasonable VBR quality, like VBR5 (“normal” quality). Or something lower or higher, whatever you prefer. In any case you’re advised to use VBR to get the optimal quality versus size experience. As VBR method I used VBR-new, which is the same as VBR-MTRH, I just like the look of it better in the settings this way. In the past they were different things.

Apart from this it is important to set the ripping method to full-paranoia under the CD Drive tab. That way the chance for reading errors in your ripped file is minimal.

Now that my music is ripped I have to tag and rename it to make it fit into my collection. For that purpose I use Picard, which does most of the work for me and adds the MusicBrainz tags, which are important for integration of Last.FM with the MusicBrainz database someday. Little of my music includes this, as I only use it since recently.

After dragging it into Picard and telling it so search, it found the album I just ripped. So I click tagger and it associates my tracks to the data in the database. I let it write the tags in ID3v2.3 instead of ID3v2.4 because that is more globally compatible among applications.

Everything is ready and all I have to do now is let it write the files in their new directory structure and naming structure.

But what is this. Apperently the month and day of release are unknown. Luckily there are more sources for this kind of stuff, most notably Discogs (specialised in music) and Wikipedia (many fans of artists hang around and add data like this).

And indeed the data is available in Wikipedia.

So now I can edit the folder name myself. I also added the information to MusicBrainz so that people doing a similar process to mine can profit from what I looked up.

Now that this is done I use Tag&Rename to add some additional info, album art and album review to be exact. Both are grabbed from Amazon automatically.

Now I’m nearly finished, but I need to do a few more things. Firstly I wish the release date to display completely in foobar2000, so I add it to the DATE field like DATE=yyyy\ddmm, where the backslash separates two entries. Also foobar2000 tells me the exact average bitrate of the album, which isn’t that important as it’s just an average, but it’s a nice indicator for me to see that I don’t need to rerip it. For example my Eminem albums had @160 in the folder which allowed me to quickly see that I wanted them higher quality.

So now I add the bitrate to the folder name, manually.

And a final check in foobar2000. The album is now ready to move from my temporary folder (for albums which I yet have to prepare) to my music collection folder (which is all organised like this).

As a final note, I think I should have ripped this album in VBR quality 2, as the bitrate on this album was a little overdone.

I do specifically not follow the ÜberStandard, for various reasons. I do however follow a few of the conventions in there, although I reached them by myself, before I knew of its existence.

If you think this method eats time. All that ate some time I might have used differently was writing this down. The actual process is only very short and can be done while doing other things. For example while ripping the album I already typed the first few paragraphs.

Did you consider my explanation useful or just a bunch of crap? Leave your comments. 😛

I just decided to check my stats and apperently people coming from American-based IP’s take up nearly 70% of my traffic. Not that I specifically aim for any kind of traffic, but it’s still quite a surprise. Assuming that Ethan doesn’t refresh this page all the time of course. 😛

I’ll simply quote myself. If anybody is able to tell me of a device which does this, or for example a custom firmware for a further nice device, please comment either here or there (no registration required here).

I was practically ready to order the Sony NW-A3000. It has all the options I require, such as (most importantly) gapless playback, no extra battery sucking extra expensive making stupid colour screen with the ability to play video and that kind of crap [1], all that seemed to be against it since the recent pricedrop was the kinda sucky software you had to use to get your music on it.

But what seems? It only does fucking gapless with the ugly stupid ATRAC format.

I’ve got so much music which requires gapless, practically everything does. From the Offspring to Clawfinger to Tool to Pink Floyd to The Beatles. Am I going to rerip them from cd into ATRAC? No Sony.

Just for the record, iPod, Creative stuff, iRiver stuff etcetera doesn’t do gapless at all (iRiver seems to do some fake stuff with silence detection which can cut off up to 10 seconds of intended silence).

So basically as it turns out to be the only players meeting my criteria are the Sony ones if I either reencode my mp3’s (which is of course stupid), so I’d have to rerip my cd’s onto the device (which is just as stupid really, especially as the format sucks). Alternatively there’s the old Rio Karma of a dead company which meets my criteria quite nicely, however it’s no longer available and seems to have trouble with the harddisk unlike Sony’s device.

Actually one of the reasons I use foobar2000 over Winamp is that it does gapless (yeah, there’s plugins for Winamp but they all suck except with ogg). Now I wouldn’t go back to Winamp for other reasons, but at the time I switched I viewed them as practically similar, only foobar2000 better blending in with Windows instead of a custom skin and gapless.

My current Aiwa “discman” (portable cd player) which is starting to become a little less happy with living after 6 years of trustworthy service can play gapless cd’s fine.

This crap pisses me off. So much. I actually want to spend € 200-300 on such a device, but is gapless playback so much to ask for such an amount of money? Clearly not, as an “ancient” (2004) device such as the Rio Karma shows how it should be done. Obtaining that one would be too much of a risk because of obvious reasons however.

Perhaps I’ll simply invest in upgrading my non-mobile sound equipment (i.e. the boxes) and buy a cheap-ass new discman which has all the features my old one has with the addition of mp3-cd support if my current one happens to break down after all.

[1] If I want to watch something I’ll take my laptop with me in the train and in the bus I’m not going to watch anything anyway. On my bike I can’t watch anything nor willl I watch anything when I walk although it might be possible.

At the IEblog a little was posted about ClearType in IE7. Of course this was posted at a time more suitable for Americans, so it was already filled with comments. Thus my opinion had already been posted by someone else.

Why is this a setting in IE 7 and not taken from the system wide setting in display properties?

It doesn’t make sense to me that only one app (well, two, IE and Outlook Express) should have the option specifically for that app when all apps have the option from the global property. Particularly because this isn’t a setting you would enable a per application basis.

Clear type is nice and all if you have the right monitor, but come on, this doesn’t make sense.

There were more posts on the blog, some of which actually managed to make me laugh or raise an eyebrow. I’ll quote an example. It’s an old friend for us Opera users (and more recently to Firefox users with some extension and Maxthon users).

What’s my favourite feature in the new IE? I’m an old Office hound myself, and so I really love to see Zoom. Available from the bottom right of the main browse window, this acts like it does in Word or Excel – it enlarges or reduces the entire page (text and graphics) to a specific zoom setting.

My opinion of IE has not changed, nor is it likely to change. All that’s changed is that it’s moving a bit again, which might maintain userbase. But I still forecast a flow of users towards other browsers. The roots of “the others” have simply grown to deep to stop their growth now.

Or one could write this into a “biblical” story, in which case my conclusion in the above paragraph would be like this:

Cane just laughed, and the sound was as of a thousand coins of gold rained down from the heavens. Many heard the laughter, and felt comforted. Others, though, knew Cane for what it was: the same Cane as old, only polished, shiny and new.