hobiger.org Blog

In priori posts (here and here) I have written about scam, but what reached my mailbox today beats all the prior attempts and brings scam to a new league of ridiculousness. Here’s the content

DearSir/Madam,

I represent the greatbusiness empire of His Royal Highness Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah of the Kuwaiti Emirate. I saw your profile on the internet and would welcome you and your company for discussions on Loans and also possible partnership in the construction of Casinos, Amusement Parks, Water Parks ,Leisure Parks Resorts, Beach Development and other recreation centers,investments etc.

Please contact me forfurther details. My Father the Sheikh has an environmental friendly developmentinitiative for diversification which he has rolled out Five Billion USD(USD$5,000,000,000.00) to give out as Loan for interested companies,organizations, individuals etc. Therefore, if you are interested in obtaining the Loan kindly contact me for further details through this email address. w.s.bmohamed@hotmail.com

Kind Regards

Saba Mohammed

Amazing, one could get a 5 billion loan, just by sending an email to a Hotmail address. Maybe countries like Greece which are struggling which their budget would be interested in contacting that guy

Popularity: 6%

Since more than three years I am running hobiger.org and I was curious about how much one could earn by selling this domain. So here’s a list of prices together with the source of each estimate

Thereby, “—” means that no estimate could be calculated. Basically all these numbers are highly suspicious and I refrained from putting hyperlinks into this post. So those of you who like to check it for your page, please copy the page URLs. What I learned from this is that my page is worth something between 1400 dollars and nothing. Yeah,

Popularity: 9%

When preparing a presentation for a meeting I am skipping tables wherever possible, and replace them by a suitable graph or plot. This helps the audiences the grasp the content more easily and less explanations are usually necessary (given that the plot are made well). But sometimes, its hard to transfer the information of a table into a figure and there’s no other choice than putting values in rows and columns. My personal policy is not to exceed a size of 3 x 3 to give the audience a chance to read the table in a reasonable amount of time. If I have only two columns, I allow myself to go to 5 rows at max. So as a general rule I would suggest not to present more than 10 values totally, plus the corresponding column and raw labels. I have seen many presentations from colleagues who are using tables a lot and some of them display sizes of 10 x 10 or even larger. When I see something like this in a meeting, I usually don’t try to read the table. Not only because the fonts are too small to be read, but just because there’s not enough time to read 100 values and compare them across each other. I looked on the web and saw that Garr Reynolds has assembled some really good examples, although all of them might not be suitable for scientific presentations as they orient rather on sales presentations.

Popularity: 9%

I try to avoid Microsoft products whenever possible, but for presentations PowerPoint is still the best solution for me. Today I prepared a talk for a meeting this week and I tried to add a graph, which I produced in Excel. Thus after tuning the plot inside the spreadsheet I did a classical “copy-paste” action, hoping that the graph appears on the slide as it was inside Excel. But, no way. Not only that most of the formatting (labels and layout) got lost, also lines changed their colour. Why can this happen? I thought that MS apps are “talking” with each other using these objects, which can be embedded in another application. So I tried to re-format the plot for about five minutes and then gave up and produced the figure with gnuplot and imported a JPG in PowerPoint. Now the slide looks professional (its always hard to produce scientific plots with Excel) and since a graphic files is embedded in the PPT file, I don’t have to worry about if the graph changes when I copy the presentation to another PC. Am I just not talented with Microsoft’s way to share information across their products or are they trying to frustrate costumers by offering useless features for their software?

Popularity: 10%