Sitting on the bus waiting to get home after a hard day’s work, listening to Belle and Sebastian on my iPod mini (thank you dd!!!). It’s almost enough to make me forget all the work i’ve still to do tonight on the animation i’m working on with my friend Patrick.

Nearly home.

well it’s been a tough week at work and i’ve just not got around to posting recently. Hopefuly i’ll post pics of my latest toy, an iPod mini! Oh and btw i made this post via my T610 phone. Amazing!

My boss recently went on a trip to New York to do some filming for work. While has was there he had the chance of visiting an Apple Store. By all accounts they are impressive stores indeed, but by far the most impressive thing? The prices. Now I know that the prices for Apple products here in the UK are higher, but until really looking into it I didn’t realise how much higher they are. It’s horrible. It’s horrible, frustrating, irritating, depressing and unfair. It’s… well, it’s just not on. To illustrate my point take a look at these comparisons taken from Apple’s Web Store…

(these prices use today’s exchange rate on the 5th March 2004 of $1.81 to £1)

	20gb iPod UK Price: £299.00 US Price: $399.00 US Price in GBP: £219.39 Difference: £79.61 ($144.80)
	15″ PowerBook (SuperDrive) UK Price: £1,999.00 US Price: $2,599.00 US Price in GBP: £1,428.95 Difference: £570.05 ($1,036.83)
	Dual 2GHz PowerMac G5 UK Price: £2,299.01 US Price: $2,999.00 US Price in GBP: £1,648.85 Difference: £650.16 ($1,182.47)

As you can see it’s pretty incredible, even after you think about UK VAT at 17.5%, it still looks like if you’re a European then the more you buy Apple, the worse you’re ripped off. I suppose in some sense it’s a testemant to how good the product is that I’m prepared to pay it, but if the prices were the same here, then I’d probably have a Dual 2GHz G5 by now. Oh and an iPod mini, but that’s a different story.

Well once again this story is just getting stranger and stranger. Last night Jaron Brass posted several comments linking to a QuickTime movie on his site. The movie purports to be a clip from his local channel NBC6, detailing the arrest of Jaron’s father due to accusations of Insurance fraud. Now this seems authentic, but I can’t find any more information about the arrest, either on the NBC6 site, or elsewhere. If you have any info about this bizarre development then please let us know!

Below is a link to a smaller re-compressed version of the video clip. The clip requires QuickTime 6.

Dr. Brass Fraud Arrest Video

The original larger file can be found on Jaron’s own server, quite why he’d want to publicise this if it is true is beyond me.

It’s now approaching one week since I published my original investigation into Jaron Brass, and the interest in this story has been both gratifying and disturbing. Through the efforts of many people, some duped by jaron, some not, we’ve managed to accumulate a massive amount of information, and the story’s just been growing and growing.

Well things have moved on, both myself and the site have received messages from Jaron claiming that he is remorseful and stating a desire to apologise and explain his behavior. Now thus far I’m skeptical about how truthful Jaron will be prepared to be, but in thinking that I realised quite how much he’s going to have to cover to satisfy everyone. Still Jaron has promised to work on something throughout this week.

So in anticipation of this statement I thought it would useful for Jaron and for us to know exactly what it is that needs answering. Although there was much in common, lots of people were also told different tales, so what truths do you most want to know? what things must Jaron explain for you to feel satisfied?

Personally I’m particularly interested to hear an explanation about the Social Security Number irregularities, to find out how many people Jaron has duped over the last couple of years that he’s been doing this, and what he really hoped to gain from it all?

So what do you want to know most? What can Jaron say to begin to explain things to your satisfaction?

UPDATE!
Jaron has posted his apology and explanation online, it’s in PDF format and is quite lengthy.

http://www.jaronbrass.com/apology.pdf

To be quite honest I’m still digesting it, and I’m not yet sure what I think, and I’ve no idea whether it will be enough for everybody, although he clearly does apologise. One thing is for certain, if anyone manages to sniff out any verifiable lies in this document then there’ll be no way back for Jaron L. Brass.

Well I know it’s been a little while since I last updated, but hopefully this one will make up for it. Come with me if you will on a bizarre little journey into the world of identity theft and virtual lives. If you’ve read my earlier post “Identity, Why Do I Care?” you’ll already know a little about it, but believe me, that wasn’t even half of the story.

In the latter half of 2003 I began frequenting a well known mac community site called spymac. It’s one of the largest sites of it’s kind, and has a very diverse and active user-base. Over time I began to get to know some of the members who post in the forums, and there were a few people that I exchanged messages with on a semi-regular basis. One of these people went by the nickname of dotcomboi.

On spymac everyone gets to use what’s known as an avatar, a small graphic that represents you visually, often people use a photograph of themselves, or a graphic that relates to Macintosh computers / Apple products, anything really that they want. Dotcomboi’s avatar was a photographic portrait of himself, or at least so he said. If you detected a note of suspicion in my tone just then it’s because dotcomboi’s photo was exceptional in two regards, firstly that the quality and composition of the photograph was highly professional, and secondly because the young gentleman featured in the image was by anyone’s definition particularly handsome, a fact commented on by many fellow members of the forums. Now although this was unusual, it was not beyond the realms of possibility and was quickly explained by dotcomboi as he claimed to have worked as a model for several years until quite recently. He also claimed to be currently working as a web/graphics designer, director, and general new media guru. He told me and many others of his job as owner of a new media company based in Aventura, Florida. Said company going by the name of Hyperactive. Now this seemed odd to me, that someone would undertake such an extreme career change, but again, without reason to really care I simply dismissed any doubts I had. That was until two new forums members appeared claiming that dotcomboi wasn’t all he claimed to be. The two members started to harass dotcomboi claiming the photo he was using was not him, that they had seen the photo somewhere before. This got me interested. So I thought I’d take a look through his member gallery, to see if I could find any evidence either way. Curiously enough there was a distinct lack of photos of himself, instead I was greeted by numerous pictures of iPods and various other gadgets. However one of the photos of his iPod also clearly showed his hand holding it, and what was strange about this hand was that the fingers were oddly fat, almost like sausages. This didn’t seem to make sense in relation to his face picture. So I added to the thread were his identity was being challenged, asking about the fat fingers. I rapidly received a series of messages claiming extreme offense on his part, but it didn’t alter the fact of his disproportionaly chubby digits.

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I’ve just imported the few entries that were on my abortive geeklog site, so although this site may not be looking as good as it was yet, it has much of the same content. There was an old HTML only blog I kept for a while, maybe I’ll manually add them too. You can actually visit that site still and look at some of the first photos i took with my IXUS 400 there too: http://homepage.mac.com/leeparry/

My last update today, this photo was taken at the same time as the winter pictures you can find further down the page. I found these odd straws in skip near work, and I thought they were so pretty I’d take a snap.

This subject’s being covered in many places at the moment, but I just had to make my feelings known. The Hutton Report has been a massive disappointment, and I’m extremely irritated on two counts. Firstly the implications for journalism and freedom of speech are quite frightening. It draws into question the ability of every UK news institution to actively question the government. Secondly it’s given the government a green light to run roughshod over not only the media, but public opinion as well.

Interestingly a Channel 4 news poll showed that only 10% of the UK population believe Hutton was right, with a massive 90% thinking he was wrong. Looks like the great British public have a lot more affection for Auntie Beeb than they do for Uncle Tony.

Just recently I’ve started to notice how many people are furious about things that I consider relatively insignificant. At the moment my biggest bugbear is people’s attitudes toward immigrants. It’s hard to believe that in this day and age we haven’t learnt the lessons of the past. Over the past couple of days I became involved in a forum thread about illegal immigration in America.

Now, if I’m honest I did lose my rag a little, and it wasn’t terribly adult of me, BUT the attitudes of what can sometimes seem like the majority are so disgusting that I faced a choice, either get depressed, or get angry. So in what’s actually quite uncharacteristic for me I choose to get angry. I would link to the thread, but I don’t want to give these people more ‘air time’. What amazes me is how easy people find it to project every little gripe and concern they have on to what is one of the most defenseless and abused groups in our society today. What is equally unfathomable is that many of these people are actually rather privileged, yet they still makes claims of asylum seekers, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants being a drain on the system. It seems most of them would be happier having an extra colour tv rather than helping those less fortunate than themselves.

Well it’s been a lovely icy couple of days here, I’d been hoping we’d get some snow, and we did! The photo below is of a sheet of ice trapped between the glass of a discarded window.

Spring is nearly here!

But I’m not sure I’ve got the most appropriate footwear.

Sad that the snow clouds have gone, but the sky is worth it