The one, the only, Jaron Brass is back on the web. Of course this alone wouldn’t really be news, if it weren’t for his being up to the same old tricks.

Jase Wells has once again fallen victim to the old Brass, read about it at his blog.

For anyone who is unaware of the history feel freee to read up. Starting with the naive suspicions moving on to a full blown community investigation via the comments, and a bizarre ‘arrest’? (With Video!)

Identity, Why Do I care?

The Brass Report

So Tell Me This Mr Brass…

Where There’s Muck There’s Brass

Just a quick post today, I’m working on a few things at the moment so I’m quite busy, but not so busy that I didn’t get time to make this picture of Pier 39 (the one with the sea lions) in San Francisco. I’m using it for my desktop picture, why don’t you?

Download 1024×768

Download 1600×1200

Well I’ve just finished the first revision of the new official site of WOMAD (World of Music, Arts & Dance) who organise festivals, events and educational projects around the world, you can find the new site at http://www.womad.org.

Overall I’m quite pleased with it so far. There are still a few bugs, features to add, and performance optimisations to be done, but all in all it’s a massive improvement over the old site and provides a much better structure in terms of design and code to be able to build upon in the future.

As usual any and all comments are very welcome, good bad or indifferent.

Well I just got back from San Francisco yesterday. I planned to post to my blog everyday I was there, but unfortunately (or fortunately) I just had too much to do, and was enjoying myself far too much. I took far too few photographs, read not half of what I took with me, and didn’t shoot any video despite taking my video camera. Now I know this sounds bad, but I had lots of things to go to at WWDC in the day, and far too much to see of S.F. at night.

As luck would have it, the weekend before the conference was Pride 2004. It finished on the Sunday evening with 13 stages of entertainment. I had a really good time, and I think I must have walked 10 miles worth over the Sunday. I met some nice people, almost everyone seems friendly in San Francisco.

I’m sure I’ll post more about the trip, but for now I’ll just say that as nice as it is to be home, it was very nice to be in San Francisco too.

I just read an interesting article on the new browser war which contains a chilling prediction: “Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web… One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it”.

There’s a lot of talk around the web at the moment prompted by the news that Microsoft will no longer produce updates to their ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. At face value one could be forgiven for thinking that this is good news for the web and for anyone interested in seeing standards compliant browsers gain market share, there is however a more sinister story to be told. Microsoft’s decision to wait until the release of Longhorn (the next version of the Windows operating system) before updating IE could in fact be a terrible blow to the cause and to the freedom of the web.

If you don’t already know what’s so bad about IE, read on…

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Oh dear, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I’ve been neglecting this little online diary of mine over the last few weeks so today I’ve decided to bite the bullet, get back on the horse, use several other cliches that I can’t quite draw to mind and get writing again. Not much has been happening of late, I’m reaching the end of an ongoing project at work, one which I’ll be very glad to finally get out the door. I can’t really show it to you yet, but as soon as it’s public I’ll post a link.

Some exciting news, I’m off to WWDC in San Francisco at the end of June. Crazily the cost of the flight drops to under half in I fly out two days early and spend the weekend there, so it’s cheaper to just get two more nights at the hotel. If I stay in the hotel I want to I’ll have decent internet access so I’ll be uploading photos and reports of my first trip to the USA. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with myself, all alone in San Francisco for a whole week, so if anyone has any suggestions of things to do then they’d be gratefully received.

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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