Fancy land in Iraq?
2003-04-18 22:41
Cape Town - This is a special edition of this column to bring you up
to speed about an important but little-known development surrounding
the Iraqi war.
Did you know that land is up for grabs in that war-ravaged country?
You may even have a chance of buying your very own plot if the
Americans don't steal a march on you.
We'll also kill some time with the heads of Bush, Bin Laden and Blair
and help pres. Bush write that speech he always wanted to deliver but
never quite did.
Cool sites
Fancy a piece of land in Iraq? It might not be ideal for that holiday
home you have in mind, but you never know, you might find oil. At the
worst, it's an interesting "memento" of the war.
I'm not joking - and neither is the site called
Iraqi Acres. Although your chances are better if you're American, you never know. And the price is very reasonable.
"As the war in Iraq moves from a military to a civil service
operation, you might be interested to know that the President has
asked Congress for about $75bn to finance American operations
there. That comes to about $375 per US taxpayer. That excludes the
cost of reconstruction. So if you're wondering what you'll get in
exchange for your hard-earned money, IraqiAcres.com has the answer:
land. That's right, an acre of land in Iraq," you can read at the
site.
How does it work? "You may be familiar with websites that allow you
to name a star for yourself or a friend, or buy land on the moon, or
even Mars. Well, Iraqi Acres performs a similar service, only we'll
let you reserve an acre of land in Iraq! No one knows yet what will
happen in Iraq, but the Bush Administration has announced its
intention to occupy the country, at a cost to Americans of about $75bn. Here's your chance to get something in exchange for your tax
dollars."
With this in mind, Iraqi Acres launched "the first and only online
registry of American citizens interested in owning a piece of Iraq.
Simply enter your name and address (or the name and address of the
person for whom you're registering the land claim) and a valid credit
card, and for $9.95, we'll mail you a certificate documenting and
registering your claim on your Iraqi acre.
"You can even pick the specific part of Iraq where you'd like your
acre: downtown Baghdad, the Rumaila oilfields, beautiful suburban
Basra, independent Northern Kurd country - the choices are dazzling.
You pick, and we register - sending you an official and attractive
certificate (suitable for framing) to document and commemorate your
claim!"
A portion of the proceeds is donated to a charity of your choice.
Somebody found a useful purpose for Bin Laden, Bush and Blair. He put
their heads together and created a game.
http://www.headwindow.com/war/
You swap adjoining heads to form a
three in a row. Nothing spectacular, but then, you didn't expect much
more from them, did you?
More spectacular and much more fun is writing a speech for Bush.
Thanks to this brilliant site you can do exactly that - using his own voice, words and phrases.
You drag and drop words and phrases from a "bank" on the left side of
the page to the "speech" section on the right. Once you're happy with
your effort, click "Play" to hear Bush deliver your speech. The
results can be hilarious and infinitely varied.
You can save and load speeches to and from the database. You can also
click on "Load Speech" to listen to other people's efforts. Check out
Psychologix, for example... or Louis...
Tip: Click on the blue bars to the right of the speech phrases to
scroll down the alphabetical list of phrases.
Hot software
Here's a quick launch bar on steroids:
Windows PowerPro.
It's much, much more than yet another toolbar.
The programme, that runs under Windows 95/98/NT/2000, lets you run
commands and configure your system almost any way you want. You can
use the bar for tray icons, hot keys, mouse actions, menus, a timer,
and a scheduler; it enables you to close, minimise, maximise, and
position programmes; and you can send keystrokes to programmes, run
commands when windows first open, create virtual desktops, use it as a
clipboard extender, run macros, shut down, play sounds, change
wallpaper, activate your screen saver and more. The price? It's free.
I like variety. That's one of the reasons I use three browsers -
Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Opera. The only drawback was that my
bookmarks sometimes became very confusing. But now I've discovered
BookmarkBridge. (This is beginning to sound like an advertisement ;-) It is a small and extremely easy to use utility that allows you to share bookmarks between different browsers.
I had no problems whatsoever with it, but it's wise to heed the
developer's warning: "BookmarkBridge is currently a pre-release beta
product. The author has conducted extensive testing on several
computers under on all supported platforms. At this time there are no
known bugs or defects in the product. Your mileage may vary."
It's 2.7 MB in size and runs under Windows 9x, Win 2000 and XP. It's
free.
Another useful tool to split up large files for transfer by disk or
e-mail, is Files Split/Join. It's a mere 9 KB in
download size and it's free. Works with Win 98, Win 2000, Me, NT4 and
XP.
Latest updates
IconArt1.3.0
Create your own icons (473 KB; free; all Windows versions)
TurboFTP 3.80 b281M
Increases speed of file transfers (1.1 MB; shareware; all Windows
versions)
Gadwin PrintScreen 2.6
Great, easy-to-use screen capture utility (970 KB; free; all Windows
versions)
CuteFTP Pro 3.1
The pro version of the very popular file transfer utility (commercial
version; all Windows versions)
SolSuite 2003
High-quality collection of 360 different Solitaire Card Games with
excellent graphics and animation (3.7 MB; shareware; all Windows
versions)
SurfSecret Popup Eliminator 4.9 and SurfSecret PestPatrol 4.2.0.1
Pop-up Eliminator block pop-ups and pop-unders while PestPatrol
eliminate spyware, adware, trojans, etc. Both are shareware.
Bug and virus watch
Microsoft has brought out a patch for a security hole in Windows NT
4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP that could allow an attacker to do
just about anything they want on a compromised system.
The vulnerability has to do with a flaw in the way the Windows kernel
- the core of the operating system - handles error messages.
"A vulnerability results because an attacker could write a program to
exploit this flaw and run code of their choice. An
attacker could exploit this vulnerability to take any action on the
system including deleting data, adding accounts with administrative
access, or reconfiguring the system," according to a Microsoftsecurity bulletin. The bulletin contains information on obtaining the patch.
Tip of the Week
Windows Me as well as Windows XP (Home and Professional) comes with
built-in, free file compression software. (It's installed by default
in XP; if you don't see it, go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs,
Windows Setup and look under System Tools for "Compressed Folders".)
The feature is called "compressed folders" in Windows. You can
right-click a compressed (zipped) file to unzip it. Zipping files and
folders is as easy as dropping them onto a zip file. It's not for
everyone, though. If you prefer another compression programme, you can
sometimes run into problems. The best option then is to disable XP's
zip support by going to Start and Run and typing in the following
command:
regsvr32 /u %windir%system32zipfldr.dll
(%windir% being the folder where XP is installed)
Now click OK and restart the computer.
To re-enable it again, go to Start and Run and type in:
regsvr32 %windir%system32zipfldr.dll
Click OK and restart the computer.
NB: As always, make sure you've got a good backup before making system
changes.
Have a nice long weekend ;-)
Louis