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Monthly Archives: July 2006

Beware Britt World Wide

7/16/2006 – 7:19 pm
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Pyramid scheme diagram
In the last week I have had two run-ins with “business men” “building teams” for “internet sales.” The first was a couple that noticed my Oregon plates outside of HEB, introduced themselves and after some friendly discussion about ‘ol Corvallis they wanted to select me for their team. Yea!

After a couple of minutes he wouldn’t shut up and I am not a rude guy so I gave him my email and darted.

The next day I got this email:

…I enjoyed meeting you. You seem like a very confident person and someone
that might fit well on the team we are putting together. Listen, I can’t
promise you anything but if you are truly interested in making some
additional income we should talk. We need to get together for about 15min
so we can get to know each other better and I can give you an overview of
what we are doing. I have some time in my schedule Thursday late after noon
or Friday. Which is better for you?…

Uh huh, uh huh. Oh gee, wowie, that sounds great, a team, money and a business plan that is so complex that it must be explained in 15 minutes, instead of in the email…

So I did some research on his email address and turned up bww.com. And the website is as non-descript as the email: “Empowering people around the world”. They didn’t even bother to put what BWW stands for anywhere on the page.

Something was up and after some Googling I discovered Britt World Wide AKA Amway + Internets AKA Free Business Training at Hotel Near the Airport AKA Pyramid Scheme.

Here are some links about the business:

Summary: BWW should be avoided.

Today I was attacked by another BWW person while drinking my iced tea and reading up on TCL/TK. But armed with the information on BWW I was able to quickly hush him and get back to my reading.

So why am I posting this? Because non of these resources link to bww.com, so using google for link:bww.com returns no results. At least until my site gets crawled :-)

As a side note everyone in Austin is extremely friendly and these few brain washed creeps by no means represents the whole of the ATX.

In other news don’t lay on metal that has been sitting out in the direct 100 degree sunlight. You will burn your back… badly!

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Mario < Statistics

7/1/2006 – 11:07 pm
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Today I had planned on exploring North Austin a bit to learn the roads and sites (see: excuse to find the local Fry’s).

But, instead I got distracted finishing “Stranger from a Strange Land” by Heinlein. Which you must read if you haven’t (slightly used copy available for shipment). It is a great piece of science fiction that explores human nature, religion, humor and social structures. It is also the book in which the word “grok” is coined.

In any case this put me back by an hour.

With that finished I opened the garage and walked outside just in time to hear the neighbor say: “I think it is going to rain.” And sure enough, checking the local weather showed a tropical storm heading right over Austin. I have heard stories of Austin hail blowing out the windshield of cars so I postponed my outing.

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To kill time I played fetch with Sam, my roommate’s boston terrier, and waited for the newly formed lakes to turn back into roads.

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With the roads cleared I made my 4 minute journey to Fry’s :-) with the intention of buying either a Nokia 770 or Nintendo DS Lite. But, after some soul searching I decided against it and headed off to find a bookstore.

I ended up in central Austin at the Barne’s and Noble and browsed, read and had a $4 Starbucks Arnold Palmer. When it came to closing time I set my Linux books back and purchased two statistics books. Yes, I hated my statistics class last term, yes the material is a bit dry, but extracting data from large sets of numbers is kind of a big deal. Particularly interesting is “Benford’s Law” which describes generally how digits are distributed in a set of data.

So to conclude:

  • Read Stranger from a Strange Land
  • Don’t mess around with Texas storms
  • Mario’s got nothin’ on statistics
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