On Net decadence

Sunday Editorial

Two weeks ago, an Australian young man has created a breakthrough in this century shopping and lifestyle when put his life for sale on e-Bay. Yes his entire life is auctioned, including:

• Name
• Phone number
• All my possessions which includes the following
• Clothes,
• Roughly 300 CDs
• Surfboard
• Laptop (minus certain information with my discretion),
• Pushbike (Has wonky handlebars, may need some work)
• Books,
• Bed
• CD player
• Backpack
• Tennis racquets
• Golf Clubs (which you will have no idea how to use)
• Childhood photos
• Skateboard
• Nice lamp which your ex-girlfriend bought you.

In addition the winner will get instructions and training in order to get this new identity including Surfing, Climbing, Skateboarding etc. and 2 more months of assistance after the actual transfer will take place.

What is amazing is that the he has obtained 48 bids reaching 7,500 AUS$! The winner is some “ridderstrade” who is now entitled to collect in Wollongong, New South Wales Nicael’s life package – which includes two enemies and some credits to be collected.

According to Nicael he is carrying out a social experiment. Nicael promises do donate 30% of the revenues to ARAFMI, an Australian association assisting mental disorders victims, and is planning to make a documentary on his experiment.

“I did this because i was a little intrigued as to what exactly constitutes a life, a little intrigued as to what people want that they aren't receiving from their current life, a little bit because I’m a socialist and was hoping to make a point that the amount and type of things that are for sale in this world is insane and wasteful, a bit because I was a little intrigued as to what makes me who I am and at exactly what point in this experiment will I lose it, if ever. Finally I think I did it because I think it will be such a strange, interesting, unprecedented, quirky and hilarious social experiment. How random is this, it's ruling! Everyone who's got behind it is ruling!”

Frankly I deem this is just a provocation, or worse probably a cheap way to reach notoriety. As a matter of fact this is another confirmation of the actual decadence of our Western culture in these days which is perfectly reflected – if not amplified – by the Internet community: side effects of a major phenomenon probably unstoppable.

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Self extracting PDF files with PDF2EXE

PDF2EXE is an incredibly useful application recently developed by a Spanish company. PDF2EXE swiftly converts PDF to EXE, making PDF documents readable even on PCs that have neither Adobe Reader nor Adobe Acrobat software installed. This means that using PDF2EXE you can share/send Adobe PDF files with/to anyone and not worry as whether they can read it or not.


The transition from PDF to EXE keeps all the features and characteristics of the original document.You can also compress and/or encrypt PDF documents by inserting a password for the converted EXE file. You can also prevent any changes on the EXE generated file and disable conversion from PDF to TXT, EXE to TXT.
The same company has also issued Cool PDF Reader a very tiny and immediately running (just 685 kb) PDF viewer/reader to view, print, and convert PDF files to TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS. This application can be useful too, considering the weight and slowness of Acrobat 7 and 8...

Both software are free to download and use

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Stickies: the best Post it reminder

Stickies is a very useful free PC utility that will eliminate your Post-It notes you usually leave everywhere on your desk and monitor, being actually their a computer version.
You write it, you stick it on your desktop and they stay there until you erase them. When a Stickies comes up, if you wish to have a reminder, you can associate it to a sound as a reminder. Stickies is tiny and easy and will not interfere with your system and running programs. No fancy: just yellow little windows where you can write down your text notes. Of course if you wish you can customise their size, fonts, colours and buttons.


A good Stickies feature is the possibility to attach a message to a document or a web site or a folder and the message will come out when this is open. Once more interesting feature is the possibility to move the Stickies over a TCP/IP network connection or SMTP mail server or MAPI client (groups and mailing lists are supported) as well as to and from your Palm or PPC PDA.
The last version of Stickies (release 6.0a) can be downloaded for free, I would give it a try if I were you!

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