This is another scam, capitalizing on the building boom in the United Arab Emirates. The scammer claims that there is excess money due to contract over estimation, and wants a reliable person to help with the bank transfers.

None of that is true of course ...

Date:   22 Jun 2008 12:00:09 -0000
From:  "ali " <alimohammed07@rediffmail.com>
To:  alimohammed07@rediffmail.com
Subject:   From The Desk of Mr. ali mohammed

According to the CBC gadget early adopters are arrogant.

Moreover they quote a study:

In a study earlier this year, Mindset found that people who bought
Apple Inc.'s Macintosh computers to be more liberal and open-minded,
but also exhibiting traits of superiority.

Here is an overview of the study.

Everyone who is in the tech field must have checked the Dilbert at some point. For those who are working in large corporations, they can draw parallels between what is on the comic and what they see around them at the work place.

Other tech oriented comics are xkcd and User Friendly, which is Canadian by the way.

Fellow Toronto DUG member Rob Loach, , committed the 120,000 th commit to Drupal's CVS on June 6, 2008.

Several notable news items on the Xdebug front lately. As many of us know, Xdebug is a remote debugger and profiler for PHP applications, including Drupal. Many IDE's support Xdebug, such as ActiveState's Komodo, and Eclipse with PHP's extension.

This is a classical scam promising a lot of money for a too-good-to-be-true job for little work. The scam centers on the victim getting a cheque and asked to cash it and wiring the bulk of it and keep the difference for "testing the wire transfer service".

The RCMP have uncovered a widespread cheque scam that attempts to lure consumers with promises of jobs as secret shoppers.

A new report from Simon Fraser University in B.C. concludes there has been a sharp decline in the incidence of terrorist violence around the world, challenging assumptions that the global threat has been increasing.

The Human Security Brief 2007 says fatalities from terrorism have decreased by some 40 per cent in recent months. It also concludes the terrorist network associated with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden has suffered a dramatic collapse in popular support in the Muslim world.

This is a photo of Abdel Aziz Salem (known as Zizo in school). Aziz has been living in Dubai, UAE since 1990, working as an investment banker.

Zizo and Magdy El Rayes were inseparable in El Nasereya High School. They even developed their own peculiar "lingo" and imitation of teachers: Abshihi for Arabic, and  the science guy (forgot his name, used to write poetry) when he was gesturing with his hand on how fish swim.

The Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group will be meeting on Friday June 6, 2008.

Martin Anderson-Clutz of Surge Communications will be giving a talk on Drupal Theming Fundamentals. This is a repeat of the DrupalCamp Toronto Talk that Martin gave last week. It was most voted session among the 26 submitted ones.

On June 2, 2008, I will presenting at the Kitchener Waterloo Linux Users Group (KWLUG) on Drupal for Fun and Profit, how to make a career in Open Source.