Rubénerd Blog :)

Sometimes I worry that I’m too funny.

For my American friends, from Wired.com’s report on gadgets they wish hadn’t been invented. Surprising though it may seem, as with the friends I’m addressing this post to, Wired also happens to be American.

Whatever the shrink is giving me, it’s either too powerful, or not powerful enough. Grilled cheese sandwiches are best when they’re made from bread and cheese. You read it here fist. First, you read it here first. Heaven forbid I be caught out making a typoo.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

One technique spammers use to circumvent spam filters is to embed natural language sentences into emails to spoof the reverse Turing Test as it were by trying to appear as a human sender. With more sophisitcated filters these efforts aren’t really effective any more, but for me they can be a fascinating source of random thoughts.

Take a gander at this latest gem; this spammer even went so far as to create an intruiging unordered bullet point list. There’s something poetic about spliced material from different sources which when combined randomly… make absolutely no sense!

sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walkedgang-planks are raised. white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a little flickeringup, old!’ It would bring tears to your eyes.” floor, through which came a dazzle of blue and gold and green. He lookedthe newspapers tell the truth.”

• the side of these carriages stood a rank of splendid servants, all dressed
• "To France."
• 1920 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. The original manuscript and corrected
• in the middle of the encounter at the request of one of the combatants. But barn.

Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in
dressed like an enormous hornbill, with a beak twice as big as himself–the a long way off, “by God! if this is true the whole bally lot of us on the chance.” “Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the

Wanna slim down for summer? Go to [redacted] to learn how.

I tell you what, if I were an author, song writer or painter and I were out of ideas, I’d just consult my spam folders. There’s a Hollywood blockbuster right here.

The irony wasn’t lost on me either that the link to the weight loss products this spammer was selling was placed directly after a comment about dying from something. One would think this would be checked!

Jimbo: I’m Jimbo Kern and this here is Ned. Say Hi Ned.
Ned: Mmmmm Hi Ned
Jimbo: HA! Isn’t that great?

Agent: Agent Johnson, FBI.
Homer: Very happy to meet you…
Agent: [Because of your tax evasion,] you’re gonna work for us.
Homer: Okay, but can you pay under the table? I got a little tax problem…

If you missed them, feel free to refer to the previous Rubenerd Fun Facts posts (part one, part two, part three, part four, part five). And as usual, feel free to take notes. Danke.

	Despite the name Swine Flu, most pigs still can’t fly.
	Due to a clerical typographic error in 2003, Neal O’Caroll was briefly mistaken for a cut of young beef.
	Industrial heat exchangers often can’t be returned for refunds.
	Permanent makers are made out of plastic so they are.
	NetBSD is the most commonly used operating system on fishing trawlers.
	Fun fact blog posts are up to 12x more useless even than blog posts talking about maximising conventional memory in DOS. Speaking of which…
	Acceptance by the general public is the Final Frontier.
	If moe-ness were a currency, Mikuru could buy her own reality given she can’t just dream it up like Haruhi.
	Western Digital hard drives are manufactured in the East.
	Anime figures make for expensive but cute paper holders.
	Despite the name, most vampires find it difficult to use TrueCrypt.
	Computers have to have their “Xeon” stickers removed in Scientology strongholds to avert fears of demonic possession.

I like to think one of the things I inherited from my beautiful late mum was her absurd, ridiculous sense of humour! Mmm, grilled cheese sandwiches.

With this in mind, last week I noticed someone on eBay in Germany was selling a set of those "Intel Inside" Xeon processor computer stickers for a couple of Euros. For those of you who don’t know, the Xeons are Intel’s server class CPUs that are found in the Mac Pro and other high end desktop and server hardware.

My first reaction was to snap them up without question, with the intention of affixing them to… my 600MHz Pentium 3 Compaq Armada M300 subnotebook! Genius right?

Well they just arrived in the mail this morning complete with stamps from Germany! My father is from Hesse and he was quite the stamp collector in his youth so I imagine I inherited part of his fascination with them.

As for the stickers themselves, if you know you’re shameless Intel advertising these stickers here are the second generation logos using the new Intel logo, before they moved over to those new crystal or landscape-oriented holographic ones. Wikipedia has a photo comparing the the styles. I reckon the ones I got are the classiest.

I’ll wait until I have some more of that foaming computer cleaning product so I can give the case on the notebook a quick once-over before putting the Xeon sticker on. I don’t know why I find the prospect of putting a Xeon sticker on such old hardware so hilarious, but it just is!

I don’t know why, but whenever I’m on Whole Wheat Radio and see this photo of Karen Collins, I always do a double take because out of the corner of my eye she looks like she’s brandishing a gun! In this case it’s even funnier because with this latest concert announcement on every page, Jim is in her firing line of sight :-)

And people say I don’t write anything constructive on this blog… sheesh.

Oh come on, eight lessons? Now we’re just getting silly people. Welcome to your eighth grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. As usual, feel free to take notes.

As far as I know this is not a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think it is. Please seek counselling.

ASIDE: I have been advised by my solicitors to disclose that while this information has been deemed accurate by most gastronomes, it should not be taken as sound legal advice when attempting to identify grilled cheese sandwiches in criminal and civil cases. If you do attempt to use such advice in legal proceedings, as far as you know this series of posts was created by Neal O’Carroll and not me. Thank you ever so much.

Previous lessons

• Lesson seven on 2009.04.05
• Lesson six on 2009.03.27
• Lesson five on 2008.12.07
• Lesson four on 2008.11.14
• Lesson three on 2008.11.04
• Lesson two on 2008.08.21
• Lesson one on 2008.08.12

Stan: I can’t believe it! This “future self” thing is all a scam!
Butters: Yeah, I can’t believe it!
Stan: They’ve been lying to us this whole time!
Butters: Yeah, this whole time! I wonder if my future self knows anything about this?