Rubénerd!

So I was at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA to people in the know) for a long drawn out reason which I won't attempt to explain here, and I found myself trying their free WiFi access. Given my experience with TMNet's WiFi at the Starbucks coffee shops here I was a bit sceptical about how good it was going to be. As it turns out it was faster than out DSL at home in Gita Bayu!

As you would know if you read this site in any manner resembling regularity I love screenshots, so here are some from my WiFi adventures :D.

Here's the initial welcome screen when I logged on for free on my MacBook Pro:

Here's the welcome screen when I booted into Haruhi KDE FreeBSD ;):

And what better thing to do on free WiFi network in a Malaysian airport but listen to Whole Wheat Radio?

After a few days of testing I've applied the new layout of the Rubenerd Blog over to the Show. There are still a few quirks I'm ironing out, but I assumed it would be a work in progress.

Cheers :)

Rubenerd Show c.2006

Rubenerd Show c.2007

Coming to you live from the San Francisco Coffee House in Mid Valley Mega Mall in Kuala Lumpur! Drumroll please...

After millions of hours of blood, sweat and tiers (thanks for that line James ;) ) the updated 2007 Rubenerd Blog skin has finally been rolled out. I'll be mirroring the same design onto the Rubenerd Show site soon too, but I thought I'd field test it here first.

Rubenerd Blog c.2006

Rubenerd Blog c.2007

The biggest challenge when updating this design? Internet Explorer! I got the design down pat and working in Gecko and WebKit without modification, but loading it up in good old IE6 broke more of the page than I thought would have been possible! Internet Explorer 7 was marginally better, but with so many people still running their XP machines without updates we'll probably have to continue writing out IE6 CSS hacks for a long time to come.

Steven Colbert from the Colbert Report and Jimbob Kloss from Whole Wheat Radio both say that people who have blogs and podcasts that simply talk about their blogs and podcasts are no good. If you agree, then please disregard this post ;).

I use the wireless network at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at KLCC (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) quite regularly while sipping away at the greatest beverage in the universe (I'll give you three guesses, it's not tea, and the last two guesses don't count).

I came home though and when I was looking through my browser history for... um... let's call it a page on how to be a better person... yeah that works... and I found the address of the login page that the browser on this machine automatically comes up with when you connect to the wireless network. I clicked on it and you can still access it!

So if you want to pretend you're in a Malaysian WiFi hotspot, get yourself a nice tall cup of coffee or (teh tarik works too!), change your desktop to a picture of Taman KLCC, and surf over to the AirZed wireless page!

This service brought to you by Rubenerd Ministry of Pretending You're Somewhere Else, not affiliated with the Rubenerd Ministry of Broken Power Cables or the Ministry of Silly Walks.

Ruben picks apart the useless spam he receives from the spamming spammers who spam him with their spamingly spammish spam. For all the spam he has picked apart, visit the spam category... sounds like a Monty Python routine.

Greetings!!!

A Genuine Univers1ty Degree 1n 4-6 weeks!

Have you ever thought that the only thing stopipng you from a great job and better pay was a few letters behind you name?
Well now you can get them!

BA BSc MA MSc MBA PhD

Within 4-6 weeks!
No Study Rqeuired!
100% Verifiable!

These are real, genuine degrees that include Bachelors, Masters, MB Aand Doctorate Degrees. They are fully verifiable and certified transcripts are also available.

Just call then umber below.
You?ll thank me later?

The problem with these kinds of messages is not so much the fact that they're obviously fake and a scam, but in the way they're presented. They could net so many more "clients" if, oh I don't know, did a grammer and spell check, maybe make it look a touch more formal... why do they intentionally make their messages look rubbish? :D.

I guess the more unbelievable they are, the less people they're going to draw into their scams, which can only be a good thing! Shows though that the people doing these mass mailings are either pretty thick... or script-kiddyish. Is kiddyish a word?

Technorati tags:  weirdness, weird, stupid, spam, junk email, junk mail

I just found today a great site called LinkedIn which is described as a "business oriented social networking site".

It's still at a very rudementary stage but you can view mine profile at http://linkedin.com/in/schade/. Was very lucky to have my last name there... as long as a German doesn't see it ;).

You can connect with contacts, colleagues and classmates as well as advertise your own expertise which is invaluable for consultants; more often than not I think finding the clients is almost as challenging as actually undertaking the work.

Ruben picks apart the useless spam he receives from the spamming spammers who spam him with their spamingly spammish spam. For all the spam he has picked apart, visit the spam category... sounds like a Monty Python routine.

Congratulations for becoming one of the few lucky winners.

With your permission, your e-mail will also be included in the next
sweepstake of 5Million.

You must claim your prize: 1,000,000.00 not later than 14-days from the
moment you receive this e-mail.
In order to avoid unnecessary delays with your claim from the bank. please
contact them immediately,
and quote your winning and personal information to the Bank in all your
correspondence with the paying bank.

Furnish them with the following informations:
(i). your name(s),
(ii) Your telephone and fax numbers
(iii) Your contact address
(iv) Your winning information.

See it sounds all good, but my bullshit detector is just going crazy. And why would I give personal details to someone that I have never met, have never been in contact with or even know exists?

With this sort of spam I like to reply using a different address and play along with them for fun until they ask for money, then I start making excuses about how "oh, to do a money transfer I need you to send money first... or why can't you just use some of my winnings to pay for it first?". That usually lets them know I'm onto their B.S., and no I'm not referring to a Bachellor of Science (which I'm currently doing myself).

Technorati tags:  weirdness, weird, stupid, spam, junk email, junk mail

The Sydney Morning Herald website is reporting that YouTube has been flooded with videos depicting young people smoking. While there appears to be no direct evidence that these videos have been posted by tobacco companies, the speculation is there.

IS THIS the last frontier in tobacco marketing or simply a global stage for the look-at-me generation?

Thousands of videos of sexy, smoking teens are appearing on the internet phenomenon YouTube, possibly being posted by tobacco manufacturers to recruit the next generation of smokers.

Quite frankly I don't have a problem with cigarette advertising. The way I see it, with all the information and evidence available thesedays about how dangerous smoking is, if you're stupid enough to start the habit you deserve all the medical consequences. I like to think of it as natural selection at work ;). The only thing I resent is when our tax dollars have to pay for these people's self inflicted damage in hospitals.

Hey I just got the pun too: YouTube... cigarettes... cigarettes are tubes! Just like the internet ;).

Gita Bayu (our housing complex in Kuala Lumpur) hasn't been very lucky over the last couple of weeks. A slew of thunderstorms (is that the correct collective noun?) have repeatedly wreaked havoc on the telephone lines, causing outages and causing Ruben to be very upset. Of course with our DSL internet connection, no phone line meant no internet. Bummer.

Fortunately the latest outage that cost us internet over Friday afternoon, all of Saturday and all of Sunday seems to have been fixed just in the last few minutes. Telekom Malaysia sure is fast... I'm just thanking my lucky stars this extended outage didn't happen during the week when I do daily Rubenerd Shows; that would have been messy to work around :|

Oh no! I was without internet for 6 minutes! Torture it was!