Rubénerd!

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!

The Malaysian evening thunderstorm recording.

Around the same time as recording Rubenerd Show 172 a very vocal (vocal?) thunderstorm starting brewing outside our house in Kuala Lumpur. Fortunately the mic and mixer boards were warmed up and ready to go, it was just a matter of plugging in a longer cable and stretching the mic over to the window.

Why buy an expensive relaxation CD or tape when you can download this? Don't answer that.

Download MP3 ↓ 11.5MiB 12:22

I hate the Windows version of MSN Messenger. Sorry I can't bring myself to call it "Windows Live Messenger". It's a poorly designed, RAM sucking, crashprone, unreliable, spyware riddled cesspool. The Mac version is actually pretty good, but I decided long ago to use Adium instead. I've resigned to the fact I have to use the MSN Messenger protocol because most of my friends use it (God bless them) but at least by using Adium I can connect to ICQ, AOL, Jabber, Google users etc.

Anyway I'm going off topic! I got an "official" Spam message today from Microsoft proudly announcing their latest version of "Windows Live Messenger". Only one problem: all the links and images were broken! It seems these folks can't even send an email that actually works. I do have images blocked in Gmail, but I "unblocked" them for this message and they were still broken!

EDIT: I found out why the images were broken: I use Adblock for Firefox. It seems it detected automatically that this Spam message was an advertisement and had its way with it. Still funny though!

Your mode of life will be changed to ASCII.

Damn, I thought I would have progressed to Unicode by now :D.

If you've been browsing the Rubenerd Blog in the last hour or so you'd notice things are looking a bit different. Now before you roll your eyes and think "here he goes changing things again!" let me explain.

The problem with the old skin was that looked okay on the surface, but the underlying theme was hacked to bits and painfully difficult to upgrade. So to make my life easier I've changed the underlying skin to Sandbox and separated my custom changes from the theme so upgrades are MUCH faster and easier.

Due to the fact I'm working on this as we speak for the rest of this weekend there may some quirks; don't worry this isn't the final version!

If you notice anything fishy or stuffed up, I'd appreciate any feedback.

Cheers and thanks for your patience!
Ruben