Rubénerd!

She says its so refreshing to find a guy who doesn't like clubbing and who doesn't have to talk about sport every second... and tech knowledge is sexy!

April fools!

- Rove interviewing Pamela Anderson, 2006 (Wikipedia)

When I moved back here to Australia last year I saw my first episodes of Rove Live, and it thought it was okay. The problem is, aside from a set change the show hasn't progressed at all; in fact the jokes are getting worse and worn out, the skits are just boring, and his interviews make me cringe.

And apparently I'm not the only one fed up with him! Look at some of these quotes from the IMDB article on Rove Live (and no I'm not being biased, about 80% of the people who wrote feel this way):

I'm going to make this long and Moderatly sweet, rove Mcmanus is the worst excuse for a comedian i have seen in my many long years.maybe his show had something when he started but now every Tuesday night he shows us further how sad and poor at being funny a person can be.I think one of his many major folly's was stealing material from "the Simpson's" and using it while hosting the ARIA's, seriously his performance that night was the worst i have ever see, Carson Kressley could have done a better job.His show needs to be canceled before he further embarrasses himself and the foolish goons who voted to award him his ill gotten gold and silver Logie's.

- mickcos

Rove just doesn't have things together enough to be host of a nationally televised show. I think Australian audiences can be partly to blame here because the audiences of Rove Live are far too forgiving, if they didn't laugh at everything slightly humorous that Rove did he might have to actually try to be funny. "Tonight Live with Steve Vizard" and "Denton", both on Seven, were a lot better than Rove Live just on the strength of their hosts, who were not self-destructive idiots like Rove.

- Steve West

But this one takes the cake:

Rove LIVE' is, put simply, not funny. At least not beyond the juvenile, stale and repetitive brand of funny that 'comedians' such as Adam Sandler and Martin Lawrence endorse. The jokes are lame, Rove himself is pretentious and the show tries too hard to be funny. What is perhaps saddest is that it seems Rove is genuinely amused by his own jokes which are superficial, shallow and not particularly entertaining. Also sad is that with celebrities like Renee Zellweger, he makes seemingly endless innuendo at the two of them getting together in attempt to get a bellow of laughter out of the viewer. I guess he must be succeeding though, because 'Rove LIVE' has constantly high ratings. I don't put this down to the creativity and comedic skills of those involved with the show, however. I put it down to the fact that as audiences are subjected to 'stupid' humour (i.e, films such as 'The Animal', 'Joe Dirt', 'Scary Movie', 'Dude, Where's My Car?') more and more regularly, audiences feel that this is the level by which good comedy is measured.

One of the regular segments featured on 'Rove LIVE' is entitled "What the?".

All I have to say, is my thoughts exactly.

- Jackson Cannery

Horizontal line (<hr />) tags are useful for diving up useful sections on a webpage, but thesedays I find it easier just to use a <div> with a "border" property in CSS, but if you prefer to use horizontal line tags, this website is invaluable:

Sovavsiti CSS Workshop: HR Tags

And that's what that's all about.

Some useful DOS programs for your DOS'ing pleasure:

TechW0rm
The ULTIMATE starting point for AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS programs that use less memory (replacements etc).

MaxDIR
A colour-coded version of the DIR command that shows much more information.

CuteMouse
CuteMouse uses FAR LESS RAM than the bundled Microsoft Mouse drivers. Can even load itself in the high memory area itself without the need for other loaded system programs, neat.

This morning I went to the coffee shop down the road for a heavily caffeinated beverage only to come home and discover a parcel on the kitchen table: My Toshiba 486 machine! The shipping was pretty fast considering I only ordered and paid for it yesterday!

Here are the complete specs of this monster machine:

Toshiba Satellite T2150CDT

• Processor: GenuineIntel 80486DX4
• Memory: 16MB
• Audio: ESS 688 AudioDrive (220)
• HDD: 530MB Unit
• FDD: Toshiba PA2652U 3.5" 1.44MB
• ODD: Toshiba CD-ROM XM-1102B

Graphics

• Manufacturer: Chips & Technologies
• Chip Type: F65545
• Memory: 1MB
• Features: DirectDraw 1.00

Official Toshiba Driver & Information Page

I'm going to install PC DOS 2000, Windows 3.0a and all my retro games on one partition, and FreeBSD on the other for a uni project. Yeah!

For those (lucky) enough to have an Intel Core based Apple machine (like me as of this morning, exciting stuff!), these are some useful links for Universal Binary versions of the major Mozilla programs:

Mozilla Intel Wiki Page
Information and download links for Firefox and Thunderbird (experimental builds only at present).

Camino Browser Page
Stable, universal release of Camino now available. My favourite web browser :).

My killer combo is Camino and Thunderbird; Camino because it uses the same engine as Firefox but uses Cocoa so it loads faster and looks sexier, and Thunderbird because it lets me take all my email data and profiles to a Windows or Linux machine very easily.

© FOX Network

With all the junk clogging up television these days I've been watching it less and less. Or maybe it's because I have way to much work. Or both.

Anyway I was channel surfing late at night a few weeks ago and I saw this TV series "Wonderfalls", and I was hooked. It is one of the best written shows I've ever seen, it's bizzare, it's funny, it has talking monkey statues...

The show tells the story of "Jaye Tyler" who has a higher education degree but is stuck in a dead-end job in a Niagara Falls gift shop. The main quirk of the show is that Jaye sees statues of animals, printed animals on boxes etc... talking to her; which of course complicates her life when others see her "talking" back.

Other characters are Jaye's love interest who is married (again) to his first wife, her parents and her councilor who is fed up with Jaye's antics.

Jaye is played by Caroline Dhavernas, a Canadian. I know she's 8 years older than me, but I really like her :). And she's a great actor... or maybe she really is that insane... and her arch rival is none other than Jewel Staite... as in the engineer on the Serenity in Firefly!

But of course...

In the US only the first four episodes were shown on FOX before it was canceled (Just like Firefly!!!) but all 13 episodes were released on DVD and are now all being subsequently shown on Network 9 back in Australia.

I'll definitely have to do a full review of this on Rubenerd Show #75 tomorrow. Brilliant show. And so is Wonderfalls ;).

Ruben picks apart the useless spam he receives from the spamming spammers who spam him with their spamingly spammish spam.

there's a fight we'll be a lot more help there than here."'moved away from the typewriter, laid a hefty file on the desk, and startedhis burned neck. The pain and lack of air made Redrick think that he was

the wind was a solid beating wall of sound against which he could move no

Huh? :|

Well how was my 20th birthday?

Aside from the mountains of uni projects and work I had to get through which took most of the day, looking for a laptop for a few hours for Sarab on eBay, it was pretty good. Kevin, Chris and I went to the Boatdeck Italian cafe for dinner for a Ruben-style birthday ending... pretty low key which was just my style.

As for the 486? I decided not to get the 486 I saw before, but instead a Toshiba Satellite T2150 series machine. Here are the specs of this incredibly fast monster:

• Processor: 80486DX4 75MHz
• Hard Disk: 530MB
• RAM:
• Drives: Internal FDD & CD-ROM (wow!)
• Graphics: Chips & Technologies 65545 (655xx series)
• Sound: ESS 688
• PCMCIA: Adaptec AIC 6X60ISA Single-Chip Controller

Yee ha :D. I will be able to use this for retro gaming, and my uni assessment task on low-powered machines. Yee ha :D

No more being a teenager! Yes I know it's only a number but given my personality not having 'teenager' stigma stuck to me can only be a good thing. Problem is even now if I go to a bottle shop etc and buy a light beer, they ALWAYS ask for ID because they say I look 16-17. Great. :|

Anyway for my birthday I'm considering reversing the trend of getting rid of crap by buying this laptop on eBay that's currently on $15.00:

Check it out, it has... wait for it... a 486 processor! And a 700MB Hard Drive, Floppy Drive, PCMCIA, VGA Out, PS2, Serial Port, LPT Port, Colour 11.3'"Screen, ext 336 Modem, Carry Bag and Power supply.

Why do I want such a blazingly fast computer? Well our family's first machine was a 486SX back in 1989 and it was damaged beyond repair when we moved to Singapore in the 90s. Ever since then I've wanted another 486 just to play my classic DOS games such as Commander Keen 1-3 (never had 4-7, only the demo of 6) etc... all on a Windows 3.0a machine of course ;).

Should I get it? I know I'm trying to get rid of crap, but it's awesome. And I'm 20. Yeah.