Rubénerd!

Ladies and gentlemen, this evening it has come to my attention that I grievously forgot an event so epic in size and importance that I may be feeling the repercussions for many millennia to come, assuming my plan to live forever pans out. I forgot @Zombie_Plan's Birthday.

Guards!

Now you must understand, I've never met Mr Plan. Our communications have primarily consisted of 140 character or less Twitter messages and the occasional blog post. As such I have long since suspected that he isn't real, he's either:

1. a different person I've already met who's putting on a secondary fake persona (so he can talk about Pokemon without fear of being ostracized by ditsy, arrogant socialites with more hair bleach than intelligence) or...

2. he's in actuality a sophisticated Turing Machine capable of reproducing all human interactions and thought. The photo above is a rough representation of what the Zombie_Plan Turing Machine could look like.

So here's my thinking. If the former assertion is true, then this person is a fake and therefore doesn't have a birthday, unless you count the day the fake persona went online. If the latter is true, as far as I know computers don't have birthdays because they're not birthed, unless you consider programming and sophisticated fabrication and construction to be a metaphorical equivalent.

In either event, I submit to you dear reader that I did not forget Zombie_Plan's birthday, for in fact he/she/it does not possess one. Happy Birthday sir, when I make it back to Adelaide for the last time we'll have to do coffee or beer or pancakes or grilled cheese sandwiches or a sickening combination of all four!

Guards!

And finally some blatant spam linking on his behalf:

• ZombieSkittles, the site I based my navigation bar on
• @Zombie_Plan on Twitter
• His very own Rubénerd Blog ZombiePlan tag
• A screenshot demonstrating him breaking The Googles

A few days ago @Zombie_Plan of ZombieSkittles fame asked his Twitter followers to dispense ideas for a blog post he could write about. Having suggested an idea to him that was promptly ignored, I decided I may as well write about it myself :).

You could be forgiven for not thinking about this because the devices in question are so ubiquitus and have become such an integral part of our lazy Western lives, but have you ever considered why remote controls have to be vertical? They all are, from the lowly air conditioner remote with half a dozen buttons to those combined entertainment system remotes with built in screens and enough buttons to control a nuclear reactor.

But why are they vertical? Were they originally designed in this way to help train people to use them by making it clear which direction they should be pointed? Was it to make it somewhat easier to use with only one hand, but was later abused by being so long and so fully crammed with buttons the benefits are no longer existent?

No ladies and gentleman I propose remote controls don't need to be vertical, they could be horizontal. Think about it, with the exception of the Wii which makes sparing use of buttons in place of motion, most gaming controllers are horizontal not vertical, and you could lay out buttons more logically on a horizontal plane than a vertical one. I know this is true because I read this post on a smart guy's blog and he agrees.

So whaddya think? Are horizontal remote controls a great idea, or the greatest idea? Be honest, I know you want to say it's brilliant and you want to give me trillions in venture capital for me to start manufacturing them and afford a private jet on the side with one of those fancy walk-in grilled cheese sandwich jaffle making whatsits with the anti-stick surfaces and those really super bright LEDs that tell you when it's finished cooking that you could blind a deer with from several hundred kilometres away. That'd be schweet.

Who's with me?

It seems both the Adelaide proprietors of The ZombieSkittleness and The Vanilla Silenceness have been drawn to this newfangled FormSpring site which allows people to ask questions anonymously and get replies, and to presumably populate their forms with springs. Why you would want to do that is beyond the scope of this post, and beyond me entirely.

I for one don't need a site like that to get people to ask me random questions, for some reason I get asked questions by complete strangers often enough as it is. I was asked this by a very overweight man while waiting for the traffic lights to change this morning:

I suppose you think you look good in that stupid jumper, am I right?

To which I replied with "Purple monkey dishwasher" and a string of Singapore Hokkien swear words, by which time the lights had changed! He had no idea what I was saying, but then again I'm used to that even when I'm talking normally. I talk normally?

Another question I was posed a few weeks ago while standing in line at the Boatdeck Cafe for my morning coffee:

Could you hold my position for a sec?

Why, is it in pain?

And finally this gem:

Daijoubu?

Ugh, not so good. For what it's worth though I did end up having a great cup of coffee at the Boatdeck Cafe and I crossed the street safely ^_^.

Screenshot is from my MacBook Pro taken on the 06th of September 2007. Yup, I was still running Mac OS X Tiger!

Cross pollination is a good thing. If you don't think it's a good thing then you're against flowers. You're not... against flowers are you? More to the point, that evil twisted genius Zombie Skittles has used two blog posts here recently as the basis for his own (Do You Have Flybuys? referencing Okay Woolies, you win and Funfact Bombshell referencing Rubenerd Fun Fact #80), so it seems only fitting for me to do the same with one of his.

For my derivative work I've elected his post titled On This Day in which he describes the following:

I have decided to come clean and admit to you all that on this day four years ago I entered a convenience store with a poster tube painted to look like a bazooka and demanded they hand over all their issues of Better Homes and Gardens otherwise I'd blow away their frozen food section. The owner called my bluff and had me placed under citizens arrest for making a mockery of World War II artillery by the Adelaide Historical Society of Southern Sri Lanka. True story.

Underneath this baffling admission he listed a series of things which he believed happened On This Day, which is clever because that premise also happened to be the title of his blog post. I've decided to blatantly copy him, by listing what happened on my blog On This Day being the 06th of September, and what happened around the world.

On this day on my blog

• in 2009 I was writing a weird blog post titled On this day...
• in 2008 I was rendering sports commentators obsolete
• in 2007 I was coming to terms with Twitter being down and my Twitter addiction
• in 2007 I was wishing aloud about things I wanted to see in 2007 iPods!
• in 2006 I tried to scare my dad by saying I wanted a Peugeot 307 HDi
• in 2006 I had updated my logos which have barely changed since
• in 2006 I was having a late night (also hasn't changed)
• in 2006 I was also quoting Bender
• in 2005 I was recording a Rubenerd Show which I used to release the following day

On this day around the world

• A lottery company announced a bogus winner and kept the money for themselves
• A grilled cheese sandwich which was left out to cool caused subsequent gastrointestinal stress for a meek house cat
• Queen Elizabeth II had her plumbing checked out
• In a surprisingly well choreographed high octane fight scene, two people with the same name started a brawl and unwittingly took out a noticeboard when they were called for a plastic surgery appointment at the same time
• A dimwitted hamster fell asleep after crawling under a blanket and thinking it was night
• A cute, shy women slightly older than Ruben Schade briefly talked to him by asking if he had seen her boyfriend anywhere
• Several hundred people around the world dropped entire cartons of eggs onto the floor that they had just purchased soliciting various profanities in different languages
• A tapir skidded on a patch of mud but was able to maintain it's dignity and composure by performing a perfect dismount
• A twisted person took the term for a gymnastics move to mean something else
• All of the Zombie's Skittles and all the Kings Men, could not make Ruben Write a Succinct Blog Post Again.

You may remember a few days I go I wrote a blog post about a blog post that ZombiePlan had written on his blog. A blog post about a blog post on a blog, who would have thought it? Anyway I blatantly fabricated a screenshot by inserting words he in fact did not say and then proceeded to pretend he did in fact say what I had fabricated. I like pie.

In response to said post ZombiePlan did what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances and made me into a Yu-Gi-Oh card that mocked the frequency in which I post blog posts on my blog. I write blog posts on my blog, who would have thought it?

The two cards presented above may look identical to the untrained eye, but in fact there are significant differences. In my late primary school and early high school years in the early 2000s I used to play Magic: The Gathering. Yes I'm afraid it's true, you could have been forgiven up until this point for thinking my online nerdish dorkyness was just a disguise, but it's definitely not!

In fact initially I didn't even play the game to start with, I used to collect the cards and put them in card folders because I loved the graphics. This used to work great because often the cards that had the crappiest attack/defence power or the lamest actions had some of the best pictures, so people would give them to me for free.

And why is it that I included the Thran Dynamo? Well when I started playing half-seriously I managed to scrounge up several of these cards and use them in place of mana once I had four down. By tapping one of those beauties, I had three times the mana to activate cards in one turn, and more importantly they could be used with any coloured cards. Not the best card ever, but I thought I was being clever.

It's amazing what you remember... and conversely what you try to forget. I still like pie though.

I was asked a question yesterday from someone other than a person from high school who had almost never spoken to me unless they had a computer problem, so for once I felt obligated to answer. Zombie Plan (yes, THAT ZombiePlan) wanted to know how it is I can blog so much and where I get my ideas from.

There are two ways to address the question, the first is the academic way. I am able to blog so much because I endeavour to discover new and exciting fields of study both in my life and in the world around me and therefore I am able to produce blog posts of a high calibre and social value for my readers. As with most academic answers of this nature though, this reason is a lot of hot air and complete nonsense.

As I've said many times here over the years I find blogging a fun distraction from studying and work, I guess you could call it a coping mechanism. It may sound counter-intuitive, but often I blog the most when I have the most amount of work to do! When I'm distracted, my brain can come up with more material. Perhaps when said brain is stimulated it's thinks better, alas I'm no Sam Harris neurologist I'm only interpreting the results in my own frame of reference.

The other thing to try is not something if you're a serious person attempting to write a serious blog. Write nonsense! I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets tired of reading dry, impersonal posts on blogs; buck the trend and put material in posts regarding your own life and experiences when you talk about things. Recently I took this one step further by having a dedicated nonsense category where I can put fun silliness. I remember when I used to work for Discovery Channel as a voice over guy one of the things the director said is that people can tell when you speak whether or not you're smiling just by listening; I reckon the same could be said for blogging.

And while I'm giving away my super duper secrets, my other trick is to just go online and find silly or completely random pictures, often they trigger something in my head and I can write about something. I try to have at least one image associated with each post because I feel text-only blogs kinda defeat the purpose of having a website on the multimedia intertubes anyway. While we're talking about triggers I also have a notebook page on my iTelephone for blog and show topics too which I frantically jot nonsense into whenever I get the chance.

I almost forgot! The other thing is I create the vast majoraty of my blog posts in coffee shops; in Adelaide I sit at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, in Singapore I sit at any number of Starbucks Coffee thingys. Don't ask me why I'm more productive or mentally stimulated in places like that, because I don't know the answer myself!

Is my blog a good one? Heavens no, it's awful! But that wasn't the question, Zombie Plan wanted to know how I blog so much. I hope this sheds some light onto it. Do lights have fur?

Look out, it's a gigantic coke can!

For those of you who don't know ZombiePlan, he's apparently a walking undead person who happens to have a plan. I'm envious; I'm neither a cool walking undead person nor do I have a plan. Unless drinking coffee, studying and typing incessantly on a keyboard to create a haphazard string of conciousness in the form of words on a blog counts as a plan.

ASIDE: If you spell plan by dropping all the letters except p and add the letters l, w and z, you end up with grilled cheese sandwich. Spooky huh?

Anyway I've never met this guy who lives in Adelaide but am fascinated by his various blog iterations and somewhat jealous that he's been able to churn out more interestingness (is that a word?) in fewer posts than have I. IBM. Really? How long have you been M?

This part of his latest post though had me confused:

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of Billy Mays, and found himself deleting the WHOLE of his public_html folder. [...] His reign of terror must be stopped; we are not even safe after death. What will he target next?

And this part had me even more confused:

I like pie.

Perhaps he's talking about the plot for that alternative reality screenplay he's been writing for the last six years in secret, the one with the futuristic robots from the past that delete websites by throwing baked goods at law enforcement officers to distract them while they enter server rooms and delete specific files from servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they all while they all while they they they they they

I'm sorry I crashed. What was I talking about?

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of I like pie.

I still don't get it.

The incompetent internets episode!

Moving lots of blogs into one blog; people like Zombie Plan and Neal from IntoYourHead going the opposite ways; working and living places after university; iTelephone cases and downloading; The Googles and I losing track of core competencies; too much self respect to use Chandler Bing and vacuous people getting angry at Twitter for losing spam followers!

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