Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Neapolitan Boat, yummeh! What’s better than a midnight sundae? :P

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

You ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

But hey, that’s what schools are for, right, teach kids what to do, rather than how to think.

To comment on any article or weblog post over on ZDNet you must register and hand over more information than I needed to open a bank account here in Singapore! That aside though, after you've filled in the registration form you scroll down the page and are given a list of checkboxes next to newsletters you want to subscribe to.

As you can see I unchecked every single one, yet every day now I get two Windows ZDNet tech newsletters which are especially useful to a Mac and FreeBSD user such as myself… go figure!

Anyway one of the articles which I received in my inbox was entitled How to run Internet Explorer securely which includes a string of screenshots like this one:

And here I was under the impression that the best way to securely use Internet Explorer was to uninstall it along with Windows and install FreeBSD or Linux with Firefox or Opera! In fact that first point is even the recommendation of US federal authorities:

The Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT which advises the US Government has warned that users should stop using Internet Explorer for surfing the web. The world’s most popular browser, it has been described as being riddled with security flaws and is vulnerable against hackers and snoopers.

A number of leading organisations have also backed the move away from Internet Explorer as a recent investigation has shown that criminals can exploit the program to record keystrokes inputted by the users, so that they may steal credit card and other personal information and use the details for their own gain.

Johannes Ulrich, CTO for Sans Internet Security stated that the recently exposed flaws were a wake up call for users to switch to another browser. He continued to say to keep on using Internet Explorer is like playing the lottery.

– adamantean.com

As you may already be aware I'm an obsessively obsessed person with an obsessively obsessed obsession for Twitter, the micro-blogging platform where you type what you're doing. It's such a stunningly simple yet horribly addictive site that I've posted updates to over 3500 times, and have made friends with so many people who not only have I have never met in person but are not even in the same city, country, time zone or planet as me!

ASIDE: I mentioned planet because I follow at least one person on Twitter who claims to not reside on Earth. Given the fact we have barely even begun to colonise the moon, I find myself doubting this person’s residential claims, though maybe they work in a secret underground organisaion that my friend Frank Nora says is the real problem with the world right now. Damn those elitist underground people who want to undermine society to bring about a new world order and make us robotic slaves who will carry out their mission to build the world’s largest mozzarella ball!

ASIDE: How did I end up discussing secret societies, cheese and colonising other planets on a post discussing Twitter? Is this a sign of a creative mind, or a deranged one?

All that said though, I fear that people who harvest profiles and add friends en-masse are slowly wrecking Twitter. If you've been on Twitter for a while you know what I'm talking about: getting a constant stream of emails informing you that John Doe is following you on Twitter along with 1000 other people, and that John Doe is being followed by only a dozen or so people.

That image is a screenshot of my inbox showing just messages from Twitter over the last month. Out of these, a small number are notifications from friends, and the rest are people who want to add me who are following thousands of people with only a few following them!

In so many situations online when people seem to be harvesting addresses or profiles and adding people I can understand the motivation: usually it's either to allow the harvester to spam or scam users. I find it somewhat more difficult to see the motivation here though: what do harvesters gain by attempting to befriend me on Twitter? Unless I add them back I receive none of their messages which may or may not include spam or links to phishing sites.

Am I missing something here? I don't understand what's going on!

For what seems like an age I've been receiving email newsletters from the so-called "Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation". They added me to their email list; I didn't subscribe to them; and they don't provide any way to opt out. Repeated messages to them to unsubscribe me from their list were always ignored.

ASIDE: I probably paid a price for replying, which verified my address and allowed them to continue spamming me. The power of hindsight!

Fortunately they finally slipped up and provided a link to a YouTube video they're working on. From their latest email message that landed in my spam folder:

Dear Friends,

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation has a polished draft of our new “Tax Competition” video. Thanks to all the helpful comments we received on our “Corporate Tax Rate” video, I hope our new video is an even better product. It’s one minute shorter and was used a professional filming facility, but we’ve also worked on making the message more compelling.

I’m hoping you can be part of our final filter.

This was a slip up because YouTube allows publicly viewable comments that they can't filter out. So I posted a quick response which I'm sure won't get me off their spam list, but at least I can warn others… and plus it just feels good finally getting a message to them they can't just block out!

These people subscribed me to their email newsletters without my permission and do not provide a way to opt out. I have to create a separate filter in all my email clients specially for their junk.

Even ignoring their flawed economic logic, the simple fact of the matter is they’re nothing but SPAMMERS. Don’t give them any of your time.

I'm not linking to their site or their video so I'm not giving them free Google juice, but I'm sure you could find them by doing a quick internet search… if you really wanted to find them!

Does this count as Schadenfreude? Is there such as thing as justified Schadenfreude? :-D

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

“It is also true that our intuitions have been known to fail. Indeed, many of the deliverances of reason don’t seem to be reasonable at first glance. When asked how thick a piece of newspaper would be if one could fold it upon itself one hundred times in succession, most of us imagine something about the size of a brick. A little arithmetic reveals, however, that such an object would be as thick as the known universe. If we’ve learned anything in the last two thousand years, it is that a person’s sense of what is reasonable sometimes needs a little help finding its feet.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Karma is a bitch!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

My good friend Felix had started his own Tumblr weblog which looks really slick and is full of random good stuff!

ASIDE: I almost typed the word friend as fiend: would have meant something slightly different!

ASIDE: I’m currently listening to Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes. As I typed in Tumblr, she sang “she’ll take a TUMBLE on you!” If that isn’t a synchronicity, then I’m a mozzarella ball.

I thought if Tumblr was good enough to meet Felix's quite stringent standards I figured I might as well give it a shot myself. As I eventually found out with services like del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and Truemors, I don't feel as though I have much of a use for it now, but it might grow on me. Actually come to think of it then, maybe I shouldn't start another addiction!

From the Tumblr Help page:

To make a simple analogy: If blogs are journals, tumblelogs are scrapbooks.

You can also look at tumblelogs as slightly more structured blogs that make it easier, faster, and more fun to post and share stuff you find or create.

For the time being I've just got my own Tumblr literally posting directly from my Flickr, del.icio.us, Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog web feeds. I also post random quotes that I find, because one line posts wouldn't really be that appropriate on a site like this, plus doggone it I really like quotes.

If you're using a screen reader or text based browser, the description in the picture above is:

A cheap imitation in design and spirit of my good friend Felix Tanjono’s Tumblr weblog!

My Tumblr can be found at rubenerd.tumblr.com, and Felix's is at ftanjono.tumblr.com.