Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Weekly Rubenerd Show announcement

2007.03.08 – 15.01 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Rubenerd Show!

It’s with a heavy concience (does that make sense?) that I announce I’ve decided to make the Rubenerd Show a weekly programme again instead of weeknightly; mostly due to the numerous delays regarding previous shows but also because of my ever increasing workload at university, my two jobs and the responsibility of looking after my mum which I could not have forseen back in 2005.

Each show will now be 45 minutes long and will be released each week, probably on Monday mornings Singapore/KL time so I have most of Sunday to record it. One long programme is far easier to produce than many small programmes, and it will give me the opportunity to reintroduce my pointless but very fun segments from the Episode 70+ era such as Will it Sink, The Top 5, Something Stupid, A Little More Serious, Now for Something Completely Different, Frank Edward Nora What? as well as free song reviews and so forth.

I will also aim each week to have a special guest to talk about crap and stuff (pun intended). I have five people so far interested which should keep me going until April; but I’ll be on the lookout for more.

Given the fact I’m moving myself over to open source software I understand how difficult it is to play MP3s in Linux, FreeBSD and so forth so doing one episode a week (aka: less overhead) will also allow me to export the shows as OGG Vorbis files as well. I may even consider exporting a higher quality 192Kb/s version as well given the fact I’ll be playing music; plus also it’s obviously clearer and easier to understand than the current 64Kb/s format which quite frankly to me sounds like I’m talking through water ;).

It’s in the planning stages at the moment so feel free to post on this entry or over on the Rubenerd Forum if you have any comments.

Thanks again everyone, will be in touch soon
- Ruben

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Anything but Monday Show

2007.02.21 – 15.56 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

ABMSo I was catching up on some missed Overnightscape episodes when I heard Frank talking about his upcoming Anything but Monday Show with Mad Mike. Visiting the Overnightscape site, I saw the link to ABM so I thought I’d give it a look-see.

In all honesty, I heard some of the Overnightscape shows with Mad Mike last year and really did not like them that much; I guess my sense of humour is somewhat different. Perhaps being an Aussie I just tend to appreciate British comedy more. But I digress. I listened to the “free sample” they have available and think it’s a bit better. I’ve signed up to the ABM website forum.

Currently though there’s a purchasing power parity problem. I’m living in Malaysia and the asking price of RM27.90 per month (US$7.99) is very steep, though I’m sure when I move back to Singapore and can pay SG$12.26 a month it will be a bit easier. I want to listen to some more episodes first though.

All that said though, I really like their website: Frank and Matt have outdone themselves again. The scary thing though is it bears a striking resemblence to the new Rubenerd Show site and blogging engine I’m designing myself in Ruby on Rails to replace WordPress for a university project… just replace the orange and red with blue and green with a downtown shot of the Singapore CBD at night. 209 anyone?

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Rubenerd Show word associations

2007.01.24 – 17.17 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Rubenerd ShowLittle game of word association going on at the Podcast Pickle web forum:

Hero Sandwich

Superman on Rye

reuben

Rubenerd Show - Never listened to it, but searched ruben in pickle and it came up.

revenge of the nerds

Hey, at least he spelt Ruben without an e ;).

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Ourmedia and Server Move Complete!

2006.12.11 – 14.35 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Rubenerd Show The Rubenerd Show audio episodes have been successfully moved over to the new web server as of a few minutes ago! This will mean a far more reliable show production schedule, no more interruptions, lost transfers and more reliable and zippy downloads. Mmm… zippy downloads!

As a comparison, with the old server it could take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes to upload a 4.6MiB MP3 file, and there was no guarentee it would actually work when it finished the transfer (as many friendly people have pointed out on the Rubenerd Forum in the past!). Very often episodes could be delayed by several days because my host would just blantely refuse to accept uploaded files, even if it was done through their "Web Upload" interface instead of FTP!

Now the entire process takes less that 2 minutes, and so far I have not experienced any upload dropouts or “stalls” as the Terminal FTP program likes to call them. I can also see iTunes and Juice Receiver downloading the files a lot faster now as well which is great news.

Tomorrow’s episode, Episode 191 for Tuesday 12th December 2006 will be the first one to be released entirely on the new server. I just can’t get over how fast and easy uploading is on this new server!

Ourmedia!I’m also giving another serious look at using Ourmedia as a mirror site to prevent future troubles and to help people access the shows. Ourmedia is great because it lets you upload and share media files for free, and unlike Google Video, YouTube or PodShow and the like, it is based around the Internet Archives and is a non-profit organisation, so I feel far more comfortable using their servers to host my content without fear of it being used inappropriatly because of evil hidden clauses in licence agreements and so forth. Am I paranoid? Probably! But better safe than sorry.

Of course again if you have any problems or suggestions I love talking to people on the Rubenerd Forum, or you can just leave a comment on this blog post.

Thanks everyone for your patience and support over these last few weeks! :D

Cheers,
Ruben

EDIT: I have just been able to get internet access again. I’ve been called to Singapore for an emergency meeting with my employer and won’t be back until Saturday. What’s the point, I ask everyone here, of work when it interferes with your podcast?

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Site Holiday Decorations Going Up!

2006.11.27 – 22.17 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Dr Tan I’m in the process of putting the holiday photos and decorations up on the Rubenerd Show and Rubenerd Blog. :D. Both pictures are of Christmas in Singapore.

If you load the pages and can’t tell the difference, try holding down shift and click reload to force a page redraw.

The picture to the right is my mum’s cancer doctor, Hematologist and Oncologist in Singapore Dr Tan (of Gleneagles Hospital and Medical Centre) who I dressed up in a very well drawn and detailed fake Santa costume as you can tell ;).

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Who Else Can’t Stand PodShow?

2006.11.21 – 11.16 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

PodShowIf you haven’t seen it yet, the PodShow website is a classic example of an abysmally designed website; the pages look cheap and hacked together, half the time the podcasts themselves don’t work in iTunes or Juice Receiver and just finding the audio files themselves to download is a royal pain in the backside.

My favourite tech podcast, the Gillmor Gang uses PodShow, I liked it much better when they were on IT Conversations :(

It’s good to know I’m not the only person who loathes PodShow though, according to some of the comments on the Gillmor Gang’s page (directed at the site, not the show):

How about the decision to place the show in the podshow network? Could there be a more loathsome venue? Could the web site be any more hideous without being completely unusable?

Finally found out how to get the damn show into itunes….what a drama that was….who designed this podshow ui, should be shot.

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Rubenerd Forum Finally Fixed!

2006.11.19 – 04.25 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Vanilla Forum SoftwareOriginally posted on the Rubenerd Forum

Well it’s almost 04:30am here in KL, and I figured out what the darned problem was in Internet Explorer!

Brace yourselves! It was… a <div> tag that wasn’t closed! That’s it! I reinstalled the database, I uploaded all the server files twice, I rewrote all the CSS, and it was because I forgot to close a <div> tag. AAARGH! Firefox must have been more forgiving when it encountered my crappy code extensions; in any event for once it wasn’t Internet Explorer’s fault, it was entirely my own!

Tinkering around though with this Vanilla Forum software though I learned a lot, so it wasn’t a complete waste. I figured out how to use the language customisation features, so now we can all bask in the glory that is Aussie/British spelling! I’m so old fashioned :wink:.

I also changed the theme to one that takes up much less screen space.

Let me all know what you think and if you have any further problems. It was exhausting, but in a way I’m glad it happened, I’ve learned so much about Internet Explorer CSS hacks, and how to customise Vanilla Forum software.

Cheers
Ruben

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Another Week, Another Delay

2006.11.04 – 01.37 UTC+08 (Singapore Time)

Hello everyone. Just wanted to apologise for another week without regular programming on the Rubenerd Show. A spate of technical problems regarding our internet connection and the stress of having my mum starting chemotherapy again have been wrecking havoc as you can imagine.

I love doing the Rubenerd Show, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that doing them can be at times unreliable. I went for months this year without a hitch, so three interruptions in a month is unacceptable. I’m weighing up now therefore to record the shows a few days in advance starting next week and use Wordpress’s ability to release posts with a time delay, so any unplanned events will not affect the show. The beauty of New Time Radio is that if there is an important event I can change a future show on short notice.

In the meantime you’re more than welcome to check out the Rubenerd Blog, the previous episodes of the Rubenerd Show or even check out some of my high school friends’ websites (Boyd Anderson and Kevin Keirle) for something new.

Thanks everyone for your support, you all rock.

Cheers,
Ruben

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