Sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes this afternoon I couldn’t help but overhear some Indian university students and an Indian student with an Aussie accent loudly talking about living in Australia. He seems to be even more of a scatterbrain than 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.
It’s killing me that I don’t remember where I heard this, but someone made the comment that many of us online are almost welcoming the demise of newspapers because we think they’re outdated dinosaurs, yet at the same time we complain about being overwhelmed by all the content streaming in from web feeds we subscribe to!
NEENZ: If you want your favorite restaurants to stay in business, you have to eat there and share with the world! – http://bkite.com/0blZR
That is the view outside the Boatdeck Cafe where I typed up this post early this afternoon as I drank a huge cup of frothy coffee to warm me up. The rain stopped as soon as I came in of course.
Weather is an unpredictable beast, to the extent that meteorologists can sustain their lives by attempting to predict it with newer and more expensive equipment which themselves are funded by the preoccupation we all have with not getting ourselves wet when we leave the house and ensuring we’re wearing adequate clothing for the temperatures we’ll be facing. That was a very long sentence, especially when compared to this one.
In a day where other cities in the country were experiencing mini heatwaves (Sydney and Brisbane I’m looking at you!) Adelaide was blustery and frigidly cold. Blustery is a word right? It was insanely windy, so windy that the glass in our windows was rattling and creaking and the rain was falling almost horizontally. I also saw a semi trailer loaded up with bricks and cinder blocks literally sailing through the air outside the window, though that could have just been a Matchbox car.
The screenshot above was from the SBS World News bulletin from earlier this evening. We were told two low pressure systems acting on each other so disruptively isn’t unusual in itself, but that it typically happens in Australia in September-October not August! Adelaide is right in the middle of the two bands of white cloud stuff.
Why am I boring you with bad weather talk this evening? It has to do with personal safety, from personal experience. You can safely ignore the nonsense I’ve belaboured so far, but I’d start taking notes from here on if I were you.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you per chance find yourself facing the daunting task of taking on extremely heavy rain and strong winds, do not take a very large umbrella thinking it will help to shield you from getting too wet. For one thing it’s entirely ineffective; when rain isn’t obeying gravity or the laws of physics your crappy piece of material held together with tiny metal rods isn’t going to do squat.
Secondly, and more importantly, by using a huge umbrella in strong winds and rain you are essentially unfolding a gigantic sail which if you hold on to makes you the servant in the relationship, not the master. This afternoon the wind was so strong I was being pulled by the umbrella and as a result was nearly forced off a bridge twice and onto the road in the path of an oncoming automotive driver in their motorised vehicle. I would not have wanted to be the person to clean up that mess.
If my terrifying message of hope has been useful, consider donating me a cup of coffee by clicking the link on the right hand side of the site here. It’s a small price to pay for your safety am I right? Wait, that really didn’t sound right. Did I mention I saw a semi trailer loaded up with bricks and cinder blocks sailing through the air?
Given I spend so much time at the Boatdeck Cafe programming and drinking their amazing coffee I’d noticed the owner Joe Karem hadn’t been there for a while since I came back. Turns out he didn’t divulge himself of his shares after all, he was on holidays in Lebanon around the same time as I was back in Singapore but stayed there longer.
Lebanon is on my ever expanding laundry list of places I want to visit because Beirut has some amazing architecture and cultural sights, but mostly because I love Lebanese food! The best Lebanese I’ve had in Australia was in a kebab stall in Canberra of all places, in South-East Asia I had a great lunch at the Alamanda shopping centre in Putrajaya. Does being a capital ensure you have good Lebanese food, is that it?
I’d be interested to hear what people reckon is the best place to get it in Adelaide, I admit now I’m having insane cravings!
Neal over at iPhone User News is reporting that some coffee shop owners have started cutting down on people taking up space and using precious electricity that could be better spent heating up milk for someone’s Iced Frappa Munga Cappacinolatte.
Coffee shop owners are reportedly cutting down on people taking up space and using precious electricity that could be better spent heating up milk for someone’s Iced Frappa Munga Cappacinolatte.
I just said that.
More and more branches of Starbucks and other coffee chains are banning laptop use at certain times of day, preventing use of power outlets, and generally becoming less amicable to Internet users.
I’m all for limiting the time people can sit there taking up space with their laptops, but banning them outright is akin to telling your best customers they’re no longer welcome. I’m doing computer science and economics at university not business, but I’m pretty sure alienating your customers is not the smartest thing to do. The RIAA in the US hasn’t learned that 101 lesson either it seems.
I can just imagine people frantically waiting for tablet computers to come out so they can use them instead of laptops at coffee shops to game the system! And with EVDO cards and tethered iPhones making it possible to use wireless internet without the need for a WiFi connection, it seems to me instigators of such bans would be fighting an uphill battle. I can just imagine nerds sitting in comfy chairs with their lattes hiding their tablet computers under their coats!
For the record, the owner of the Boatdeck Cafe here in Mawson Lakes has no trouble with me sitting at his shop for a couple of hours with my laptop. Why? Because I’m a good customer, and he’s a nice guy!
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?
My beloved Boatdeck Cafe (extreme left) was the only shop in Mawson Central to observe Earth Hour. They had candles on every table, was kinda romantic :). I sat down for a cup of coffee and a caramel slice.
I have a healthy dose of scepticism regarding this whole Earth Hour business and how much of a difference it’s really making to our planet, but I must admit it was kind of a fun thing to take part in :).
These are the photos I took around Mawson Lakes (our suburb near uni) a few minutes ago with my D60. I was nervous about what people would think of a weird guy walking around a neighbourhood at night with a camera, so I bumped up the ISO a few more levels and lowered the aperture number to take the photos faster!
You can also view these photos on my Earth Hour in Mawson Lakes gallery.
The Mawson Lakes river with the train station in the background. Usually the water is reflecting a ton of lights from houses and buildings.
The roundabout next to our street. Absolutely nobody has their lights on!
Only two houses on our street are lit up. Ours is not one of them 
UPDATE: This post was originally written yesterday on Sunday, but I hit the "Save Draft" button instead of "Publish". Looking back at it now, I wish it were still Sunday.
I’m sitting here at the Boatdeck Cafe this Sunday afternoon with just my iPhone and a stable wireless network. Sometimes I need to lug the glorified monitor and keyboard stuck together, but today just typing on this feels fine.
It is definitely starting to show that it’s Autumn here in Adelaide; after almost every day being as hot as Singapore when we came back here, this weekend has been in the low 20s and drizzling. To the astonishment of many a person in the real world and online I’ve readily admitted I prefer overcast days; there’s something about them that allows me to relax more. Perhaps it was the positive cool change overcast days have on tropical climates that made me think of them positively.
Mugachinos are good!
As for today, despite university now being back for a fortnight now I’ve still been having a nagging enrollment issue that I thought would have been fixed but clearly not, so I had intended this afternoon to work on that, but unwittingly I forgot the online enrollment system isn’t functional on Sundays! Or at least the part I’m trying to access. I still haven’t even got a new student card yet!
So to be productive I’ve been watching some more Code Geass and going to the Boardeck Cafe! I figure my life is so dreadfully confusing and filled with anxiousness and dread that a Sunday where I only have a few responsibilities is, for an Atheist wanting a better word, a godsend! Plus it’s overcast, good times!
I’ve also finally recorded a Rubenerd Show again, the first since coming back to Adelaide. I had forgotten that I was supposed to be keeping shows under 10MiB so people on iPhones and iPod Touches (the phrase "iPod Touches" just doesn’t sound right, if you know what I mean) can download them on mobile phone networks, so I rambled on just as I’m doing here without any thought to the time until it was just time. The result was I had four things I wanted to discuss and I ended up discussing one thing, then getting sidetracked and talked about something else! Good times.
Well that’s my Sunday! Now if you’d excuse me, I’m going to turn to the Stanza iPhone app and continue reading The Counte of Monte Cristo [Wikipedia] while I finish my Mugaccino. Sundays are fun.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
I'm also on Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and lots more places.
