Rubénerd Blog :)

I’m typing this post from a small café next to our hotel in Dublin and boy it’s freezing! There’s snow lightly falling outside and the footpaths are slick with ice which has caused more than a few bruises in the last few days, but we’ve still been thoroughly enjoying ourselves! Anyway I was going to save blogging until I got back to Singapore, but I couldn’t resist when I saw the above ad.

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My dad, sis and I are just about to leave the door to start our Europe trip. We’ll be heading to Germany via Dubai to catch up with relatives in Frankfurt am Main and friends in Munich, then to Plzeň in the Czech Republic, then driving back through Germany to Paris, then a flight to Cork and a tour of Ireland.

I’m going to take a ton of photos and will be blogging as much about it as I can! In the meantime you can follow our adventures on Twitter and Gowalla too.

Selamat tinggal! Wait, wrong language :D

It’s a cruel irony that my close friend Jerry Novak lost his wife and I lost my mum and best friend to cancer around Christmas, as I’m sure many others have. My family isn’t religious but we always had massive trees, big Christmas lunches and swapped masses of prezzies while we listened to Tony Bennett and Bing Crosby carol CDs. Even decorating the tree was a huge event we all looked forward to, and in the last 12 years even though she wasn’t physically strong enough to join in we purposefully rearranged my mum’s chemo treatments so she could sit there and watch.

My dad, sister and I haven’t unpacked the decorations since and don’t celebrate Christmas any more, for obvious reasons. To all of you who are though, have safe and happy holidays, and to my friends in Europe and the US I hope you’re somewhere warm.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

Had a bit of a scare with our oldest little doggie Romeo yesterday, he completely lost his usually veracious appetite and looked as though he was struggling to move. We rushed him to the vet where a blood test revealed his white blood cell count was through the roof, so he was hospitalised overnight. We were told the symptoms pointed to a a severe infection, but there was a chance he had a tumour in his liver. Needless to say, we didn’t get much sleep last night worrying about it.

Fortunately he was discharged today after being placed on several vitamin drips and his blood returned to normal. We have to keep him under close observation over the next few days and have a cocktail of medications to give him, but he’s already looking more like his old self. Hopefully he’ll be looking as happy and silly as the photo above again soon :).

UPDATE: Alex has suggested I try Ruby with Qt. Genius!

My family has always had an obsession with the Monopoly board game, and since my mum died the remaining Schade clan has clung onto it even more as a family tradition. Because I have some spare time over the holidays I thought I’d create a computer version of Monopoly but with the place names and chance cards to do with places and experiences we’ve been to and had. Trouble is, I’m not sure what graphical toolkit and language to use!

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Okay everyone I’m going to be blunt here and just come out. If you follow me on Twitter or read my blog here you may have noticed I sometimes talk about religion, and most of the time I have nothing positive to say about it.

I’ve mentioned here and on Twitter I’m an atheist and people ask me why. I responded in the past the same way virtually every other atheist does; by saying there has been no scientific or empirical evidence ever put forward to justify the belief in any god from any religion. People distort this to claim I’m saying there is no god and that it takes as much faith to deny it as it does to believe, claims which are nonsense of course. It turns out at least for me this is only part of the story.

For most of my life I was agnostic, but it wasn’t until my mum died that I finally figured it out. I guess you could say it was a cynical Newton moment. She was one of the nicest, most moral people I have ever known, but she spent the last 12+ years of her life in slow, agonising pain and died around Christmas in 2007.

Now here’s the part I don’t understand. I’m told God stands by as earthquakes and the like happen because of the concept of free will, that god can’t stop us living in earthquake-prone areas. If we lend this explanation credence we’re still left asking: why did God create fault lines that cause earthquakes in the first place? And why go to all the trouble to create us in His image but leave dangerous and sloppy imperfections in our genetic coding that predispose us to diseases and mutations like cancer? Why did He invent bacteria, to punish those who can’t afford sanitation? God can’t stop us smoking to cause lung cancer, but my mum was healthy. It’s obvious when we dig below the surface of this free will explanation, its bunk.

It’s claimed god is all powerful, all knowing and all wise, and that most importantly he loves us. Much like a good piece of computer software cannot be made quickly, cheaply and well at the same time, all four of these conditions about God can’t be true. The classical Greek philosopher Epicurus made this observation 2,000 years ago.

Given the amount of hate mail I get this doesn’t seem to be self evident when I thought it would be, but if religious people are allowed to discuss the ways in which they saw the light and converted to their particular faith, it seems only fair I should be allowed to discuss why I became an atheist. If you were offended by what I said, I encourage you to take as open a view as you would with a person of another faith to your own instead of reading it as if I were an atheist and try reading this entry again.

Because this is a very personal family matter, I’m doing something unprecedented on the Rubenerd Blog and turning comments off. Believe me, I’ve heard every single possible response to this anyway. Feel free to comment on other sites and places, but don’t expect a reply.

I’m now putting this issue to rest and moving on. I may discuss spirituality and science at some point though, I’m absolutely fascinated by the idea. When we applied science to astrology we got astronomy, when we applied science to alchemy we got chemistry: what will science yield when we apply it to spirituality? I’m really excited by the idea!

Thank you everyone. Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben

For those who may be interested, my dad now has an official website over at RainerSchade.com. We may be setting it up as a wiki based system for him to upload and write material to, but for now it’s a simple link page to his Flickr and Last.fm accounts.

Now I just need him to finally get a Twitter account and we’ll be in business!

It’s always fantastic when someone or something comes along to bridge two disparate parts of your life. Like talking about Haruhi with Felix Tanjono from high school, or talking about Leo Laporte to my cousin James, or finding out that girl I talked to at Starbucks knew what FreeBSD was! Okay I lied, she didn’t know but she knew what Linux was, that’s pretty close!

Overnight Twitter just became infinitely more awesome thanks to Sue Heins following me! Sue worked with my mum before I was born back in Australia and is now (amongst several billion other projects I no doubt am not aware of) working at Inspiring Women, an organisation she spearheaded that encourages and supports women in business. I didn’t take her focus group personally ;-).

Now that I got my sister on it, and now that Sue is on it, this just leaves my dad. He’ll crack eventually.

My mum and I in 2006 at Changi Airport in Singapore

Since 2007 my blog here has been dedicated to my late beautiful, cheeky, warm, funny, brave mum Debra. Now that it’s 2009 I finally feel strong enough to upload some photos of us you see here and write this post: I’ve rewritten it hundreds of times (yes, really!) but nothing I’ve put here seems to be able to do her justice. Here’s take #101 I’ll be linking to with a Dedication link in the header of this blog.

After an epic battle with cancer that lasted since my sister and I was little kids and through three international moves, Debra suddenly left us in her sleep on the day before Christmas Eve 2007. Her funeral was a beautiful service in Sydney a few weeks later with close friends and family played to the sounds of Santana’s Sam Pa Ti, Bob Dylan’s Forever Young, Bob Marley’s Stir It Up, Sabah Habas Mustapha’s Warm Rain Falls, The Beatles’ Let it Be and of course Spirit in the Sky.

She was an amazing person with a ridiculous sense of humour that I can proudly claim was the primary influence for my own. We’d watch Bertie Wooster and Fawlty Towers episodes for hours on weekends (a cow creamer!). In the oncology ward where we considered the nurses and Dr Tan family she’d refer to her chemotherapy drip as champagne and loudly insist on seeing the wine menu. She introduced me to Michael Franks (now my favourite singer/songwriter) and his Search for the Perfect Shampoo. I’d dance into her bedroom singing Dean Martin’s How Do Ya’ Like Your Eggs in the Morning? to her at breakfast and she’d throw books. I’d poke fun at her short stature and she’d mock me for being a nerd who was too scared to ask that cute Korean girl out that she had already pre-approved. Most of the time when she didn’t have enough strength to get out of bed I’d bring a pair of laptops in and I’d do my work while she lectured on why the dress the latest celebrity was wearing was awful or how corrupt the cosmetics industry is.

Officially the most epic photo of all friggen time!

Behind the tough, silly exterior though was a person in almost constant pain and anguish. Routine aspects of most of our lives were insurmountable chores for her that only got more difficult and painful as the years went on. She was a master at hiding it from the outside world, but the consequence was she’d rarely want to leave the house for the effort to put her self described "mask" on was nearly always just too much.

She confided in my sister and I shortly before she left us that we were the reason she continued to fight, because she wanted us to be old enough to have memories of her. It’s only now I realise how incredible (and lump-in-the-throat inducing) that was. I’m also becoming aware now as I get older that she won’t be around for so many milestones in my sister’s and my lives (graduations, work, weddings, kids) but we do have memories we would not trade for anything.

One of her favourite songs of all time was Thunderclap Newman’s Something in the Air, particularly the beginning of the final verse when the coda finishes and the melody seems to soar; she told me she loved it because it sounded like a bird was taking off without worries. While I selfishly wish she was back here with me, I also know she was living in excruciating pain for years and her passing finally allowed her to take off and leave the agony behind. Even if she was taken away from me far too soon, she’s no longer in pain.

Unfortunately I didn’t seem to inherit her class or her incredible musical, comedic, artistic or literary skills (thank you Rainer!), but given this website is one of my own primary outlets for my mind I can’t think of anything more fitting than to dedicate this to Debra Schade, even if all it amounts to are sporadic thoughts about software and the universe that she’d laugh and mock me for for if she read! We had a great relationship :-).

I love you Mumster, I miss you so much it hurts. Thank you for giving me life but even more for your friendship. Forgive me for this next part.

#import Display.h;
int main( int argc, const char *argv[] ) {
    printf( "Lots of love, Ruben" );
    return 0;
}

This post is really stretching the limits of what this blog is supposed to be covering, but I thought the wording of this one comment on an article discussing Obama’s budget eliminating abstinence-only funding was brilliant:

My parenting philosophy/ discussion goes something like this:

• Drinking alcohol as a teen is a bad idea.
• Drinking alcohol and driving is suicidal.
• Having sex as a teen is a bad idea.
• Having sex without protection is suicidal.

Posted by No One Of Consequence | May 18, 2009 8:41 AM

I think I should talk about computer software again soon.