Rubénerd!

For the first couple of years since we lost mummy on Yule Eve-Eve, the 25th of December was a pretty sombre affair. Last year was bittersweet.

This year, for the first time, I felt as though Yuletide joy was with us again. My dad, sister and I sat around and exchanged presents to an awful vinyl record of 1980s pop stars butchering holiday classics, then had a nice late breakfast (Schade family savoury French Toast!); talked and joked for hours about life, the universe and everything; played some traditional Nintento Wii bowling; and chowed down on an amazing home cooked turkey dinner made in the way only my parents know how.

Along with a can of original, imported Irn-Bru and a registration code for OmniFocus (YES!), my sister and old man also bought me a MacBook Air which should be arriving on the 31st. Speechless!

A few days prior, over some coffee, tea and cuddles at a lovely French cafe in Sydney, my beautiful girlfriend Clara gave me some of the most thoughtful presents ever. She is responsible for practically my entire nendoroid collection at this stage, and to have one of Nagato Yuki from the enduring Suzumiya Haruhi franchise is particularly apt ^^. I'd argue she's cuter than Yuki though.

Above all else though, as with my family on the day itself, the best present I could have ever wished for was her company. I hope to share in that with her for many years to come :'). Happy belated holidays!

She'd be 57 today. Fortunately, I had a suitably embarrassing photo from her birthday celebration in 2005 to share with all of you. Good thing she's not around or I'd receive a P.G. Wodehouse book to the face!

What I wouldn't give to celebrate this day with you again. I love you ♡

Celebrating in class and style, clearly! :D

(Pending a better photo when she can provide me one!)

Ruben Singlish also crap

Before we go any further, I'll admit I was rather excited to celebrate my fabulous sister's 23rd birthday today, because it meant I could finally wish her a Happy Twenty Tree. For those not clued into Singaporean speech, "three is "tree". You see? Hey, I made a rhyme. Of course I did, I did it on purpose, geez. Or did I? Why are you asking me?

We did breakfast at a great little place in Newtown, before heading off to a tattoo parlour of all places. Without shedding a single tear (incredible!), she had a small "XXIII" inked onto her wrist; 23 for her birthday, because our beautiful mum was born on the 23rd of August, and because she died on the 23rd of December. I'm personally as White and Nerdy as they come and wouldn't get tattoos, but I appreciated the significance :).

Elke's wonderful friend Samme then proceeded to fulfill a dream Elke has had since she was an early teen: a formal lunch at a McDonalds! Dressed in ties, jackets, collared shirts, formal dresses and hats, some of her closest friends sat around us at the formica table in the McDonalds near UTS. We ate burgers and drank Coke off formal plates with cutlery, table cloths, placemats and champagne glasses, then an adorable cake in the shape of shaggy white dog for desert!

If all is going to plan for Elke now, she should be on a cruise in Sydney Harbour with some of her work friends... while I sit back at home frantically coding homework no less! ;D

Hope she had a great day. She well and truely deserves it; she's the best sibling a brother could ask for. Happy Birthday Elke :)

It's Monday again, so to lift our spirits I thought I'd post something adorable and utterly pointless. Well, more pointless than I usually post. Enjoy.

We swapped gifts, had a turkey roast and freshly made fruit cake, played Wii games, flew a RC helicopter to scare the dogs courtesy of the illustrious @omegatron, built Lego, then took a long family walk in the park. The first real home Yule we've had since my mum moved on, and it was absolutely wonderful :).

My old man and I decided to call it Yule given our German heritage, because the holiday was originally a winter festival before it was adapted, and because "solstice" isn't entirely accurate. We're precise scientific folk, you see!

To my beautiful, friendly, cheeky, brilliantly talented, witty, trolling, free spirited best friend and mum who suddenly lost the battle four years ago today. I still feel your glamourously fabulous cane with Christmas lights wound around it hitting me on the head when I say something particularly nerdy or stupid, or when I sing Dean Martin off key, or when I start to doubt myself.

I miss you so much it hurts, but you're still my rock and in all my thoughts. I love you <3

Yeah you should see Polythene Pine...

I don't remember exactly when, but at some point in the early 1990s my sister and I were helping my mum and dad decorate our Christmas tree. We were so little we could barely reach half the branches, but my dad would lift us up onto his shoulders so we could reach the top. As the professional artist in the family my mum would stand behind us judging our performance and telling us where to put things, and my dad would scuttle around the base of the tree to help us get to where she wanted. The tree was so massive it lit the room at night with a warm glow, and allowed plenty of space for presents underneath!

As I'm sure is the case with many Western families, decorating the tree was always a family tradition for us that we all looked forward to almost as much as Christmas itself. Even as my mum started her decade and a half long chemotherapy treatment, she'd still make it to the loungeroom in early December to help out, even if all she could do was sit in a chair and observe. It was unspoken, but we were celebrating the fact she was still with us for another Christmas as much as we were celebrating the holiday itself.

A few days before Christmas in 2007, she left us peacefully in her sleep. We kept the tree up that year, but we never had them again.

That would be a great Beatles song

Four years later, and we decided we were finally ready to have another tree. Again. Maybe. So we navigated the family sleigh to Big W, a reputable organisation selling plastic trees from sustainable petrochemical plantations, and bought a modest but lovely 1.8m pine.

Over the course of the afternoon, we unpacked the decorations we'd left in storage for years, and decorated the tree to the same cheesy Bing Crosby music and the same doggies looking inquisitively at us. Surprisingly, we were in good spirits for most of the time, and the tree turned out wonderfully. If she couldn't be there with us, at least we were using the decorations she largely chose and bought for us over the years, and we were thinking of her the whole time.

For you mummy. Merry Christmas, and stop mocking the way I'm dancing to Dean Martin. <3 *hugs*

To test our English proficiency (allegedly to assign us to the right tutorials), UTS asked us to write 200 words on a technology that has profoundly affected us. Given the recent 20th anniversary of the first World Wide Web page, I felt compelled to select it!

Screenshot is of Rubenerd.com rendered in Netscape Navigator Gold 2.02 on Windows NT 4.0... because I could! Despite some unicode issues and a lack of CSS, it rendered surprisingly readable given my insistence on using <hr /> and image replaced <h1> elements! Well, it was mostly for lynx/links/elinks/dillo, but the point still stands! ^_^

My GeoCities neighbourhood was SiliconValley

When my family first moved to Singapore in the mid 1990s, we registered for a dialup plan with Pacific Internet. We paid a small fortune for a 56k fax modem over the midrange 33.3k models, and even registered a second phone line to separate the high pitched squeals from... modem signal noises. We felt so advanced and modern connecting to the World Wide Web for an hour or so to check the weather, update our GeoCities pages and play NeoPets.

Fast forward to today, and the World Wide Web is everywhere but the kitchen sink. Unsatisfied with being constrained to our desktops, it can be accessed from our laptops and tablets in coffee shops and airports, in our smartphones from anywhere with a signal (that rules out Earlwood, NSW) and from cars to aeroplane cabins. I can't help but wonder if Sir Tim Berners-Lee from 1991 could travel to 2011 what he'd think of the pervasiveness of the WWW, and if he'd be surprised the protocols and hardware were handling everything so well!

In its meagre 20 years existence, arguably the World Wide Web has facilitated the spread of more knowledge than the Gutenberg press, and has enabled more affordable communication than any phone companies or; perhaps by a logical stretch; airlines.

While I use it to do practically all my research, assignments and work now, what initially drew me to the web wasn't what I could glean from it, but rather the opportunity to contribute. I was more excited than a Yui with a graduating Ui that I could update a page and have my relatives back in Australia see it instantly. If we grant ourselves another fast forward (wasn't that a TV show?), today I have two blogs with thousands of entries, tens of thousands of tweets, hundreds of photos and dozens of domains.

Given my dad was mostly out of the country on business trips and my mum spent much of her time in hospitals and chemo wards, the WWW was fantastic escape. Netscape-sensei never mocked me for my disparate electronic and science fiction interests, never laughed at my innocent childhood questions about sexuality, and didn't marginalise me when I started questioning organised religion.

Calm down, Ruben

That's not to say the World Wide Web isn't without its challenges. Much as it took a while for books to spread to all corners of the globe after Gutenberg, much of the world still doesn't have [reliable] internet access. Internationalisation is not only a needlessly lengthy term (and i17n ranks among the world's dumbest abbreviations), but along with accessibility is still poorly covered. The web efficiently spreads malware in ways floppy disks can only dream of. We're running out of practical addresses. Internet Explorer still exists.

Then there are the legal challenges. Governments and businesses are rapidly realising the WWW's potential to expose corruption and malpractice, and aren't willing to cede this power to us without a fight. Industries too lazy to adapt to emerging technologies are punishing their customers with lawsuits and digital restrictions. ISPs are threatening to challenge net neutrality upon which the WWW thrived in order to throttle their customers and give preferential treatment to sponsors.

Still, as with every scientific and technological advance since we evolved and learned to rub two sticks together, it has the potential for Good and Evil. Ultimately, I'm confident the World Wide Web easily delivers the former in excess of the latter.

I couldn't live without it... could you?

I kinda understand. Being a geek faced with a loved one battling cancer is a particular sort of painful. ~ @GeordieGuy

No kidding.

From the ABS Spotlight website. With a few exceptions, on the whole I find infographics to be all fluff and little substance, but this was fun!

If you go to the page, run with NoScript enabled or Flash disabled to access the faster HTML version. Don’t go to the root address, or you’ll be one of the 100% of people who’ll be given an Apache error!