Rubénerd!

I never did use this coupon flyer thingy! Got it the week we arrived back in Singapore from Kuala Lumpur in 2007. Scanned in 2013.

Via @IntelMiner on Twitter. Some real posts coming again soon!

Admittedly my cooking is acceptable, though not fantastic. That said, I do love baking bread, and @hanezawakirika shared a recipe for a so-called Soft Sweet Pretzels that looks like something I'll have to try!

Top egg-washed pretzels with coarse sanding sugar before baking, or ice cooled pretzels with fondant icing.

Their sourdough also looks amazing.

I'm just ashamed that as someone with a German father, I'd never heard of sweet pretzels before! Das ist sehr nicht gut!

I disagree with Robert Scoble's assessment that Twitter needs to be more like Google+. If anything, from using Google+ I've learned to appreciate Twitter's simplicity! Oh yeah, and pudding.

It's not easy being green

In an entry on Google+ (makes sense) and on his blog, Robert goes into detail how Twitter now seems boring, and that the only way to change this would be for Twitter to broadly emulate Google+. MG Seigler posted a rebuttal, which I'd be able to take more seriously if it weren't quite as scathing, and hosted on a site that requires people to use a Facebook account to leave comments. Still, I found myself nodding my head in several places.

On the one hand, I can see Robert's point. With a [paltry!] 1200+ followers myself, I'm acutely aware of how frustrating it can be to receive comments from people on a regular basis without knowing which tweet they're commenting on! With tens of thousands of followers and commentators, there's no denying Google+ facilitates tracking theses threaded conversations more easily for people like him.

Claiming this can be fixed by making Twitter more like Google+ though makes absolutely no sense to me, just as John C. Dvorak's claim that Apple would only gain market value and share by licensing Mac OS X didn't. You're awesome John, but what were you smoking my friend?

Google+ is cool, but so is Twitter

Since Twitter's inception people have complained it's missing feature XYZ, but fortunately Twitter's managers have [largely] ignored such demands unless their users overwhelmingly form a consensus, such as with @replies and retweeting. The appeal of the platform is simple: 140 characters to do what you see fit. If you want more features, clients like Twitter's TweetDeck (that still sounds weird to say that) provide them.

The proof is in the pudding. Mmm, rice pudding. Services such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz have attempted to come along in this [relatively] free marketplace to introduce lacking features such as threaded comments, but they never really gained any significant mind share. It makes sense for Google+ because that's what the service started as, and because they're a clone of Facebook... who ironically bought FriendFeed and attempted to clone much of Twitter's features.

Now I have no qualm in hypocritically acknowledging that Twitter does need a few more features. The ability to automatically block obvious spammers (those who only send links to strangers and have no followers) and perhaps "associating" a URL with a tweet as I suggested in January would be fantastic, but the key is these features would arguably make the system simpler.

I love you Robert Scoble and am a huge fan, but I really believe copying Google+'s features would miss the point of Twitter entirely, and I sincerely hope nobody there takes your advice. The Google+ team should be taking it as a compliment though, they're obviously doing something right!

As a matter of disclosure, I know its not cool to admit but I've been a Twitter user since Q1 2007, and I have Google+ and like what I see.

John Gruber on a guy who ate 25,000 Big Macs:

Dan Gorske has eaten 25,000 Big Macs over 39 years — close to two per day, every day. My first thought when I heard about him was that he must be either an idiot or an asshole. But now I think not. I think maybe he’s a lucky man — someone who found the perfect food to suit his taste, an obsessive who never tires of it, and it happens to be cheap and readily available almost everywhere in the world.

He's a lucky man because he's still alive.

Today's Wikipedia photo of the day is a photo of a rambutan by Muhammad Mahdi Karim. For your consideration, an entirely pointless post of nostalgia!

Moving to The Singapores

When my family first moved to Singapore when I was a small child, I had no idea what to expect. We'd watched plenty of travel shows about the city state and the introductory videos my dad's company had sent us in the mail, but videos and travel books and whatnot simply can't prepare you, even though arguably Singapore is the most Western country in Asia!

Funny story, I was sitting at Starbucks in the city here yesterday, and I overheard a guy commenting that Singaporean girls and guys make better partners than Japanese because they speak English. I made no comment.

Anyway for the first few years as a kid I absorbed very little Singapore culture and cuisine. For better or worse depending on your point of view, Singapore makes it very easy to live as a Westerner and never experience anything Asian; its actually quite a contentious issue when you talk about so called "foreign talent" to some local people. You can understand why.

Omnomnom!

For some reason though around the time I turned 14, something inside me clicked and I started to change. Suddenly I wanted to explore and try new things! I turned off the cable TV and started watching local TV shows, I started going to public libraries and mingling with local people instead of sitting at the Australian International School library, and I started trying local food.

My parents had always had a huge obsession with Indonesian food, art, music, dance and culture which gave me a gentle introduction, but by the end of the year I'd tried Shanghai noodle bars, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese and Malay. My mouth is watering remembering all this stuff, if you want to try the absolute best Asian AND Western food, its ALL in Singapore, let me tell you :).

Anyway I belabour all this to tell you about the rambutan. They're slightly larger than the Wikipedia picture would have you believe, but they're still fairly small. Surrounding the fleshy middle which is almost the consistency of a grape but without the skin, is the hairy outer part that's surprisingly thick. They're really sweet and delicious!

I tried my first rambutans in fruit salads, but I started eating them in their own right after I turned 14, and soon developed a small obsession. I confess to liking lychees a little more now (especially in bubble tea!) but I still have a soft spot for them. You could say... a sweet spot!

End with The Wikipedias

Given I started this post with a rambutan photo from Wikipedia, it only seems fitting to end it with a Wikipedia quote from the rambutan article!

The rambutan is a medium-sized tropical tree in the family Sapindaceae, and the fruit of this tree. It is native to Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Sri Lanka and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, although its precise natural distribution is unknown. It is closely related to several other edible tropical fruits including the Lychee, Longan, and Mamoncillo. It is believed to be native to the Malay Archipelago, from where it spread westwards to Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka and India; eastwards to Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia. The name rambutan is from the Malay/Indonesian word rambutan, which literally means hairy caused by the 'hair' that covers this fruit, and is in general use in Indonesia, Malay and Filipino.

There is a second species regularly for sale at Costa Rican markets which is known as "wild" rambutan. It is a little smaller than the usual red variety and is colored yellow. The outer skin is peeled exposing the fleshy fruit inside which is then eaten. It is sweet, sour and slightly grape like and gummy to the taste. In Costa Rica, it is known as mamón chino due to the likeness of the edible part with Melicoccus bijugatus and its Asian origin.

So there you go :).

Discovery Health is running a story about 15 modern conveniences that are bad for our health. I have a 16th item to add to their list: paginated stories that are split up into 15 separate webpages!

Their list of list items in a list

Most of the list consists of fatty foodstuffs such as partially hydrogenated oils, margarine and fat. They also mention high fructose corn syrup, the primary reason why I don't buy any processed food or drink made in the US. Come to think of it I should be buying very little processed food at all, right?

Plastics, leaded fuel, microwaves and other such whatnot they're probably right on, but I was disappointed to see them rehash the same tired argument against the use of Teflon coating that has been so thoroughly debunked by so many people, perhaps none quite as beautfilly as this person or Bill Nye the Science Guy. I love Bill Nye the Science Guy, he's like an American version of Dr Karl who wears bow ties.

My revised list

Still, I'm no medical expert but I think I could have condensed their 15 points into one small bullet list:

• radiation emitting thingys [maybe]
• toxic and non bio-degradable stuff
• processed food

I suppose it's harder to come up with 15 pages of ads that way ;).

Would that be beef wellington? I suppose if it's in New Zealand it must be a mutton wellington right? Tee and as well as that hee!

In all seriousness though, I'd love to visit Wellington. I've been to Auckland for an afternoon (long story) but that's it. Maybe it's just because I'm hungry.

Singapore's getting quite a lashing this morning, so my dad and I have camped out at the O'Brien's sandwich bar at Jelita. Back when my school had its campus at Ulu Pandan, I'd go to Jelita all the time for Pizza Hut. Now it's an Irish sandwich shop, go figure :)

UPDATE: Typical, I hit the Draft button instead of Publish, again! The timestamp for the photo was around 10am today.

Another one of our beloved Rubénerd Fun Facts. Put the brick down.

"Tunafish sandwiches" have a supefluous word.

And a related fact:

Ruben can't spell superfluous.