Rubénerd!

With an auspicious 42 days of life left in the J-Walk blog before he says goodbye, I decided to pick an article at random to discuss.

import j-walk.util.random

Round and round the random number generator goes, where it stops nobody knows!

Here's Miss Cellania's Tribute to the Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
I'd take this spinach pesto sammich.

From his Grilled Cheese Tribute post from the first of September. Suffice to say, his included image looks good. Really good. Which reminds me, I haven't even had breakfast yet.

I went through my own grilled cheese sandwich obsession here on Rubenerd.com several years ago; I used it in all my examples and name dropped them everywhere. I'm going to pretend J-Walk posted about it on this 42nd last day on purpose, just for me.

That's a lot of posts

For those unfamiliar, John Walkenbach is probably best known as a Microsoft Excel ninja with dozens of books to his credit that are sold around the world, including places overseas I've lived. Pointing this out earned me my own blog post on his site in 2008!

Rubenerd combines three topics into a single blog post: On Google Reader, the iPhone and J-Walkyness.

By the way, if you’re ever in a bookstore, go to the spreadsheet books section and adjust the display such that my books are facing out. Even if you have to move some of the other books to the Religion section to make room. I do it, Rebenerd does it, and you should do it.

The beginning of the end

The J-Walk blog has for many years been a curated cornucopia of coolness, a lovingly updated list of material from around the net. In a world now of mass news aggregation sites and social networks, John continued to post what he found interesting on his own site instead, which inspired me to keep doing so here too.

With all the upheaval in the world and in my own life over the last decade, the J-Walk blog has been one of the few happy constants. I was reading this in high school, during breaks at my first 9-5, my first years of university, during The Schade Family Medical Troubles, and now again in the lecture halls of UTS.

Needless to say, I'll be sad to see it go, and will be reading it (for want of a better word) religiously while I still can.

I know these two quick observations are oversimplifications of broader, more complex issues, but I'm going to observe anyway. Have you ever noticed oversimplification is a less simple word than simplification?

American mortgages

I'm by no means the first person to point this out, but I just feel compelled to here anyway. Instead of giving money to the banks to bail them out as a result of bad debts, why didn't the United States government give the money to homeowners instead to pay their mortgages? The banks would have got their money and homeowners would still be in their homes while the government works out what to do next. It wouldn't have solved the problem of land values, but then again writing the banks a giant cheque didn't either.

Chinese currency

Barack Obama has pledged to put pressure on the PRC to stop messing around with their currency, to use the correct economic terms. With such a breathtaking deficit and the Chinese willing to buy American government bonds with the effect of lowering the value of their currency against the dollar so their exports are more competitive, how will Obama do this at all? He has nothing to stand on.

Grilled cheese sandwiches

Taste better with gherkin and a bit of cracked pepper.

I've studied economics extensively in school, university and by myself but I haven't really done any business studies; perhaps with these points on why current internet business still surprises me will show this! Some random observations:

• I'm still surprised how short the half life of web companies are. The turnover rate is stunningly quick, what other industries have businesses like this?

• I'm also surprised at the assumption that if a company isn't worth $X it just naturally has to be bought out and consolidated. I suppose people expect if a small company isn't bought, a huge company will clone its features and let it die instead.

• I'm also surprised internet venture capital firms still get so excited over investing in hundreds of new firms when only perhaps one or two will succeed enough to recoup their funds and turn a profit. I suppose that kind of ratio is still enough if so many VC firms still do it.

• I'm finally still surprised that nobody has launched a grilled cheese sandwich delivery website with complimentary oven mitts and/or a subscription model.

New rules of business? I'm sure astute folks could cite other examples.

When you work for a publication you're presented with a series of style guidelines you have to follow in your work, if I'm to believe what people in the bidness have told me. Senior members of Rubenerd Blog management (myself and my teddy bear) have been complaining about a series of style issues for our blog here, mostly to do with names.

1. If the name eBay or an Apple iThing is the first word in a sentence, do you capitalise it?
2. For anime like K-On! and sites like Yahoo!, do you keep the exclamation marks even if you're in the middle of a sentence?
3. For Japanese names like Her Senjougharaness, do you use ou or risk older browsers only rendering ō instead? Is that a concern?
4. When talking about projected Microsoft products, because it's regarding an American company do we spell it vaporware instead of vapourware?
5. Is GCS an acceptable acronym for grilled cheese sandwiches given it also stands for the GNU Coding Standards?
6. Is it okay to refer to them as grilled cheese sandwiches in the first place so we reach a wider audience than if we called them jaffels which, while being technically a better name, only Aussies would know what we're talking about?
7. Is it a sign of madness that a lone blogger considers a teddy bear to be a member of his blog's senior management?
8. Did this list lose relevance after point 3?
9. Is the Bird the Word?

So I'd just woken up after a terrible night's sleep and was making coffee when I tuned into The Whole Wheat Radios on my Mac, and within 20 minutes none other than Jim Kloss came online and started chatting on the mic on air with all of us! He talked about a discussion he'd had with Marian Call about Twitter recently, the music that was coming up (in his own classic and imitable style), along with the progress he was making with his nuclear wheat powered ioniser that can bend space time. Unfortunately so far he can only beam one person at a time with his voice activated command processor, but it's a work in progress.

He also asked a few questions which come to think of it I didn't answer in the collaboration page chat thingy. To answer them here, Elke and I are in Adelaide until November, and while not technically correct in German, when my dad's family immigrated to Australia they started pronouncing our last name as "Shade" for English speakers, so es ist gut so :).

As for the image above, this was a photo I took of Jim Kloss himself mowing the perfect green lawns that adorn the surroundings of the Wheat Palace where the independent music Whole Wheat Radio headquarters are located. You can tell it's not an extremely crappy Photoshop job because I actually did it in The Gimp. I'd be hilarious if I could write and deliver good jokes.

Checking my Google Reader page this evening I noticed all of a sudden I have 18 readers for my main RSS feed here at Rubenerd.com, and 34 readers for the old URL bringing the total to 52! I do admit I started blogging because I enjoy writing about my weird and disparate interests first and foremost, but it's another world of good feeling knowing a few of you are interested in some of it too.

<Cheesyness> So I just wanted to get all soppy for a second and send out a thank you and a hug to all of you for thinking my material here was worthwhile enough to warrant some of the time from your hectic electronic lives. Its a fulfilling feeling that has helped a socially awkward, introverted guy like me in ways you can't imagine. </cheesyness>

I'll try my best to minimise the number of typos and grammar mistakes :). I chose the above photo from my Flickr account because it looked all dramatic and the primary colour is similar to uncooked grilled cheese sandwiches.

Peace, health and happiness,
~ Ruben

Without home internet and the huge difficulties I've already eluded to with publishing blog posts from the university computer pools I didn't think I could be bothered going through the rigmarole (sounds like a dip), but this warranted the effort. This entire post summarised in one line: the new MacBook Pro inverter I ordered arrived, and it fixed the dead screen problem! I have my travel companion back!

Inverter for the Introvert, sounds like a sitcom title

After worrying that it might not work after I ordered it all the way from the States, I finally had some time yesterday evening to install the new display inverter in my discrete construction MacBook Pro. It took well over an hour to deconstruct the machine and the display assembly, but when I plugged it all back in again and turned it on the screen lit up again for the first time in weeks! Success!

It seems the Snow Leopard MacBook Pro black screen issue some people have had was a complete coincidence, for my machine it was a hardware problem that stuck around after rebooting and installing other OSs. If you've had the same problem with your MacBook Pro where the screen backlight refuses to turn on, you could have a shot inverter too.

I ordered my replacement inverter (Apple ID 922-7191) from PowerbookMedic.com and could not have been happier with their service.

Thoughts

This was the very first portable Intel Mac model ever shipped back in 2006, it has a 32bit Core Duo CPU with a maximum of 2GiB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM. It was starting to feel its age with Leopard, but with Snow Leopard its felt much "snappier" while executing regular desktop tasks and I thought I could perhaps extend the life of it a bit longer. When the screen died I had started to think planned obsolescence was kicking in!

In fact this machine does something that the current generation 15" MacBook Pro can't: accept ExpressCards. Given how critical they are to my workflow (added FireWire 800 and eSATA ports, wireless modems, 8 in 1 card readers, a super fast solid state drive) I'm hoping Apple reimplements them in their next hardware refresh for the 15" line, then I'll upgrade. In the meantime, this machine is once again performing its duties well :).

In the meantime I'll be looking into upgrading the internal hard drive to a 500GB one and perhaps even swap out the optical drive for another internal hard drive. Having 1TB of internal storage in a notebook would be fantabulous. Fantabulous sounds like a brand of grilled cheese sandwiches. Wait, no it doesn't.

I have my venerable MacBook Pro back, and I'm so happy ^_^.

Had a ridiculously busy day today with a ton of things that went wrong. Two conference calls; five classes with hour long tests in two of them; I had to see my sister off at the airport by taking public transport which took an age in an of itself; I had to work on an assignment because I'm a schedule freak and don't like getting behind on university work I've planned; three lots of homework which I had to sprint to the computer pools at the campus to print because our printer stopped working; I had to deal with another internet banking glitch and subsequent explanation to the landlord; our internet was throttled; and while having one of my usual headrushes I blacked out for a second and hit my head on a light switch, something which doesn't sound like it would hurt much but it really did!

Then after breakfast... I kid. I tell you what though, while days like today aren't exactly the most fun, I think it helps at times to remind ourselves that's it better than the alternative. I'm comfortable saying this now because today is over of course, if someone had come up to me and relayed that sentiment to me earlier today I might have relayed a frozen grilled cheese sandwich at their head. That's my new weapon of choice by the way.

On behalf of the entire writing team here which consists of me, I apologise for the lack of posts today. I've been on a roll publishing posts these last few months, so I can understand it's difficult to miss out, especially if you use Google Reader for example and are used to seeing all my nonsense scattered through your unread posts every day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to put another ice pack on my bruised forehead and call it a day. Which would be disingenuous to say the least given it's 00:26 and therefore it's very early morning and still dark.

Oh come on, nine lessons? Now we're just getting silly people. Welcome to your ninth grilled cheese sandwich observation lesson. As usual, feel free to take notes.

As far as I know this is not a grilled cheese sandwich, and quite frankly it concerns me that you think it is. Please seek counselling.

ASIDE: I have been advised by my solicitors to disclose that while this information has been deemed accurate by most gastronomes, it should not be taken as sound legal advice when attempting to identify grilled cheese sandwiches in criminal and civil cases, particularly if you are serving with a jury of your peers.

If you do attempt to use such advice in legal proceedings however, please cite Neal O'Carroll as the creator of this post and not me so that I may not be involved and have to deal with the associated paperwork and litigation. Thank you ever so much.

Previous lessons

08, 07, 06, 05, 04, 03, 02, 01

Adelaide Now is reporting that millions of Australians have had their first drink by age 10, and that it's the reason for alcohol abuse later in life. I don't buy it.

MILLIONS of Australians have been put at risk of developing alcohol problems later in life by drinking before the age of 10, new research shows.

Research commissioned by The Salvation Army shows more than two million Australians were under 10 years old when they first tried alcohol.

The Roy Morgan research also showed that 12 million Australians were unaware of new national guidelines which advise the safest option for teenagers is to delay drinking for as long as possible.

The Salvos said the research was alarming, adding it was concerned the message that children under 18 should not drink is not getting through.

Leaving aside the title which doesn't say anything about alcohol, I completely fail to see the connection between this alleged research into the age alcohol was first consumed, and the problems with alcohol abuse.

My father's side of the family is from Germany which has no age limit on the consumption of alcohol, and many other countries in Europe that have proud traditions surrounding beer and wine have similar laws. Do these European countries have problem drinkers? Absolutely. Are there any more than in Australia where the early age of alcohol is being blamed without evidence for so many youth trouble drinkers? I'd wager a grilled cheese sandwich the answer is no.

The fundamental problem with banning a substance outright is that socially it just doesn't work. Banning hard drugs doesn't stop the drug trade, prohibition in the United States didn't stop drinking, and abstinence classes don't stop woohoo. In fact often such efforts backfire simply because they're seen as forbidden fruit.

The real problem the Anglosphere is facing with alcohol abuse (Australia, the United States et al) is that heavy drinking is seen as a rite of passage to adulthood. Our society dictates that young people who get completely wasted and smashed are in, and the people who choose not to are losers. Frankly I don't know the answer to this problem, but I'm not pretending that we can blame it all on the fact trillions of under-age youths had their first taste of alcohol earlier than the law says they should have.

As a matter of disclosure, I had my first glass of red wine when I was 12. I'm 23 and I have a standard drink perhaps once or twice a month, if that. Now if we wanted to talk about coffee...!