Rubénerd!

Given John Walkenbach is an Excel guru, on a whim this afternoon I wondered what better way to pay tribute to his ended J-Walk Blog than by creating some graphs!

We begin, above, with the number of posts we've both written containing the name of the world's most awesomely titled location, your favourite place and mine, Saskatchewan. For this graph, I determined the number of posts containing said locale, then divided it by the total number of posts we've written. Judging from this, we can deduce John was at least three times more interested in ice hockey than I was, and three times more likely to have a live moose roaming in his pantry.

Here's a chart comparing the number of years the J-Walk Blog was active compared to Rubénerd.com. For interest's sake, I also included the late Whole Wheat Radio which was an influence on both of us, and that we both blogged frequently about during its heyday. John even met the site's proprietor, something I hope to do at some point as well.

According to this, I have two years to match WWR, and three for J-Walk. Wonder if I'll be able to overcome this apparent 8 to 9 year itch.

You think I blog too much? I'm a rank amateur compared to the blogging machine that was J-Walk, and who continues to be on Google+. Granted many of my posts tend to be longer than his, but given he'd only been blogging a few years longer than me, that's pretty friggen amazing.

Check out the specific number of posts too. Aside from the 3 in the middle, the numbers are the same. That's just freaky.

And now we end on something that Google proposes but I still simply can't believe! Despite his order of magnitute more entries than yours truly, and despite both sharing a passion for this most perfect of constables, both in relative and absolute terms I've mentioned them more often than he has.

DISCLAIMER: These charts were generated in LibreOffice, not Excel. Sorry John!

With 15 days left to go before closing his blog, J-Walk has already started to descend into puns with a link to a site discussing the growing trend of corn mazes. Yes, actual corn mazes. I'll admit, it grew on me.

In any case, those interested in maizes (darn it, now he has me doing it) should be a pedestrian in Kuala Lumpur. The shape and intersection of their road network could be used as a source of high entropy random numbers.

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.

Read it on The J-Walk Blog from Reuters, so it must be true!

Coffee... Coffee Coffee!

From the report itself, which J-Walk also quoted, which means this post may qualify for some serious Inception:

Young American adults have increased the amount of coffee they drink daily in 2011, after feeling better about their finances following the global economic crisis, a survey showed on Saturday.

Funny, I would have thought drinking coffee to cram for more exams to get into the fewer available jobs would be endemic of further financial difficulties and job problems. Go figure!

For what its worth, I started drinking coffee when I was 14, so I could stay awake during my mum's super early chemo sessions. I used to drink six cups a day, but I'm down to two now and no longer get serious caffeine headaches if I miss out. Ironically, I feel I have more energy as a result.

That reminds me!

Having only just wrote an entry about coffee, I noticed in my PayPal inbox that Roel247 donated a cup of coffee to me a few days ago! I wanted to thank him personally here for being so friendly :).

For those who don't know, Roel was one of my most loyal supporters of the Rubenerd Show back in the day and is one of the most genuinely nice people I've ever had the plesure of conversing with. One of these days I'll go to The Netherlands and meet him, this much is sure :).

J-Walk, surprisingly the proprietor of The J-Walk Blog, posted an entry about a neat gadget that lets you use those tiny pencil stubs by sticking two of them together. This may have (nay, probably has) already been invented, but what about a longer gadget that you stick a short pencil stub onto the end of so you don't need two of them?

On a related note...

On a related note (wait, I just said that), this post has got me thinking just how little I use writing instruments at all anymore. This is not a joke, I am serious: when I took one of my required mathematics classes last year and broke out the pens to take notes for the first class (formulae are still very difficult to generate quickly on a computer) I couldn't remember how to write lowercase letters. Literally the only time in the last few years I had ever used a pen was for filling out immigration forms which require you to print in caps. That's it!

Before my late mum got cancer she was a professional calligrapher for weddings and other major events, her writing was absolutely breathtaking. I remember back in primary school when she'd write our lunch orders on those brown paper bags to give to the tuckshop and often we'd get our lunch in a generic plastic bag because the tuckshop mums had kept the originals! Not only that, she could speak and write fluent Elvish -- the language of the Elves from the Lord of the Rings -- which when coupled with her penmanship was stunning.

When I can work up the courage to go through her belongings, I'll get some of work and scan it to show you all. She really was amazing.

Michael Franks and The Trashmen

I've noticed a reoccurring theme of posts on the J-Walk Blog wherein either John Walkenbach (or his stunt double) searches his music library for song titles based on the presence of a particular word. Given what today is, I figure it's only fitting I do something just as fun and utterly unproductive myself.

For example, here is a list of songs from my music library on my MacBook Pro that contain the following words. Granted I only have a few gigs on music on here compared to my desktop back in Singapore, but it's a start.

Shampoo

1. In Search of the Perfect Shampoo — Michael Franks, Burchfield Nines

Eggplant

1. Eggplant — Michael Franks, The Art of Tea

Toyko

1. Rainy Night in Tokyo — Michael Franks, Tiger in the Rain

Dragonfly

1. Dragonfly Summer — Michael Franks, title song

With all this talk about words in songs though, we mustn't forget that The Bird is the Word. The bird bird bird. The bird is the word. Papa-oom-mow-mow-mow. Papa-oom-mow-mow-mow. Don't you know about the bird? Everybody knows that the bird is the word!

Now if you'd excuse me, I'm off to find my way out of Sanpaku while in Search of the Perfect Shampoo. Here's hoping I don't get Popsicle Toes along the way.

A belt sander which curiously has absolutely nothing to do with this post whatsoever.

J-Walk has published a series of questions on the J-Walk Blog (of all places) for readers of his to answer and submit to him through electronic mail so he can perform identity theft and advance his own personal wealth beyond his revenues from printed Excel guides and consulting.

I don't think I could match the wit or sheer interestingness (is that a word?) of so many of his other readers, so instead I'm posting my responses here in the hopes they'll be mildly entertaining. At worst there's enough material here for you to print and make an armada of paper planes to throw at unsuspecting coworkers, room mates, family members or people on the train.

1. How did you first hear of the J-Walk Blog, and how long have you been reading it?

I've been reading the J-Walk blog since I was in high school in 2004 after I heard Jim Kloss mention it on the Whole Wheat Radio audio magazine I downloaded out of curiosity. It's been one of those stable, reliable things I've turned to over the years when everything else in my life has been changing.

2. What's the significance of your screen name?

I've been using the name "rubenerd" since 1997 when I was 11 and had registered for a Hotmail account of all things. My little brain was horrified to find "Ruben" was taken, so in what I thought at the time was a stroke of unadulterated genius, I merged my name and "nerd" and removed the superflous n.

3. Do you read this blog from work or at home? How many times a day?

I have it subscribed in Google Reader and read it during lectures. If you're a professor reading this, I mean all the lectures except yours.

We then got to choose five from a list of =18-3 questions. I'd enter that subtraction problem into Excel, but I'm a Gnumeric guy.

4. Basic stats: Age, sex, location, marital status, employment, etc.

Almost 23 years, male, Adelaide and Singapore (but not at the same time!), painfully available, part time computer system consultant, studying computer science and economics, atheist, no, yes, a Japanese girl who digs introverts, none of your business, the episode where she steals the computer, yes but I tell people no, purple monkey dishwasher.

5. Send a copy of the weirdest photo of yourself that you can find, and describe what was going on.

This is a photo of me attempting to make a phone call and look philosophical in the middle of a gigantic canola field on our trip to the Flinders Ranges outside Adelaide in Australia last year.

7. How many different places have you lived in?

I was born in Sydney but moved to Melbourne when I was a few months old, then Brisbane, then to Singapore where I spent most of my life but moved three times when they kept knocking down the apartment buildings we were living in, then to Kuala Lumpur, then back to Singapore. I’m now studying in both Adelaide and Singapore with plans to move back to the latter permanently because it's the closest I've ever had to a "home". Always fantasised about living for a few months in Kyoto and Stockholm though.

8. What other blogs to you follow?

Blogs where computer spell checkers go two dye. I'd never be caught baking such an obvious mistake on my blog. Why am I Hungary all of a sudden? I'd be a hilarious comedian if I could form and deliver good jokes.

9. Which are your favourite topics covered at the J-Walk Blog?

To be honest: religion. It's a sinful guilty pleasure.

17. Which celebrity would you most like to have a beer with?

Michael Franks at the Blue Note Jazz lounge in Tokyo after a set with Aya Hirano, the voice actress who played Suzumiya Haruhi. Is that cheating?

Wait a minute, I think Gnumeric computed that wrong, I answered six questions instead of five. Must have forgotten to turn on the Analysis Toolpak. Wait, Gnumeric doens't have an Analysis Toolpak. I've already said enough.

You know your blog has gone up in the world when you've been linked to on the J-Walk Blog, and you know your blog has gone up even further in the world when a blog post from your blog is featured in it's own separate entry on the J-Walk Blog!. Did I mention it's the J-Walk Blog and link to it?

From the 9th of December 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.

And because it's the J-Walk Blog I'm not even offended that he didn't spell the name of my blog properly in the last line!

His assertion is true, I did in fact take said Excel book and put it in front of a stack of other books, and I've been making it a habit of doing so. Jean Luc Picard would be pleased with that last line.

Curiously if you do a search for Rubenerd J-Walk in Google, you get exactly 1,110 hits. I'm not sure if that's a decimal number or whether Google is telling me 14 in binary. Heck it could even be 4,368 in hexadecimal. That definitely sounds more impressive than 14, let's just leave it at that.

I figure if I put a photo of mine from Singapore of a J-Walk book here, people will see it on Google Reader and possibly their iPhone, thus satisfying every part of the title. And people call me stupid, can you believe it? Don't answer that.

Since my posts on Google Reader's new interface and my own subsequent installation of Greasemonkey scripts to make it usable again, I thought I'd share a couple more resources and observations in the hopes they may be useful. If you don't use Google Reader, you could always print out this page on paper and give it to your cat to shred. If you don't have a cat, give it to your chameleon, if you can find him camouflaged somewhere. Everybody's happy.

First observation is the iPhone Google Reader web application. While the new Blazing White with faint blue lines is somewhat less than usable without a few Greasemonkey scripts on the desktop, I think the iPhone Google Reader web application is a marked improvement. The grey gradients on the toolbar and the navigation buttons which never really worked on the iPhone's screen have been replaced by solid colour which makes it much easier to eat, especially when you're outdoors and battling lots of sunlinght.

ASIDE: Did I just say it's much easier to "eat"? I didn't mean to type that... but it works doesn't it? Can't you just picture someone eating some web feeds with their breakfast? Eating web feeds? Anyone? Okay, I guess I'll never be a poet after all.

That Google Reader is a very nice site,
Even if the new interface is an absolute blight.
I could even type nonsense in a tree,
But I really, really suck at poetry.

The new Google Reader iPhone web application (top part of the screen)

My other observation was that J-Walk recently blogged (J-Walk blogged something? No, really?) about Google Reader and had his own interface modifications to share complete with before and after photos which I assume he took with a very high resolution camera. I mean, those photos of his screen were perfect, no light distortion or anything. I was really impressed.

In a nutshell:

A few days ago I mentioned that Google made lots of style changes to their Google Reader site. I spent some time and tweaked the styles so it looks much better to me. Most of the stuff I don't use is hidden, and the overall look is much less cluttered.

I started with the file found here, and then modified it and added my own stuff to it.

If you use Google Reader with Firefox (and have the Stylish add-on installed) you can try out my tweaks. The new styles are in this text file: Google Reader Tweaks. It's not set up for one-click installation, so you'll need to create a new style and copy/paste. Or, install this one and replace the code with mine.

I've been reading J-Walk for a long time; I have fond memories of the last few years of high school in 2003-04 and when I got my first full time job in 2004 before I took off to university reading his material. Before my mum passed on I had got her reading it too.

Even if he does suggest you can be productive writing lists in Excel! Oh well, we can't all be Gnumeric list makers :).