Rubénerd!

Via NoScript.net. I am in approvance! Is that a word?

Aaaaaah. Chitanda Eru from Hyouka, the latest KyoAni production. Will no doubt be another significant (and entirely voluntary!) financial drain on me at some stage.

Thank you @hanezawakirika ^^;

And yes, this post had merit. Just like this one.

All this violent weather in Sydney reminded me of an experience I had years ago with loud noises, avoiding talking to people and the like. Many facts have been admonished, embellished or made up for convenience. Enjoy!

Rowan of Brethrin

Despite having neither the licence nor the skill to operate a motor vehicular device, I piloted the nimble automobile down a lonely, dark stretch of road towards somewhere. A guy's house flew past me on one side, and presumably someone else's house on the other side. The road felt like a tunnel with large, overgrown canopy trees stretching out from the footpath and reaching across to touch the branches of their brethrin on the other side. A rather rude display to be performing in public, if you ask me. Which you didn't, so I'll shut up.

As I was attempting to avoid a fork in the road lest it puncture one of my tyres, I heard a loud crash so loud it crashed. Just like that description.

Bolting out of my chair like a spring loaded... chair, I thrust the headphones I was wearing onto the table and hit the spacebar on the keyboard to pause the simulator. I'd paused it many times before, but not under such frigtening circumstances. Frankly, I was surprised the keyboard had absorbed the impact of my keysmash as nonchelantly as it did. I suppose it had plenty of practice from when I'd been debugging Java late at night. ExcessivelyCamelCasedException THIS!

When I'd calmed down from the shock, I adjusted my invisible tie and strained my ears to triangulate where the sound had emanated. The room was dead silent, save for the oversized cooling fan in my primary desktop computer system which ironically was positioned below my desk.

Just as my blood pressure had returned to as normal a state as caffeine normally afforded me, the crash sound thundered across the room again. This time, with my full and undivided attention, I realised (HEY, AN ANIMATED GIF OF A CAT!) the sound was coming from the front door.

Who's to say front doors aren't side doors? Isn't the front a side?

On my tippy toes, which was rather difficult in awkwardly fitting slippers in the masculine shape of bunny rabbits, I inched towards the door. Croutching on the bunnies, I peeked underneath as I'd done so many times before while attempting to avoid contact with people, but to my surprise I saw none of the telltale signs of a human presence. Feet, mostly. And shoes. None. Neither!

Relieved I wouldn't have to actually speak to anyone, I fumbled with the door knob then inched the door aside.

Laying in front of the door was the unmistakably wooden shape of a tree branch. As thick as a tree branch, and nearly as long, it lay there with a freshy snapped section on one end, suggesting it had snapped off from the tree of which it had branched from at some point. How it had sailed to my front door in the dead of night without human assistance baffled me to the extent that I couldn't figure it out. Unlike all those other times I was baffled, mind.

Still, where did that second bang come from? Oh wait, it did make sense, there was a second branch there. Almost as massive and menacing as it's brother, assuming they branched from the same tree.

Another loud bang, and I took an involuntary nap on the welcome mat. Surprisingly soft, though a little muddy for my tastes. For the next few hours, I supposed it'd have to do.

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

Granite pit a rock solid investment for owner
Jeff Starck, Wisconsin Rapids Tribune

MOSINEE -- Glenn Kafka was just another guy in central Wisconsin with a backhoe when he found his "dinosaur egg" while digging for rock in the 1980s.

According to their site banner, the paper is published by Gannett. That's almost too much.

Lots of people were getting on board with #adayinthelifeApril2 on Twitter today, so I took the opportunity to reboot my Trains Ruben Taketh blog, and snap the above photo.

At some point I'll upload more train photos from around the world, for now it's just a terrible site where I take photos of Sydney trains I've been on. As exciting as it sounds!

I get one lift home, and I leave an impression! Sort of. From my friend Emily on The Twitters:

My dad was like, "I just realised, I don't know what this Ruben guy looks like - just that he's blonde, tall and kind of skinny."

To the right is an artist's conception based on that description.

When I first heard of Black Rock Shooter and its anime adaptation, I was expecting a franchise about a kick arse, renewable energy-touting superhero taking down the coal lobby by staring people down. Needless to say, I was entirely wrong.

Forgive me, my last three posts were about more serious news topics, and I needed an entirely pointless break! It seems people are disappointed with the anime, but for those of us who never played the game or read the manga, would it be worth watching?

The 29th of February! Such a monuments (though chronologically predictable and necessary) occasion warrants a post I have precious time to write, so instead of a well thought out, logical post I've decided just to ramble for a bit. That's so unlike me.

When did this happen last time

To get into the spirit of writing, I thought it best to check out what I was blogging about the last time it was the 29th of February. Given this happens every four years, I was able to ascertain I needed to look up the 29th of February 2008. No, I'm not a mathematical genius, I just used a calculator to deduct 4 from 2012.

What happened last time

Turns out, the post I wrote for the 29th of February 2008 was a rather unsalubrious rant regarding sites taking my blog posts and wrapping them in ads. No, I'm not talking about Google (haiyo!), I mean spam sites. Ironically, those that Google used to be infested with and are starting to slowly creep back.

Let's take a look! Step into the four year time machine!

At first spam bots harvested email addresses from search engine indexes of web pages, then when the concept of posting comment on blogs started reaching critical mass spam bots started pumping spam through those [..]

It seems to me though that blog spam in itself is evolving though. I used the word "though" twice in that sentence. When previously they mostly consisted of masses of links to get more Google juice, now they seem to be latching on web feeds that blog software exports and creating more and more junk blogs with this plagiarised information. Some of them try to pass themselves off as legitimate by creating faux introductions that go along the lines of "Hey I found this blog entry and it's really interesting, here's a summary!".

I even took a screenshot of Camino showing one of the spam sites in question.

29th of February 2012

So now we return to the future, or the present, or whatever this period of time is. Einstein's Law of Relativity would imply that in this current time we would see it as the present, but had we stayed in 2008 we would have seen the present as the future. Right?

This reminds me of that episode of Star Trek Voyager with the USS Relativity where the first officer is trying to explain to 7 the idea that time travel is plausible if one understands effects often precede causes, and that temporal paradoxes can cause headaches. Wait, that was Captain Janeway, never mind.

So-called "True Trekkies" aren't supposed to like Star Trek Voyager, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching it growing up. That could be read as me watching it while I was growing up, or that I was watching the show itself grow up. English is such a clumsy language, one need only be a programmer or know other languages to be aware of this. Hey, at least we don't have seven different tenses! Right?

What was the photo?

So we finally come to the photo from the very beginning of this post. As I did while looking for previous blog entries written on the 29th of February 2008, I ran my master Swiss Army Chainsaw Perl script to spit out photos on my SLR backup drive taken on that day. I didn't take many, but one was that view above from my bedroom balcony at the time. You can view the full photo here, if you really want to.

Suffice to say, set homesickness mode to full! It was such a shock to have a quiet, dark bedroom when I came back to Sydney, I can tell you that much!

Another photo I had for some reason was this "screenshot" of installing Nvidia binary blob drivers for my FreeBSD tower.

The End

The irony hasn't escaped me that I spent my 29th of February 2012 post taking about the 29th of February 2008. That's fine, on the 29th of February 2016 I'll talk about the 29th of February 2012. Better make notes about Raspberry Pi for that day. The system works!