Rubénerd Blog :)

Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it’s not there. I’m far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I’m going to give it a try.

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My home is back in Singapore and I’m studying in Adelaide, and in both places over the years I’ve collected huge collections of computer books, like these ones! Computer books are bulky and heavy just by themselves, so carrying a few dozen of them between cities in luggage is completely out of the question. What I need are ebook versions.

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I read a report somewhere that people of my generation tend to stay in contact with our parents far more than previous generations did. I’m not sure how much of that is societal or whether it’s because it’s just cheaper and easier to do now wherever we are, but I’d say it definitely holds true for us here.

I try to contact my dad at least twice a week on Skype because especially since my mum died we’ve become really close friends. He’s still obviously an authority figure when it comes to certain whatnot, but for the most part I talk to him now the same way I talk to friends. We didn’t break our longest running record yesterday afternoon on Skype, but 1 hour 54 minutes is still pretty damn impressive!

Monnie over at Vanilla Silence recently wrote a detailed blog post about her holidays that were otherwise fabulous save for a nasty bout of hayfever, so I decided I should talk about my flu thingy too.

COUGH! SNEEZE! SO HOT! SPLUTTER! COUGH! SO COLD! SNEEZE! BIRD! SNEEZE! WORD!

I was going somewhere with this!

After postponing going to the doctor for several days because doctors scare the heck out of me, I finally went this morning. Turns out what I thought was just hayfever or a common cold was the flu and a respiratory infection. I’ve got stuff to take for it now and I’m breathing easier already, though I still have to take it easier over the next few days. When I have assignments due and a family crisis, of course!

My mum put up with these symptoms when she was having cancer treatment for over 12 years. 12 F*CKING YEARS. Even now I still don’t know how she did it.

So I’ve come down with such a severe case of hayfever now that Spring has finally Sprung that I think I was making more noise this morning than the constructon workers across the street. Every time I sneezed in the loungeroom I think I broke a window, quite an achievement when you consider our small house here only has glass doors and no windows.

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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.

UPDATE: This post was originally written yesterday on Sunday, but I hit the "Save Draft" button instead of "Publish". Looking back at it now, I wish it were still Sunday.

I’m sitting here at the Boatdeck Cafe this Sunday afternoon with just my iPhone and a stable wireless network. Sometimes I need to lug the glorified monitor and keyboard stuck together, but today just typing on this feels fine.

It is definitely starting to show that it’s Autumn here in Adelaide; after almost every day being as hot as Singapore when we came back here, this weekend has been in the low 20s and drizzling. To the astonishment of many a person in the real world and online I’ve readily admitted I prefer overcast days; there’s something about them that allows me to relax more. Perhaps it was the positive cool change overcast days have on tropical climates that made me think of them positively.

Mugachinos are good!

As for today, despite university now being back for a fortnight now I’ve still been having a nagging enrollment issue that I thought would have been fixed but clearly not, so I had intended this afternoon to work on that, but unwittingly I forgot the online enrollment system isn’t functional on Sundays! Or at least the part I’m trying to access. I still haven’t even got a new student card yet!

So to be productive I’ve been watching some more Code Geass and going to the Boardeck Cafe! I figure my life is so dreadfully confusing and filled with anxiousness and dread that a Sunday where I only have a few responsibilities is, for an Atheist wanting a better word, a godsend! Plus it’s overcast, good times!

I’ve also finally recorded a Rubenerd Show again, the first since coming back to Adelaide. I had forgotten that I was supposed to be keeping shows under 10MiB so people on iPhones and iPod Touches (the phrase "iPod Touches" just doesn’t sound right, if you know what I mean) can download them on mobile phone networks, so I rambled on just as I’m doing here without any thought to the time until it was just time. The result was I had four things I wanted to discuss and I ended up discussing one thing, then getting sidetracked and talked about something else! Good times.

Well that’s my Sunday! Now if you’d excuse me, I’m going to turn to the Stanza iPhone app and continue reading The Counte of Monte Cristo [Wikipedia] while I finish my Mugaccino. Sundays are fun.

Tanglin Mall in Singapore, sans Christmas decorations by User:Sengkang Will be uploading my dad’s and my Christmas photos soon!

I’m sitting in a coffee shop again, only this time not at my beloved Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes in Adelaide in South Australia in Australia in Asia Pacific in Earth in the Solar System in the Milky Way galaxy, but rather the Starbucks at Tanglin Mall. Sitting here on a Sunday morning you could be forgiven for thinking you’re in Australia, or the US, or Canada, or the UK here there are so many ang mohs here!

Little tip, you can always tell the ang moh (literally means "red head" in Hokkien, used in the past as a somewhat derogatory term) tourists from the people who’ve lived here by what they’re wearing and how much they’re sweating!

Anyway back to better things, having been back in Singapore for just over a week now I’ve been dealing with this web hosting disaster. Wait, that’s not a better thing at all, it’s quite awful! As a result of my web host being blocked on my own internet connection at home it’s been painfully hard to create and upload new posts which has been a real shame. I think the problem is I thought I may as well clean out the databases that have accumulated large amounts of junk since I started using them five years ago, as well as moving over some of my media files to Ourmedia and changing the URL to something more logical. Perhaps I’m biting off far more than I can chew.

ASIDE: Ever since I was a little kid I’ve had problems with my jaw bone and chewing, that’s why I eat so slowly… and find it even harder to chew that which I have bitten to much off of. When I was a kid I thought it was normal to feel pain whenever you closed your mouth! Ah those were the days, right?

I’ve really missed writing these rambling nonsensical posts, they were so enjoyable to do in the past. Here at the Starbucks using their free Wireless@SG internet connection I’m having no trouble accessing my site; very refreshing after dealing with proxy servers at home just so I can upload a file or browse my comments pages! SingTel seems to think that my web host is still reputable. Or perhaps they just don’t know.

Back to business though, it continually stuns me how rapidly Singapore is developing and changing. Every time I leave here and come back after only a few months things have changed. For example, there’s now a 50+ floor new apartment building nearing completion outside my bedroom window that wasn’t there before. Really! The post office opposite Tanglin Mall which I can see through the floor to ceiling glass here as I type this is now a Friven and Co which also houses a fantastic gourmet Swiss deli which my German father wholeheartedly approves of! Half the computer shops in Sim Lim Square have changed and rearranged themselves.

My aforementioned father for his birthday on the 2nd bought himself a Nikon D90 DSLR of which I am insanely jealous of.

ASIDE: I’m sorry I have to rudely interrupt myself here. Does that above sentence make grammatical sense? I would be jealous of my dad for having a fantastic new camera not jealous of the camera itself… would I? Four years since high school english classes and I can already tell my standards are slipping. I blame it on C++, Perl, Ruby, Objective C and Chuck Peddle.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the camera. Yes he has a new Nikon D90 and a slew of new lenses including an ultra wide angle which can see so far in either direction the camera may as well have eyes in the back of it’s head! Or lenses in the back of the camera as it were. As a result of having this new optical device we’ve been on several photographic expeditions around Singapore taking photos of the Christmas decorations at night and during the day, as well as some nature shots. I’ve been using my venerable FinePix S9600 bridge camera and the super macro capabilities of the attached lens to show up my dad’s D90 up as he currently doesn’t have a lens that matches it, but let’s just say his night photography shots are somewhat better!

I purposely chose photo sizes that make my S9600 appear bigger and more impressive than my dad’s D90. I’m not biased, I’m just… selective!

My FinePix S9600 can take stunning night photos even when set on a low ISO setting, but I tend to tremble a lot so I need to use a a tripod. The Nikon D90 can take stunning night photos even if you swing the camera and intentionally move it around! Just for fun he took several photos at night of the Christmas lights and sneezed as he pressed the shutter button. Photo came out perfectly. What a show off.

Did I mention I’m jealous?

My dad, sis and I have been to restaurants I want to review here and post photos of, we’ve seen Segways zipping around the street… eventually when all this web hosting nonsense has sorted itself out I’d love to post all this stuff. It’s amazing, I’ve only been posting every other day now instead of several times a day, and the material is piling up faster than snow. Which given Singapore is in the tropics it isn’t much of an accomplishment, but notice I didn’t specify where the snow was. Ha, I’m too clever for you!

Until next time, have a good one :). Did I mention things keep changing here?

And once again an anime character perfectly summarises the mood of the post. Even if including them does violate one of the blogging rules I talked about below.

I’ve been back in Singapore for over a day now but I haven’t written any posts since the day before I left Adelaide. For those who have been enjoying my several month long posting streak, sorry to let you down! I’m going to break one of the first laws of blogging here and dedicated a post to why I have had this gap.

ASIDE: I figure I’ve already thoroughly broken the laws that state you’re supposed to stay on topic and have a site with a light background with dark text that uses the Georgia font for headings and a logo with gloss on it, so one more won’t hurt.

Unfortunately I’ve developed quite a bad cold suspiciously well timed to my arrival back here. So far I’ve counted sore bones and joints, glands along the sides of my jaw and in my throat are swollen, sore throat, blocked ears and nose, really bad headaches, coughing, an irrational desire to listen to ridiculously long loops of only Dean Martin, Rod Picott and Jack Johnson music turned down low in the background while eating nothing but mandarins and German pretzels… typical symptoms.

I’m entertaining the notion that it is some sort of Australian Federal Government immigration conspiracy. They didn’t want me returning to Singapore for the next few months because they’d prefer I spend the money in Australia. It makes perfect sense; while I was in Adelaide I was walking through Rundle Mall buying Aussie gifts, here in Singapore I can barely get out of my chair to have my usual obsessive four showers a day. It’s worked.

Is that my temperature or my tax file number?

ASIDE: Just over two hours have passed since I wrote the first part of this post and I think the joints in my fingers have stopped burning enough to keep typing. I need a scribe. A scribe would just be bril.

Continuing this train of conciousness…

If what I think I was writing is correct, I’m thinking I may have to go to the Australian High Commission here and ask for some antidote. Why are the British Council and High Commission, the Aussie High Commission and the American Embassy right next to each other, but the Canadian High Commission is somewhere else?

Makes as much sense as the underlying premise of the first part of this post.

ASIDE: Okay another half an hour has passed. Writing this post was probably not the smartest thing to do. Then again leaving your battery in your electric razor so it buzzed in your check-in luggage and scared airport security wasn’t a smart thing to do either. Not that I’ve ever done that… twice… and once with an electric toothbrush. They weren’t even that good.

Continuing this train of conciousness…

What astounds me is that my beautiful late mum was able to endure over 12 years of chemotherapy which gave her symptoms that were infinitely worse than any of the silly stuff I’m complaining about, and yet she put up with it and lived… for 12 f-ing years. It absolutely boggles the mind, though it does show how much she cared for us that she would go through all of that just so (her words) she could see us grow up and allow us to have memories of her. Bummer, now I’m choking up a bit for another reason.

I think I need some cream of chicken soup, a nice thick blanket and a book of cliches. Or maybe some Mark Twain reading. No, some Dr Karl Kruszelnicki reading. Yeah, that’ll all straighten me out.

If I’ve unwittingly made even more spelling and grammar mistakes than I usually do here, forgive me. Perhaps at some point I’ll come back here and delete half of this post. I think I even talked about shopping trolleys here at one point; I mean what do shopping trolleys have to do with having a cold? Wait, did I talk about shopping trolleys? I know I talked about magazine subscriptions and electric toothbrushes.

I like electric toothbrushes, they tickle. Unlike blog posts which take (checking…) over three hours to type. You know what? I need a scribe.

Now if you’d excuse me, I’m about to apply several thousand eye drops and drop my burning finger joints into an ice bath. Preferably with my fingers and hands still attached.

The Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, taken this morning

As far as I know I haven’t done a rambling post like this for several months which I’m sure you were all very relieved about. Not any more!

Yes I’m sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe with a ridiculously large cup of coffee and several ideas churning through my head which I just can’t separate out logically when I’m having such a buzz. Think of it this way, in your blog aggregator or on the website you’re reading several condensed posts in one. It’s as if a regular post is a normal strength coffee, and this post is a triple or quadruple shot espresso targeting your eyes and brain. Should I be putting a health warning on this? For that matter should I be putting warnings on everything here?

Today is the last full day both my sister and I are having here in Adelaide before we go back to Singapore for the summer holidays. Though technically Singapore is in the Northern Hemisphere by a couple of degrees so it would be the winter holidays over there, but the last time I checked, a year round tropical climate with only artificial indoor snow really doesn’t count as winter. It doesn’t count as winter here in Australia either but that’s because we’re like Brazil and South Africa, we’re too cool to play by the Northern Hemisphere’s rules. Well actually too hot to play by the rules, because we’d only be cool in winter, which of course isn’t happening.

We have so much to do, but fortunately the most difficult things have already been taken care of. My father is a person who works much better under pressure; that’s a politically correct way of saying he leaves things until the last minute! My late mum was the exact opposite, she had to have her bags packed and next to the door a full week before any trip. I’m somewhere in the middle; I hate frantically dashing around when I’ve forgotten to do something in my preparations, but it’s inevitable that some does end up happening.

ASIDE: Like accidently pouring too much shampoo in the shower and it gets on the floor and then you slip on it and hit your head on the roughly cut masonry wall. Fortunately it hasn’t affected anything serious like my short term memory.

Onto other matters, given it’s my sister’s and my last day in Adelaide we’re celebrating in different ways. It’s 10:25AM and I’ve been up for many hours already, have had coffee and gone on a walk around Mawson Lakes which is a really, really good thing to do first thing. The benefit is by exercising a little, I only absorb 95% of the kilojoules from the gigantic Betty Blue Sea of Espresso instead of 100% which I’m positive will do wonders for my health and well being.

I was positive "well being" was one word, but for some reason the spell checker doesn’t like it. Then again this spell checker doesn’t like "colour", "customise", "flavour" or "Schade" either, so what would it know? Wow, look at all those red underlined words.

The Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes, taken this morning

As I typed that last line, a little kid and her mum were walking out of the cafe as the kid was exclaiming she wanted to pay! She wanted to pay! It’s just as my parents told me, you desperately want to grow up and be mature as a child until you do actually grow up and realise how much better you had it before. It’s a bit cruel when you think about it!

ASIDE: It was also cruel when I accidentally poured too much shampoo in the shower and it got on the floor and then I slipped on it and hit my head on the roughly cut masonry wall. Fortunately it hasn’t affected anything serious like my short term memory.

I’ve noticed one thing about living in Australia that’s very different from living in Singapore, and it’s related to habits. One thing I’ve noticed is common with people in Singapore is that guys tend to take their wallet out and put it on the table, usually with their mobile phone on top into a nice expensive please-steal-this sandwich. I admit I started doing this too though because it makes sitting down so much more comfortable! Here though I’m a bit more wary of doing this, but then again I might have been affected by slipping in the shower and hitting my head. Fortunately it hasn’t affected anything serious.

I have so much to do today, but instead I’m filling out a disjointed, rambling blog post that is discussing virtually nothing that I had originally intended it to. In other words, it has been a complete success!

Because the one thing I try to do here and on my show is I strive for professionalisn. Did I just misspell "professionalism"? How deliciously ironic! Ironic sounds like a brand of iodised hair tonic. Why you would buy ionised hair tonic I have no idea. I’m sure a shampoo company could market it as a special, extra super duper healthy alternative with no evidence to support it, but then again they never do need evidence do they? Shampoo… now where have I written about that before?

Good morning everyone :).