Rubénerd!

My first 2013 post, my first K-On! post of 2013, the first post from my adorable new 11" MacBook Air, and the first 2013 K-On! post from my adorable new 11" MacBook Air!

The image on the left is by おまる@3日目西“け”23b on Pixiv, the image on the left is the video I took of the Sydney fireworks from my iTelephone 4 in the company of some wonderful friends, and especially Clara ^_^.

Peace, health, sillyness and happiness for the new year to you all.

I get nostalgia for the most random things. Case in point, I was on the Amazon Affiliate Associates Thingy website this morning, and I noticed their documentation still shows a screenshot of their classic site design. Will they replace it soon? Maybe. And when they do, I have this old one preserved here for posterity.

I think I may have a problem.

Despite my resurgent interest in the colour purple owing to not being embarrased to admit to being my favourite colour anymore, when I randomly stumbled upon this photo of Strusta Lake in the Vitebsk Province of Belarus taken by zedlik, I just had to use it as a background. What a sight.

The icons for my drives are from the Treasure Isle Wiki, of all places.

Now that Ruben has his MacBook Pro back, he decided to try a new "theme" kinda thing.

While he thought Bakemonogatari was an interesting show, what he really did love were the graphics and character designs, and while Sengoku Nadeko wasn't his favourite spirit-possessed character, the colours in this background were too gorgeous to pass up. As a bonus, they match really well with Terminal.app's "Red Sands" theme which he'd never used before. They're all like the colours from Ubuntu... only classy!

As a matter of disclosure, Ruben uses Sabayon and Fedora as his Linux distros of choice, and only talks about himself in the Third Person occasionally. Like a boss.

Maybe it's because the computer is too slow and old! HA! ^_^;

Thank you, thank you, you were a terrific audience.

After much anticipation my copy of Snow Leopard I pre-ordered back on Monday arrived in our mailbox early this morning. Of course Murphy's Law was in full force: I had classes, a ton of assignments and work, I tagged along with my sister to the airport for her flight to Canberra and I set our toaster oven on fire when I tried to make a slice of toast and forgot about it. Imagine the damage if it had been a grilled cheese sandwich.

Well here we are at 23:30 and I finally have some time to install this here Snow Leopard. Problem is I absolutely loathe upgrades, I much prefer starting a new install of an operating system from scratch so there's the lowest chance of something going wrong and it also forces me to do a thorough system clean out and to check the few files I don't have backed up daily.

There probably won't be many blog posts today while I frantically work on this here Snow Leopard install preparation, so you can take five. Speak of the devil, I'm listening to that now. Genius.

Oh bummer, one of my external hard drives is almost full already. This is going to be a long evening!

UPDATE: I've been advised that the reason why urlTea was forced to go offline was due to clients getting sick and electrocuted from trying to brew their computers in mugs. Makes sense to me.

Reading about the latest problems with the tr.im URL shortening service, it got me thinking about urlTea and whatever happened to it. Before the current crop of shorter URL shorteners appeared such as is.gd, bit.ly and the like, TinyURL was king but I liked using urlTea because it was something a bit different and I loved the name! The previous iteration of my blog theme had links to URLtea under each post for well over a year, in fact I still think the icon I used for it is still on my server somewhere.

As of April it seems their site has ceased to exist like an infamous Monty Python parrot. If you attempt to visit their site, you're told the site is Temporarily Unavailable and a scary error line warning of a malformed httpd server file (gulp) suggests they won't be coming back anytime soon. Bummer.

It's normal for sites to go offline on the intertubes when their owners run out of a combination of time, money and/or interest, but intermediary sites that serve to redirect links pose an entirely new set of problems if and when they're disconnected. It's a bit scary.

In the meantime I've switched to RubyURL.com which was the other site I used to use alongside urlTea because it has the same few letters as Ruben and Rubenerd, and at the time I was into the Ruby programming language.

While I'm hopelessly sucking up to sites and people by giving favourable reviews (they're so much nicer to write than negative reviews!), Dana Gardner (yes, the same Dana I talked about recently) unveiled his new BriefingsDirect podcast website design this evening Adelaide and Singapore time. I like it, it's classy and fresh. Freshly classy if you will.

The new design features a darker background with a solid header colour and a white centre. Where have I seen a recent site redesign like that before? I guess its what they always say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Yes, I'm implying a big shot like Dana is a not only a regular reader of my site here but that he was so impressed by my stunning design skills that he copied it. Yeah, that'll work!

BriefingsDirect is described as an "Analyst moderated enterprise IT podcast". I admit I'm a bit behind in the more recent episodes, but they're fascinating and well worth a listen. I especially enjoyed the episode in late May about WebKit and how web developers are adapting to mobile platforms. A lot of the topics Dana and his guests talk about I'm studying as we speak, so aside from being interesting they're also immediately useful :).

I first heard Dana talk back when I subscribed to the IT Conversations iteration of The Gillmor Gang in 2004.

Unfortunately I've come across something that doesn't seem to be playing well with Mozilla Firefox 3.5: Tab Mix Plus. Despite working flawlessly in the betas and release candidates, my tabs since going to the final release have been displaying weird artefacts or are simply not drawn properly.

I'll wait to see if I can reproduce it predictably, then file a bug report or post a message on their forums. I'm running version 0.7.2009062901 which as far as I know is the most current one.