Rubénerd Blog :)

Just came back this evening from our (brief) trip to KL, as evidenced from the view from our hotel window above! I lived here in 2007-08 so it was good to go to all my old haunts. Will be posting proper photos and whatnot later this week.

We’ve got Tuesday in Singapore (going to make the most of it), then 09:00 on Wednesday morning I’m back to Adelaide to face those "people" at that university. Can’t wait.

With that in mind they’re will probably be a further interruption to your regularly scheduled blog posts here. If you feel the urge to read more Ruben sanctioned nonsense, feel free to browse the archive or barring that visit any of the fine folks on the site sidebar. They’re far more interesting, succinct, eloquent and funny than me anyway.

Danke schön, see you on the other side ^_^.

Starbucks have released a PDF of their opening hours during the Chinese New Year long weekend. Their branches at Liat Towers, Pacific Plaza, Plaza Singapura (with the exception of Tuesday), Raffles City, Northpoint and all the airport terminals are still open 24 hours. All the branches in the CBD around Raffles Place are completely closed.

No word at all on the Coffee Bean’s website whether they’re open or not. Killiney Kopitiam seems to be closed from the ones I’ve been to.

This has been a public service announcement from the Rubénerd.com Coffee Obsessors Association, Pte Ltd, Pty Ltd, GmBH, Sdn Bhd, LLLLLLLP.

Google’s creative and unconventional logos celebrating certain events and milestones throughout the year are fun to watch, but their latest one for Google Singapore shows the local versions of their sites aren’t so local!

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Speaking of photos in Singapore, here’s one I also took this afternoon of the brand spanking new apartment building outside me bedroom window here. When I was in Singapore in January last year it wasn’t there, now just over a year later it’s finished! It took them longer for the people next door to us in Adelaide to build a semi detatched one story house!

The colours seem a bit over-saturated, but I did very little post production other than converting from RAW. And no, I didn’t build the building.

For those of you who’ve never been to Singapore, Chinese New Year weekend is similar to Christmas in that everywhere is almost completely deserted! It was such a stunningly bright and gorgeous day I replaced my workhorse 35mm with the much slower but wider 18-55mm VR to take some photos around the neighbourhood :)

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You know you’ve lived in Singapore too long when you see the Mountain Bike Action magazine’s website URI MBAction.com and you think of business administration.

Dear CNET Member: Get ready for this year’s big game by creating a new list on CNET, and enter to win a new LED TV in the Samsung Super Bowl Wish List Sweepstakes! [...]

SWEEPSTAKES OPEN TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OF ONE OF THE 50 UNITED STATES OR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA AT LEAST 18 YEARS OR AGE OF MAJORITY IN STATE OF RESIDENCE AND OLDER ON DATE OF ENTRY. [...]

Dear CNET, I provided my location in my account profile with you, please don’t send me spam that doesn’t even relate to me. Sincerely, Ruben in Singapore and Australia.

This sort of thing happens to me all the time, and not just from CNET. How hard would it be to check a user’s provided country before sending them offers and competitions they’re not eligible for? One or two extra lines of code?

Have you ever walked down a street on a particular day of the week — any of them will do — and suddenly realised that you should be walking alongside the street not down it? Really, nobody should be walking down a street, unless its one of those pedestrian ones that are closed off to traffic, otherwise a car might come out of nowhere and clip you on a part of your body that had previously never been hit by a vechile before. Unless you’ve walked down a street before, which you may or may not have done.

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Personally, I find the act of clothes shopping to be in the same league as furniture shopping, doctor’s appointments and certain university classes: they’re unbearable but necessary. IKEA is the one exception for furniture in my book, and now Uniqlo is the exception for clothes!

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I usually don’t read the Singapore Straits Times, but Stephanie Yeow’s graphic in their story about drink driving was just too well done to pass up.

I wish the Singapore Police luck in their efforts to curb drink driving with incentives instead of nagging which I’ve maintained never works because it attacks the symptoms and not the societal causes. For example, both Singapore and Australia have had countless anti-drink driving campaigns pitched through all forms of media and as far as I know they haven’t done anything.

Then there are 23 year old people like me who don’t even have a car licence and probably have one or two standard drinks a month, if that. Go figure.