Rubenerd

Sitting in a coffee shop, listening to two computer nerds preening their feathers at each other. It’s not so much eavesdropping, because they’re practically shouting with the most stereotypically-nasal voices you can imagine!

So far I’ve overhead:

• that’s security through obscurity
• yeah, well, correlation is not causation
• have you considered…?
• the fact of the matter is
• that’s just planned obsolescence
• Docker

Then another gentleman walked in with his laptop. He asked how to get on the Wi-Fi, and proceeded to get a patronising earful about VPNs. When the barista started explaining, one of them piped up again saying, and I quote:

“I can make your Wi-Fi so much better, but you probably don’t want to know because it’s like French to you, right? Lol!”

Was I ever this insufferable? Don’t answer that.

Shannon van Sant wrote for NPR:

Lee served as president of South Korea from 2008 until 2013. A court ruled Friday that before and during his presidency Lee accepted $5.4 million in bribes from Samsung, South Korea’s largest conglomerate.

I remember a gentleman tweeting me — since deleted, for some reason — that he bought Galaxy phones over iPhones because Samsung was, and I quote “more ethical” than “dodgy” Apple. It got a dozen or so likes.

In the early to mid 2000s I had a blog post series called it’s not Apple, so it’s okay, before I decided point-scoring was boring. But imagine for a second if Apple had been caught bribing American government officials to the tune of billions of dollars. The press and social media would DDoS themselves.

It still boggles my mind people can be that selfish; that company managers would be willing to risk the livelihoods of their employees, or a government official the jobs of their staff, for something as cheap as money. And even if you secured it all, I’d be living in fear the rest of my life that I’d be caught. Worrying on a caviar-filled yacht is no way to live.

Aside one: I’m so glad I’m on a social media sabbatical.

Aside two: I say “cheap as money” as someone who has enough of it for a roof over my head, food in my tummy, and train fare. And I’ll bet those involved in the scandal did too.

This post was originally written in August 2018, but I was trying to find a closer image of the posters in the MUNI station below. Never mind!

Logos are fascinating. A well-executed mark is instantly recognisable, communicates what the company or institution is, and has longevity; the latter of which designers of late have been doing their best to break.

I was standing at the Montgomery Street MUNI station in San Francisco after work one afternoon, like a gentleman, and noticed something was a little off. And it wasn’t just the second-hand pot wafting down from the street, or the curious accent of the computerised BART announcer.

I didn’t give it a second thought, and moved on with my life. Which is a blatant lie; I was churning about this in my head more than someone who’s business isn’t advertising or logo design really should. What had they done? What looked so weird?

I noticed the same thing on a poster at Wynyard station when I got back to Sydney. But with the aid of closer proximity, I was able to ascertain a few more details. The blue square was now a solid colour, not a gradient. The slightly off-centred text was now centred, and simplified its white outline. I liked these; they kept what was strong about the original mark, but made it cleaner.

But then I saw the thing that had been bugging me since July; the one tiny detail that renders the logo awkward in a way I couldn’t immediately recognise. The CA ligature was gone!

The previous logo joined the C and A in American, from the lower stroke of the narrow C to the bottom-left of the A. It was subtle, but worked. The new logo cannibalises the lower stroke of the C without that visual balance of being joined with the A. It looks so weird.

If you look closely, that same angle of attack is now employed on the upper strokes of the S, but not on the bottom. The clever EX is now a FedEx style double arrow. The elegant Helvetica-style R is now an ugly Arial-style R. And the vertical spacing between the lines also seems slightly too wide.

As an aside, I know saying ugly Arial is redundant, but it needed to be said in the context of the typeface Microsoft should have bundled from the start!

I’m flattered they’re using Rubenerd Blue, and I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but its a hit and several misses from my vantage point as a well respected logo critic.

Wikipedia hasn’t had a bird featured picture or article for a while. Here’s the most recent one of a tree swallow by Iiii I I I, the former of which sounds anatomically impossible unless it was a tiny sapling and a very large bird.

It also has a very familiar colour scheme :).

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

01:03:32 – In the first of what I hope to be many episodes in the Rubenerd Rewind series, we take a journey back thirteen years to my university dorm to hear Kevin Tan’s show! He heard me doing Rubenerd Shows when we were both studying in Adelaide, and thought he’d give it a try. Each of his six episodes are preserved and presented here in one easy-to-listen programme. Shows recorded by Kevin Tan in 2005-06, introduction recorded by Ruben Schade in 2018, and an Adelaide Channel 7 news clip from 2006.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released October 2018 on The Overnightscape Underground, an Internet talk radio channel focusing on a freeform monologue style, with diverse and fascinating hosts.

Subscribe with iTunes, Pocket Casts, Overcast or add this feed to your podcast client.

I just wanted to give a shoutout and congrats to to the pgAdmin team for their latest release of pgAdmin 4. The project is also moving to a regular montlhy release cycle.

In another life I was an O9i gentleman, and lived out of the Oracle SQL Developer. pgAdmin makes Postgres as capable and easy to develop against as that program made Oracle. There are a few different open source Postgres clients, but nothing is more polished.

It’s available as a macOS Homebrew cask, and for other platforms. The FreeBSD port is still on pgAdmin 3; I may try building version 4 and submitting a new one.

I had a series of shower thoughts this morning, in the shower no less. Or would it be no fewer, given I have a known quantity of showers?

• PNG and JPG are both graphics formats with abbreviations ending with G, but for entirely different reasons.

• GIF begins with G, but for the same reason PNG ends with G. And not the same reason GNU begins with G, which is a recursive acronym for something else, which it itself isn’t the same as the G in PNG.

• Some people pronounce PNG as a vaguely network-sounding acronym, others just spell out the letters. I do the latter.

• And then you have BMP, which refers to graphics as Picture instead; and TIFF, which now that I think about it I can’t remember what it stands for.

I see what my Mac did there.

Here are three videos I watched this week. This may become a regular feature, now that I have a script to auto-generate thumbnails without doing embeds.

Cody’s Lab: Aluminium Foil Thermite!? Making thermite from ’luminum foil, iron oxide, baking, and a bit of muscle. Cody’s channel is rapidly becoming one of my favourites.

Red Hat Summit: Ansible best practices. I made it thus far with self-directed study and a great workshop with Benedict Reuschling at AsiaBSDCon 2018 in Tokyo. The camera work wasn’t great, but this video was another useful step.

Jonathan Burns: Magic with Cheese. I’m with Penn, what a great act. He used to work in a casino in Wisconsin!

It’s everyone’s favourite Fate/Grand order servant not yet released on the English version, in this adorable new garb and with coffee! By 天蔵 on Pixiv.

The artist is also on Twitter, Tumblr, and Giftee for support. I’ll be buying some FamilyMart ice cream through the latter just as soon as I can translate it. ^^;