Rubenerd

I’m blogging today from Santa Monica, west of Los Angeles. This is an important place for Australians, for several critical reasons:

1. It’s the setting for the closing song on Savage Garden’s 1997 eponymous debut album, Savage Garden. Hence my description of it being eponymous, you silly goose.

Wait, that’s only one reason. But my point stands! I was in primary school in Singapore in 1997, and heard those faux-American accented Australians singing in every shopping centre I went to. I hear it now, and it immediately takes me back.

From the song:

In Santa Monica, you get coffee from
the coolest places on the promenade.

Check! Well, we’re at a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on the promenade, not sure if that counts. But this chain means a lot to me; I spent a large part of my life hanging out in them when I was going to school in Singapore, and again in Malaysia. Most of the blog from 2005-2009 was written from those coveted tables near power points on a first generation MacBook Pro, when I wasn’t studying in Adelaide.

Those years were tumultuous, in as much they could be for a sheltered expat. Home? Where/what is that? I still don’t know the answer.

Back to the song:

In Santa Monica, on the boulevard,
you’ll have to dodge those inline skaters
Or they’ll knock you down

Those quintessentially awesome 1990s lyrics have long since given way to four new realities. First, I had to look up how to spell quintessentially. Second, self-entitled blogging experts claim you’re not supposed to start sentences with first, second, or other numbers. Third, you’re also not allowed to use skates, likely on account of the required, aforementioned dodging:

And lastly, those skaters all gave way to electric scooters you can rent. I love scooters and badly wanted to try one, but I didn’t have a helmet. You may not need one, but I’m just enough of a klutz that it’d be a good idea.

Savage Garden, regroup and make more music. Maybe you could come back here and update your song to talk about the new Metro Line, or how while everything else looks so much different compared to 1997, chances are the jetty looks exactly the same.

This is my first blog post from Los Angeles! Though the topic in question is perhaps only tangentially related to the place. Like a protractor. Clara found a soft toy protractor in Little Tokyo and came this close to buying it.

I have a sinful confession: when I scrubbed my RSS feed subscriptions, I kept the foodie sections of many sites around. And I may have added others from sites I shan’t mention here, though if you know where to look you could figure it out.

Kristen Aiken collated a list in the The Huffington Post — or Huffpost a they brand themselves now — of ingredients that should never grace a guacamole, along with supporting documentation. They include:

1. Greek yoghurt
2. Mayonnaise
3. Green peas
4. Brussel sprouts
5. Celery
6. Blue cheese
7. Cottage cheese
8. Tuna salad

All but one of these are correct. Diced celery in guacamole is amazing. I give them a free pass for cottage cheese; for while it tastes great as a topping, it royally messes with the texture if you mix it in.

The canonical Schade family guacamole ingredients are, in descending order of volume:

1. Hass avocado; not sheppard
2. White onions
3. Red capsicum
4. Celery
5. Chives
6. Smoked paprika; sweet is an acceptable substitute
7. Tabasco sauce; jalapenos are a tolerable substitute
8. Cumin
9. Black pepper

It is your right to disagree with any of the above ingredients, just as it is for me to point out you’d be wrong.

The last avocado mentions on Rubenerd were a passing comment about trying to find my mum’s recipe in 2010, and a discussion of Avocado’s Constant in 2012.

Here’s somewhere I never thought I’d be blogging from: Oakland! Specifically, the Blue Bottle coffee in Old Oakland which has iced coffee and rhubarb bread. I’ve been to one of their beautiful San Franciscan branches in South Park, but I didn’t know the chain came from Oakland originally.

Nerdy confession: when I was a little kid and obsessively read atlases, I thought Oakland was where Oak Milk came from. Moving right along…

I got the 25 Muni bus to Treasure Island across the photogenic western span of the Bay Bridge, mostly to explore and grab lunch. But that’s where it stopped, so I had to venture back to San Francisco, then BART it under the Trans-Bay Tube. I’m not sure if BART can be used as a verb.

I was initially wary of venturing over, given Oakland’s reputation of being the downtrodden, dangerous brother of San Francisco. I guess in the same way tourists in Singapore are told not to venture to Johor Bahru, or Sydneysiders to Newcastle, even if they turn out to be fine.

I’m reminded of that legendary line from a Dave Chappelle standup:

When you leave, they say “oh my god, thank you SO MUCH for visiting San Francisco!!!” And when you get across the bridge, they say “Welcome to Oakland, bitch!”

But Old Oakland especially is beautiful, and I’ve counted as many people with cute anime bags as those with boomboxes. I think that may be the whitest sentence I’ve ever written, and for honesty sake I’m keeping it in there.

I might not stick around late, but I had to take a look given it’s right there.

It’s also noticeably warmer. San Francisco is bound by water on three sides, but I’m already a bit inland here. Clara is down in Los Angeles where its 20+ degrees warmer though, so I feel like I’m still getting off easy!

And despite that aforementioned reputation, this whole coffee shop is full of people on Mac laptops, iPads, and hipsters with paper, beards, and overemphasised hand gestures. And the Chinese American barista has a subtle English accent underneath.

Still, it’s a different world out here, even though we’re so close to SF. It’s hard to describe. If anything, San Francisco feels more like Sydney, and Oakland feels more like the east coast. Like Brooklyn is to Manhattan, though don’t make that comparison here or you’ll make enemies.

Now to find the Ask.com headquarters, which will always be Ask Jeeves to me.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

46:01 – Working from the San Fransisco office of the company I work for the next month, so I went wandering around Mission Rock, Embarcadero, the Bay Bridge, the docks, and a bit around the office. I’d write a more detailed description, but I’m doing double Australian and American shifts right now! Recorded over a week in late June 2018.

Recorded in San Francisco, California. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Released July 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.

Australian pronunciations and words are interesting. Much of what we say and spell is derived from British English, or what the internet has come to refer to as Commonwealth English. But we let slip with a few American terms that I had to get used to coming back from Singapore, like truck for lorry, soccer for football, and we also called our upper house a senate.

And then there are terms we share and even spell the same, but are pronounced differently out of varying degrees of necessity.

Take network routers: Australians pronounce them the American way like rawrter, instead of the British rooter. To root someone in Australia is to engage in sexual activities, presumably owing to a root’s vaguely-phallic shape. This is also why Americans should never encourage an Australian by saying they’re rooting for them, unless it’s for a specific risqué encounter.

And its why my boss and I got a kick out of this van. San Francisco, where people get Amazon goods, restaurant food, and other things delivered to their doors.

This evening’s office for us is the common area in my boss’s apartment complex in Mission Bay. It has a coffee machine, couches, lots of natural light, free Wi-Fi, and did I mention couches?

We lived in condos growing up in Singapore, but none had a shared kitchen or dining area.

Remember the ribbon? There was such furore from users and interface designers when it was announced with Office 2007, not least because it replaced text with inscrutable little icons for everything, and took up precious vertical real estate right when the world was going to widescreen displays. But over time we all came to tolerate it with the abject resignation one feels having fought head winds long enough.

To be fair, I don’t use Windows beyond VMs for games and BMC access, so this no longer applies to my little bubble. Office for Mac is inferior in many ways, but MacOS’s enforcing menubars is still a welcome relief in 2018.

But anyway, I didn’t realise someone took the next step after complaining about this UI regression and did something about it. Introducing the Addintools Classic Menu for Office 2007:

Frustrated by endless searches for features on the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon? Download and install this software to bring back the familiar menus and toolbars. The classic view allows you to work with Office 2007 as if it were Office 2003. It not only includes Classic Menu for 2007 Word, Excel 2007 Excel and PowerPoint 2007, but also includes Classic Menu for Access 2007 and Outlook 2007.

I wonder if it works in Office 2016?

This purchase, and subsequent post, have been more than half a decade in the making. At least six years, which is slightly more than half a decade. Hence, my use of the phrase more than in the first sentence. Are you going to mock my spelling of multimeter soon too?

Yes, I’ve finally replaced my highschool-era device with a fancy new LCR meter, the Pro’sKit MT-5211. I wish I could say this was the result of studious, well-documented, and thorough research, but it was the one that Medhi uses in his ElectroBOOM videos, and he’s delightful.

Here he is experimenting with induction cookers:

I lucked out on the price, on several fronts:

• Being based in San Francisco for a month, so I didn’t have to pay the Australia Tax™ for expensive overseas shipping and GST, and whatever else Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wants to charge the rest of us so he can hand out tax cuts to the top.

• Using my boss’s Amazon Prime account for free overnight shipping to the office, rather than paying for local postage.

• Getting an otherwise fully-tested unit, with warranty, in a damaged box for less than a third the original price!

• The seller had typo’d the name as mustimeter, so presumably others hadn’t been able to find it which kept demand and the price low. I only found it by looking for the exact model number.

• Did I mention not paying the Australia Tax?

All in all, a low three digit purchase became a low two digit purchase. Which this meter could pick up, given its resolution! A bit of a precision joke for you there.

Alas, I don’t have my Nagato Yuki figure with me to take a picture with, like I’ve done with all my hardware purchases going back a decade here, so this recent cute promo art from Nagato Yuki-chan will have to suffice. The laptop may also provide a sense of scale, which is another precision pun for you there.

Little did I know that among an inundation of recent emails though, regular contributor William Hales emailed me further details, which looks interesting and worthy of being passed on:

A note on LCR meters: the LCR-T4 project (widely cloned) is a useful first step if you don’t want to throw cash on the “traditional” boxed units. Lookup “LCR tester” on eBay.

Cheap variants: between 10-20 AUD shipped. No case, simple two-line ASCII display. Expensive variants: around 40AUD shipped. Case, buttons, colour TFT display. Otherwise the same internals doing the testing.

There’s a whole long thread about this platform and its relatives on the EEVblog forums. The author’s also on there.

My boss also reminded me of the EEVblog 121GW Multimeter which also looks amazing, but a little outside my price range. It’s a sweet looking unit though.

The VMDK description for this SonicWall appliance mentions:

Jenkins bentley SonicCore-SonicOsV-6.5-Candidate Candidate builds are for testing purposes Candidate.

I wonder if it’s a Candidate?

Footnotes

1. Are distinct from headnotes.

2. I’ve since noted the original line did not include that final Candidate, that was me accidentally pasting. I did the same thing they did. Candidate is a slippery word.

3. The word Candidate has been mentioned ten times in this post, including in this line, and this extra mention of Candidate here.

4. It has dawned on me, or sunsetted in this case, that the footnotes for this post now outweigh the original text of this blog post. What a candidate. Damn it, now footnote #3 is invalid.

My coffee omake page has a new entrant: Cafe Réveille in San Francisco!

Beautiful high ceilings and decor match the great coffee and friendly staff in Mission Bay. If you get there early enough, you can watch them roasting in-store.

I feel I could have phrased the last line better. You don’t want to watch staff roasting, unless you’re a particularly twisted individual. In which case I wish I did give up on your privacy after all, and embedded Google Analytics or similar on pages so I could track you and report your IP to the nearest law enforcement officer.

I tend to prefer black coffee, but this café was also the first place I learned of Oatly, the Scandanavian milk-substitute hipsters have been losing their collective minds about:

OATEY - Since 1916, Oatey has provided reliable, high-quality products for the residential and commercial plumbing industries.

That’s clearly the wrong site. Or still the right one, if your mind is so inclined given we’re talking of comestibles. Let’s try again:

We just love this product. Actually we love all of our products but this one is special because it looks and acts like milk, but it isn’t milk. It’s made fresh on 100% Swedish oats and enriched with extra calcium, fiber for your heart and stomach, a realistic amount of good protein and is naturally low in saturated fat. Here’s the bomb. Wherever and whenever you would find yourself drinking milk or using it in a recipe “back in the day”, you can use Oat Drink today. It’s a one for one swap.

My Aussie side bristles at the stereotypical Bay Area marketing speak, but I can’t fault the product. It tastes amazing; it doesn’t merely replace milk, it improves on it. I may be biased though, given I consider oats to be the world’s most perfect food.

As the legend goes, an Englishman was mocking a Scot for eating oats, for he fed the grain to his horses. The Scot delighted in pointing out the English raise fine horses, and the Scots raise fine people.