Rubenerd

Stilgherrian podcasted and rode the Caltrain for us back in Australia in 2014, so we didn’t have to. Exactly four years and one day later, Clara and I were wandering around the Caltrain station in San Francisco, and made many overlapping observations.

Silicon Valley runs on diesel

When I first arrived here, my boss laughed that for its ultra modern global reputation, Silicon Valley runs on diesel. And aside from the so-called Baby Bullets, the locomotives are the boxy shaped ones more commonly seen pulling freight trains.

Efforts to electrify the system have taken even longer than the long-suffering Gawler line in Adelaide I used to take when I studied at UniSA; Stil knows what I’m taking about! So in the meantime, you can peek across the fence and see several of these lococs docked to the huge, double-decked carriages.

It looks like Mars in the right light

Which leads us to the colour. We’ve had spectacular weather since we started working here, but this morning we awoke to the sight of a surreal, orange-tinted sky and fog. It felt like Mars wandering outside the railyard.

This lead @vmisev to render a delightful modification to this image. As Mayor Quimby once commented, that’s a quality side!

You can get it on Train Simulator

A friend of mine commented that Train Simulator was the most “gifted” game when he worked at EB Games, presumaly because people were too embarrased to admit they play it. I used to count myself among them, now I don’t give an accute flying toss!

If grown men can watch other grown men tackle each other in tiny satin shorts and call it manly rugged rugby or AGL or whatever, I can operate a virtual train and make grunting noises as I attempt to navigate it up steep terrain and other hazards.

I’m not sure how tosses fly, but there you have it.

I just checked, the game has a San Francisco to San Jose route, though it has mixed reviews. I may still need to get it; if only so I can play it with that same orange sky when I’m back in Sydney in a few weeks, like a gentleman.

And there ends my meandering post about Caltrain. No podcasting from me about it, because again, Stilgherrian did already from that endless plain of lowrise office campuses and desolate freeways.

We have a few different ways to check for outdated ports on FreeBSD. Homebrew on macOS has a useful outdated command:

$ brew outdated  
  
==> ansible (2.5.4) < 2.6.0
==> ffmpeg (4.0) < 4.0.1
==> gdbm (1.14.1_1, 1.15) < 1.16
==> git (2.17.0) < 2.18.0
==> harfbuzz (1.8.1) < 1.8.1_1
==> hugo (0.40.3, 0.42.1) < 0.42.2
==> icu4c (61.1) < 62.1
==> imagemagick (7.0.7-35) < 7.0.8-3
==> libunistring (0.9.9) < 0.9.10
==> libyaml (0.1.7) < 0.2.1
==> p11-kit (0.23.10) < 0.23.12
==> python (3.6.5) < 3.7.0

That’s a few outdated ports, including the world’s greatest automation tool, and the world’s greatest static site generator. This cannot stand! Presumably because they don’t have legs.

$ brew upgrade --verbose

This will upgrade everything, unless you’ve used pin. This is consistent with FreeBSD’s pkgng.

This was originally uploaded while tethered, and didn’t go through. Let’s try this again!

I don’t drink much; but when I do, I try to make it special. I feel like this was a meme at some point, though with the logical premise replaced with something comical. Hey look at me, explaining jokes! I don’t joke much, but when I do, I ruin them. Wait, that’s no good.

Of the spirited beverages, Nikka and Glenfiddich have become my recent favourites. So it concerns me when people try flogging off their stuff as the real thing, as Greg Miskelly and Riley Stuart — both of whom sound like scotch whiskeys themselves — reported:

D’Aquino Bros Pty Ltd, and seven related parties, including Mr Liquor, a Sydney retail store, have been accused of selling alcohol wrongly labelled as scotch — in breach of Australian and international trademark laws.

Aside from flagrently lying about originating from Scotland when it was made by Joe Bloggs in Australia, they add insult to injury by then calling their product scotch.

But what makes this story fascinating is scientists were able to prove it:

The label of D’Aquino’s The Black Scot whisky claims it is a “Product of Scotland”. But the ABC has seen test results from an international laboratory that show The Black Scot lacks the unique chemical compounds that identify a true scotch.

I’m assuming you wouldn’t be able to cut your fake scotch with the real thing so as to thwart such detectors, because they’d go by concentration. Or I wonder if you could?

And while I’m wondering, has anyone counterfitted this scotch? I assume yes, it’d be perfect for patching up kitchen surfaces.

I was looking for LCR meter reviews, like a gentleman, and stumbled upon this Yahoo! Answers question:

What is the main difference between a multimeter and a LCR meter?

What do you reckon the answers were? Take a seat, these are great:

A multi meter [sic] checks for volts, amps and ohms. Don’t know what a LCR meter is.

If you don’t know what it is, why did you answer!? What runs through the minds of these people? Are they doing it for the answer count, assuming there is one?

But this answer, this one, takes the cake. If you’re taken the aforementioned seat based on my previous advice, strap in:

Go look it up

If you needed a four word summary for answer sites, there you have it.

I love the San Francisco Muni logo. I’m surprised it hasn’t been reimagined by a shortsighted design agency, like CityRail and others have done. It graces the Muni Metro pictured above, signage, trolleys, and buses.

I was trying to remember what it reminded of me of, and I think I got it: Sun Microsystems. Like Muni, it used flowing rounded lines to spell out something, in this case Sun regardless of orientation. So cool.

That’s what most modern logos are missing. Their mission and brand statements make sweeping claims about being true to the company while ushering in a new world of blah blah blah, but they usually ring hollow.

History will look at the 2000s and 2010s as odd graphical anomolies where technology became sufficiently powerful to have complex shapes and gradients, but without the self-restraint or foresight to use them tastefully.

In 2015 I realised there was a direct correlation between the time of night, and the prevalence of these error messages in Vim:

"E492: Not an editor command: Wq"

This also extends to its FreeBSD cousin nvi:

The WQ command is unknown.

Maybe I should just map all these mistypings to wq and be done with it. But then I feel like this key combination has won. So I’m going to continue mistyping it, in some vain attempt to maintain salvage my pride.

This is fresh from the Microsoft Volume Licence Service Centre, or VLSC for those in the know and likely supporting several habits now:

Special Instructions
Both Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Pro for Workstations product keys will activate Windows 10 Professional media, although only versions 1709 and newer can be used to activate Windows 10 Pro for Workstations edition.

I forget how good we have it on FreeBSD and macOS.

Update

Like an unappetising bowl of congealed soup, the plot thickens. I saw this banner in an email, and it wasn’t even Retina:

So wait, is it Windows 10 Professional, or Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, or Windows 10 Pro now? Or for completeness, what about Windows 10 Professional for Workstations?

I wish they’d call it Windows 10 Workstation and leave it at that; it has a far nicer ring to it. Which would be useful for all the phoning home it does. It’s also delightfully nostalgic.

It’s not even close to being Friday now! But have this draft anyway.

Dear Business Builder,

I’m getting in contact with you from an Australian based Digital marketing company that specialises in helping local businesses to get more leads and sales from their website. I found your contact details by doing a Google search and found you’re not ranking in Google’s 1st page for the search terms that you need to be ranking for! I’d be happy to send you a “Pay on Performance” proposal using the top search phrases for your area and expertise. Please email back for full Proposal.

They always follow a pattern by:

• spelling first 1st;
• quantifying phrases like “Pay on Performance” with quotes;
• fluffing with ambiguous words like your area of expertise;
• making a big deal of being Australian based, suuuure; and
• sprinkling with random Capitalised words; are spammers German?

The good news is we can spam filter based on these.

I figure while I’m here, and literally a few blocks down from where a huge baseball game is about to erupt, the analogy is apt. I didn’t know what a San Francisco Giant was, but now I’ve seen so many posters and jumpers and caps.

The photo above shows the building traffic along 4rd Street in Mission Bay to get to the ballpark. Fortunately the Muni has right of way here!

But anyway, to what this post is supposed to be about. Good thing I don’t normally get distracted. I noted today the Hugo frontmatter generator I wrote was inserting the timezone for Sydney (+10 UTC) into posts, instead of San Francisco (-7 UTC). Whoops!

This wasn’t an issue when Clara and I were in Japan or Hong Kong, because they’re close enough to Australia not to matter. But here, we only share half a day, meaning potentially as many posts have the wrong day.

This has now been corrected. Se a vida é.

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47:35 – Screenbeard, aka Josh Nunn, the lead writer and webhoster at The Geekorium, generously sent me his Commodore 128 in response to show 359! This episode is dedicated to him, and includes snippets of Clara and I wandering to an Australia Post parcel locker, and the official unboxing ceremony. We also talk about bubble tea. Recorded May 2018.

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

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

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