Rubenerd

The fatherland is at the polls now, and indications are either a hung parliament, or at least a huge swing against the Tories. The Guardian has the best interactive constituency map, not least for the cute SVG caricatures.

Interestingly, the Guardian puts the SNP on the Labour side of the two party split. Forming a coalition with a party who’s stated goal is independence from you would be weird. What if they got their way? Wouldn’t you lose your coalition partner’s seats, and your majority?

You could probably guess which side I tend to fall on, but in this election I hope it goes to the parties that will preserve and rebuild the NHS. I still consider that system one of the greatest accomplishments of modern times.

Worried you’re priced out of the Sydney housing market? Domain has the goods:

Are you wondering where you can buy your first home at an affordable price? There are still a number of Greater Sydney suburbs that have a median house price below $650,000.

Domain’s First Home Buyers Report uncovers the suburbs across Australia with the most affordable average median prices and unpacks government grants available in each state, to help you make your move.

Sounds great, do tell.

Gosford, about a 75 kilometre drive from Sydney’s centre, on the Central Coast and the cusp of the Greater Sydney, is the cheapest area for first time buyers.

The most affordable spot for Sydneysiders looking to buy their first home is so far from the city it barely counts as Sydney at all.

Hey, at least the report is honest.

The title of this post sounds like a Crash Test Dummies song.

I was sitting at a coffee shop this morning, trying to hold off rushing to the office across the street in the pouring rain. It’s become something of a morning ritual that I read emails, catch up on news, and what happened in the US office before facing the day.

I’ve been blogging and working in coffee shops since high school. I can’t explain why I’m far more productive in these places than in offices or at home; caffeine, the atmosphere, the feeling that I’m around people without the obligation to actually speak to anyone.

But this morning, a couple in their mid 70s were sitting at the table a few rows down from me. They weren’t shouting, but their voices carried about the din. How are the kids? Why are people so lazy? What’s with dumb folk on their laptops in public?

I often think how the world has changed in the last decade. My use of a laptop and smartphone in high school in 2004 was unusual, now its par for the course.

But that couple would have seen a far greater transformation. People using coffee shops to catch up on newspapers. Maybe reading books. Perhaps their conceit wasn’t entirely misplaced; I could be improving myself rather than blogging or catching up on email.

What will people be doing in coffee shops in 50 years? And will I think they’re dumb?

I wanted to give a shoutout and personal thanks to the Official Rubenerd Patron Sir Jerry Novak again for another caffeine-related donation. I’m drinking it as we speak!

I may be working from San Francisco for a couple of months later this year, I’m thinking a quick trip down to LA for a meetup may be in order :).

David Frum articulated this so well on the latest Waking Up with Sam Harris, I had to quote him:

In the world before World War II, countries behaved like selfish entities. They regarded the world as a competitive enterprise. The US, other great powers, small powers too. It was a Hobbesian world of all against all.

After World War II, our parents and grandparents decided “we’re not doing that any more”. What we’re going to do – and this can’t apply to the whole planet because there are a lot of authoritarian regimes and backward societies – but among the advanced democracies, we’re going to build new kinds of structures.

International politics starts to look like domestic politics. [..] There are a set of rules that are agreed upon by the two sides, they’re arbitrated by a neutral adjudicator, it’s binding, and you can enforce it inside [domestic] court systems, from within this zone of peace and cooperation. NATO countries, plus Japan, plus Australia, New Zealand, and a few others. International and domestic politics blur to an extent.

I regard that as one of the most e political accomplishments of the human race.

Trump’s people went to Europe and said, as far as we’re concerned, that’s over. [..] We call you our friends, but we think our relationship is regulated entirely by interest, not values.

I’ve been avoiding discussing the new American president here, but this in a nutshell is what concerns me as an outsider. Speaking from Australia and Singapore, I feel as though we’re losing a friend, with all the ramifications that entails.

Two weeks ago I updated my git post update hook, and today I realised I broke it. As such, there are a few posts that have all come through the pipe at once, including:

• Goodbye, del.icio.us
• But I’d treat her better!
• Here’s an email for a received message
• Ubuntu switching to Wayland

Apologies for the amateur RSS spam. If I’d done this properly, there’d be at least 20 new items hitting you at once. And it’d be rendered in JSON, or something.

I also since noticed the title of this post says “July”, when we’re only in June. I was on a roll.

I remember sitting in a Burger King in Singapore listening to an early episode of The Gilmor Gang. They’d been talking about this new trend called podcasting, and how businesses were already considering how they could use them. The conversation steered toward social networking, and how sites like del.icio.us were shaking things up.

That was in 2004. Thirteen years later, and I’m impressed the social bookmarking was even able to stick around, albeit it seems by accident.

I wrote about the service’s troubled past in September last year, in the context of moving to Pinboard:

Unfortunately, in what has become the new normal for beloved online services, it has been passed around like a that [sic] licorice jelly bean nobody wants, and regurgitated every time. It was sold to Yahoo!, then (famously) listed as sunsetted, then sold to AVOS, then sold to Science, Inc, then sold to a new company owned by Science and Domainersuite.

Now del.icio.us has been bought by Pinboard, the service so many of us fled to once del.icio.us was left to whither. If it was left to Bill Withers, the announcement would have been this:

And I know it’s gonna be…
A lovely daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
A lovely daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

Mmm, that’s good satire. But instead, Pinboard’s developer maciej announced buying the site, and that it will become read only on the 15th of June. It’s probably the best outcome we could have hoped for.

I’m going to bookmark this post on del.icio.us, and it’ll be the last one. Goodbye, high school friend, again.

I heard this song again today, and I feel compelled to reach out and comment. You may have heard it, the chorus says:

I know I could treat you better
Than he can

The logical disconnect frustrates me. But it’s also embarrassing, because it’s exactly how I felt and thought for years. The abusive, aloof guys are rewarded with attention, dates, Oxford commas, and other social currency, and quiet guys are ignored or mocked. Many mean-spirited incidents only reinforced this feeling.

But it’s a red herring.

I’ve had bad bosses and clients, but high school trumps them all. That mix of hormones, preening and desperation in close quarters cause fireworks. It’s impossible not to take it personally when you’re living through it, but its not the be all end all. Girls have psychological warfare down pat, but both genders are dicks.

Emotions also aren’t logical. The “bad boys” have confidence which helps, but how you think you’d treat someone doesn’t enter into the crush calculus, beyond scaring people away with perceived overbearing concern.

And speaking of being ignored, it’s a two-way street. Somehow I thought if I sat in the library or computer labs at lunch with my clique, or alone, girls would just come to me. With hindsight and emails years later, I realised the shy girls were just as nervous to approach me as I was to them. Doi!

Despite terrible shows like the Big Bang Theory and tech startup culture, it’s still largely socially acceptable to humiliate nerds. But as my fabulous late mum said, don’t give them the satisfaction of getting to you.

I can’t stand sites with their own inboxes. When we go to Flickr or eBay for example, we see those circled red numbers indicating the messages we’ve probably already read in email. It’s one more thing we all need to check and clear.

And then there are sites like Twitter and LinkedIn that do this:

It would have taken fewer words (and much less rich-HTML) to just send us the 140 characters that were sent. Same with LinkedIn; I’ll be emailed that I have a new message. Just send it to me, for Pete’s sake!

Pete’s Sake sounds like a brand of weeb Japanese alcohol.

If I were coerced into playing Devil’s advocate, these sites are directing us to HTTPS sites with logins to protect our privacy given email without GPG or S/MINE is sent in plaintext. But then why not let us opt-in to email forwards?

We all know why: grabbing and holding attention is the new economy. The fact it’s user hostile is irrelevant.