Rubenerd

When I’m not in the mood for music, I love having educational videos running in the background when I’m doing less taxing work. They keep me engaged, and I’ve learned tons from osmosis.

Many universities have online courses on YouTube you can subscribe to and watch. MIT OpenCourseWare remains my favourite, but I’ve since found a few more:

• OpenLearn
• Oxford
• Stanford
• Yale

UCLA gets an honourable mention for their back catalogue, but they haven’t added anything for a while. I hope to see some more soon.

Let me know if you have any other ones! I’m especially interested in more global institutions.

I’ve only just started watching JayzTwoCents’s YouTube channel, but he has so much fun and interesting stuff. His videos about everything from choosing graphics cards to using primers correctly for custom computer builds have been invaluable and fun, and I love how he interacts with his staff on the channel.

A month ago he did a Q&A video where someone asked him about hobbies which really helped me a lot:

I have to round robin. I just imagine my hobbies are on a lazy Susan, and it’s kind of what do I have time for right now? Sometimes it’s difficult. Do I want to play guitar, play video games…? I don’t have time for all of it. I really just have to sometimes be honest with myself and say I want to do all these things, but what do I want to do most right now?

The problem is, sometimes guilt sets in a little bit. I’ve spent money on certain things like hobbies and whatnot, and if I’m not utilising them I feel like that’s just a waste.

YES! Sorry, editorial comment.

But I also know that having these different hobbies is kind of what keeps me sane. If you always fall back on the same thing all the time to try and keep your sanity, especially when the world is all kinds of crazy and living upside down right now, that hobby can also start to become frustration. Because if you have a bad day at it, then you’re mad at your hobby!

What the hell!? This is supposed to be my vice, I’m supposed to be relaxing doing this, and it’s just making me mad!

If I get in that particular mode, then I can literally just go to something else.

Last Saturday I wrote about the need to even post on social media defensively, because there will always be people reading your words in bad faith to troll and score Internet points.

Mike Harley of Obsolete29 chimed in:

It’s almost as if we’re trying to include the anticipated rebuttal, right in our original post… a pre-buttal if you will. I do think your approach is about the only sane thing to do. Don’t let bad faith actors occupy space in your head. Act in good faith. Be kind. Communicate your truth.

Plus, who knows what’s going on in people’s lives, you know? Maybe some of them are miserable cunts or they’re off their meds or their cat is missing.

That’s true. I’ve written here before about giving people the benefit of the doubt, but it can still feel frustrating having the most innocuous posts turned into storms of criticism. The best we can do, as Mike says, is tell the truth and move on.

He also linked to this post by Tracy Durnell that quoted What Facebook’s Crumbling Empire Teaches Us, emphasis added:

What happened on Facebook was that chilling effects dominated network effects. Chilling effects meaning just the above: “Hey, maybe I shouldn’t post this today, because I don’t want to deal with the bullies, the vitriol, the anger, the rage, the random creeps attacking me, the hate.” And then that thought happens more and more often. Until it’s the norm. And suddenly, chilling effects have overcome network effects.

That’s it in a nutshell. It’s a learned behaviour, and discriminates against the timid and shy, not those in the wrong.

Assuming you abbreviate your dates without leading zeros, this is the most number of consecutive twos we’ll ever experience in our lifetimes. That’s cool!

Here are some other valuable posts:

• Related: 2022–02–02
• Somewhat related: 2011-01–11
• Not related: Dates

Update: 2022-02–22 22:22 unlocked and preserved for posterity! If only I’d worn the battery down just little bit more.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this quote by French author Daniel Pennac:

Schools everywhere have always confined themselves to making students learn techniques and write essays, while proscribing treading for pleasure. It seems to be established in perpetuity, in every part of the world, that enjoyment has no part to play in the curriculum, and that knowledge can only be the fruit of suffering.

Everyone has that book, play, or even subject that school ruined for them. For me it was Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, and any time the Bard waved a pen in the vicinity of paper, parchment, or whichever. Maybe I need to revisit them when I can enjoy and learn from them on my terms, rather than smash an exam.

There are great teachers, but they’d be the first to admit that the system is still designed to force information, not nurture exploration.

I think this also raises our perverse societal conditioning to see being stressed, overworked, and perma-tired as being virtuous, and the corollary that those who aren’t are lazy or hedonistic.

Update: I’ve decided to take this post down.

It was a ramble about my fears on nationalism and feeling disconnected in the world, but the timing was in poor taste given what’s happening to our friends in Ukraine right now. My attempt to understand Putin’s warped mindset also came across as endorsement of those views.

I apologise for my clumsy words here, and if I trivialised any of your struggles in the world. I can claim it wasn’t my intention, but the outcome was the same.

I especially wanted to thank Dmitry A. in Russia, and Danil Smirnov in Latvia for their good faith rebuttals. I learned something, but it shouldn’t have come at the expense of kind people.

Clara and I send our Japanese wares to the same proxy shipping account, so we can pool our stuff and get it sent in the same box back to Australia. It’s like receiving a present from our past selves every few months. Thanks, past Ruben!

From left to right we have:

• An immaculately-assembled BlueSCSI desktop card by infinity5750, which permits attaching SD cards to an old SCSI interface. It even came with some cool stickers!

• A Go Jazz compilation album from 1991. This was the label Ben Sidran started in the 1980s, but I’ve never been able to track down any of their compilations. It has tunes from Ben, Georgie Fame, and Bob Malach!

• A cute Nakano Miku acrylic stand, my favourite character from the Quintessential Quintuplets. She’s taller than we expected, but flatter than a fig, which for our shelves is a good thing.

• A Cool Sounds from the Go Jazz Vault released much more recently in 2007 for the Tullys coffee chain in Japan. We’ve got Ben Sidran, the Bob Rockwell Quartet, David Hazeltine, and Bill Carrothers.

Clara and I like to think we’re at the Tullys in Arashiyma having coffee right now and listening to these CDs on the sound system. Miku is an audiophile, and I’m sure there’s an old sound system out there with SCSI.

Power is out to most of my suburb today. Chatswood is one of Sydney’s northern commercial hubs, so navigating the busy streets without traffic lights as a pedestrian got the blood pumping.

(Still not as fun as crossing that highway in KL during one of their regular outages back in the mid-2000s. The sounds of that metal crunching behind me still haunt my dreams. Whoa, that went dark)!

It does serve as a reminder of:

• how much we take wires of always-available energy for granted

• how rapidly things have problems when it’s taken away, and

• bullet points!

It’s interesting that it’s only affecting specific buildings on the same street. My hunch is it’s a single power feed (or a phase?).

Update: AusGrid says it’s back, but the traffic lights at our local intersection are still out.

LibreOffice has been crashing every few minutes on my 5500M Intel MacBook Pro since I upgraded to the most recent branch. I haven’t had stability issues for years, so this was a surprise.

I’d noticed the UI of LibreOffice Calc looked a bit different, with thinner cell borders and some strange new dropdown buttons. So I went to check the rendering options.

Under Preferences → LibreOffice → View, I saw a checkbox for Use Skia for all rendering that was checked now. I unticked this and restarted, and it hasn’t crashed again since.

I haven’t had a chance to reproduce on other Macs yet, but passing on in case you’ve noticed the same issue.

These are always fun. I’m replying in public here, because surely this legitimate outfit must read this site to be aware of my business, right?

Dear CEO,

(It’s very urgent, please transfer this email to your CEO. If this email affects you, we are very sorry, please ignore this email. Thanks)

We prefer the term Managing Director in the glorious Commonwealth of Nations, but yes, I am the fabled CEO of Rubenerd Enterprises. But please, call me Your Excellency.

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in China. We received an application from Hai Tong Ltd on December 27, 2021. They want to register " rubenerd " as their Internet Keyword

They want to register my Internet Keyword? Do these people know how much money I have to send to The Big Search Engines to keep my Internet Keyword?

and " rubenerd .cn “、” rubenerd .com.cn " 、" rubenerd .net.cn <"、" rubenerd .org.cn " domain names, they are in China domain names. But after checking it, we find " rubenerd " conflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, so we send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China or not?

You’re right to contact me. This business, which I’m sure is legitimate, is not affiliated with Rubenerd Enterprises. The fact you’ve brought this to my attention is appreciated. You haven’t asked for payment, so I can only assume you’re willing to do this for free, which is even better.

I consider this issue resolved. Thank you!