Rubenerd

This originally appeared on PenguinCoffee, Clara’s and my old shared weblog.

Sae was the best Amagami girl ^_^

You can throw me in with Marco Arment when it comes to clothes shopping. It’s among the most boring of the necessary activities I find myself having to perform. I have a recurring fantasy where a fashion consultant fills and maintains my wardrobe for me.

(For some reason this doesn’t extend to Uniqlo. Those Japanese designers have made the experience as frictionless and fun as IKEA has for furniture).

Fortunately though, we have the phenomena of clothing sales. Suddently, much of the decision making process is taken care of, because the pool of avaiable choices is reduced. When Sketchers had their recent sale, I pulled out the shoes in my size from the pile of sale items, and when I found some, I ran with them.

It’s always good to have a durable pair of black runners; they’re comfortable and easy to clean. I especially love the blue ones though, I haven’t had a funkier pair like that in a long time. Despite their appearance, they’re also surprisingly comfortable.

So there you have it, Ruben talked about fashion. For the first time in nine years. Stay tuned for 2023 when I discuss slacks.

I don’t live in the US, nor do I watch HBO programming. Well, other than Carnivale, that show was sublime.

Still, I’ve heard every podcaster wax lyrical about HBO’s Go service crashing during the premiere of the latest Game of Thrones. How did such a huge media company botch something so spectacularly? Was HBO CEO’s lack of concern about login credential sharing a wise position? Can HBO even be blamed, given even the mightly Apple couldn’t handle WWDC booking traffic?

Strangely, nobody has stated the obvious. That we’ve already solved the issue of CDN resouce contention. If only I could remember what that decentralised, distributed technology was…

This is a ridiculously verbose post that would benefit from a TL;DR, something along the lines of hearing a commercial when I was a child, and recently rediscovering the ad and song that I’ve been humming that whole time. Consider this intro the TL;DR.

The year was 2005

About a decade ago, I was growing up in Singapore and watching TV. Back in those days, we only had 4:3 aspect ratio CRTs in the house, connected with analogue cable. I can only assume the TV guides for our SCV service (now StarHub) were chiseled on stone tablets, my memory of those years is quite hazy.

Starting one evening and continuing for several weeks, one ad started playing that caught both my mum’s and my attention. I can count the number of ads I’d willingly watch on one hand; this was one of them. Whenever it came on, my mum and I would drop what we were doing and just stare.

I could barely remember much about it now, all that I knew was it was for a consumer electronics company. After panning across an unknown (to me!) cityscape, the camera zoomed into one street which proceeded to be filled with millions upon millions of brightly coloured balls. As they fell and bounced, a hauntingly beautiful melody began playing in the background.

It was utterly mesmerising

Long after that commercial ended, I still had the imagery and music from it in my head. For years and years and years (and years), I’d find myself sitting here typing away, humming along to a song I didn’t know the words to, barely knew the tune to, for a commercial I didn’t know.

You’d think it’d drive me insane. Sometimes, it did. Other times though, I’d hear that song in my head, and it’d bring back such beautiful memories of my childhood, sitting there with my mum while she was still around. Doctors far smarter than me say we’re influenced mostly by sight; I can confidently say sound would be the runner up for me.

Back to the future

Fast forward ten years. My mum had passed on, and my father and I were sitting in a coffee shop back in Hornsby, Sydney. My PalmPilot had given way to an iPhone; our TV to an AppleTV without any cable service at all! School had become university and work.

What should I hear, out of the blue, but that song.

Now I’m as shy as they come, but when that happened I bolted out of my chair, launched SoundHound and aimed it shamelessly at the closest speaker I could find. It couldn’t recognise it, so I tried twice more. I was about to give up, when the name came up. Given it had trouble recognising it, I assumed it was wrong, but I saved it anyway.

The commercial

Plugging the name into YouTube when I got home, I heard that song again, and with it the commercial. It was Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez. The commercial was for Sony’s then–new Bravia LCD TVs. The city was San Francisco, and the balls were those small little bouncy things.

I’ve downloaded the song from iTunes, and the uncut original video from YouTube. I’m unreasonably happy!

Update 2019: The original video was geoblocked, so I’ve replaced it.

Wikipedia is among the more conservatively designed top sites out there, so when they make a change we take notice. Or maybe just people like me. Fonts are fun.

If you haven’t yet seen, Wikimedia recently upped the font size across their sites, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikitravel. Given I’m logged in and use the Monobook skin, I only noticed when my last session timed out. It was quite the shock!

While the change doesn’t do much for those of us with computer-induced myopia who can read 8pt font just fine, the larger size will certainly make the site more accessible for more people. There’s also just something really pleasing about sans-serif fonts at that particular size; maybe it’s just me.

As for the typefaces specifically, it’s a mixed bag. They stuck with a sans-serif font for the body text which, as you can probably tell from reading my site here, I’m a fan of. Regardless of your preferences, non-retina displays simply lack the resolution to adequately draw fine serif font details at low point sizes.

Georgia on my mind

Which gets us to Georgia. Unfortunately, the headings are now all rendered in this cliché vestige of late 2000s design. Just as everyone (ab)uses Helvetica Neue Ultralight in inappropriate situations now (see my above comment on resolution and detail), so too did designers with Georgia before then. It was everywhere, and it wasn’t pretty.

Alas, with this font Wikipedia looks outdated already. It’s regrettable, though I suppose we can take a little comfort from the fact they’re not using it for the smaller body text.

As Siracusa would say, I give this one thumb up, one thumb down, and one thumb is indifferent. That’s a lot of thumbs.

At some point in the most recent branch, my Jekyll setup began falling over itself with timezones in timestamps. I hesitated to call it a general bug, given I use Jekyll in a fairly custom way. In any case, this was a serious issue given I’ve written this blog from a dozen different timezones over its nine year history, including a couple that were more than 12 hours apart.

(To be fair, Jekyll still performs far better than WordPress ever did for timezones, particularly when I was living in Singapore and studying in Adelaide, Australia. My late night SQL adventures with that are for another post).

My solution, at the time, was to bypass the bug by moving the offending timezone to its own front matter “tz” attribute. This necessitated adding extra post.tz Liquid markup everywhere where dates were handled, then writing a custom date mask that didn’t convert the time to UTC, but supressing the automatically added timezone. It was a horrible hack, but it worked:

title: "Clara and Ruben's Singapore-KL-Tokyo-Seoul-HK-Taipei trip"
date: "2014-04-05T11:33:10
tz: "+1100"
hash: [goop]

With the most recent 1.5.1 release, I noticed most of my posts were off by a day. It prevented me writing my post yesterday, on account of not wanting to mess up timestamps for thousands of posts.

Fortunately, this failure was for a wondrous reason; Jekyll now recognises my timezones again! A quick regex to remove text and a newline, regenerate my post hashes, and my dates are now properly parsed:

title: "Clara and Ruben's Singapore-KL-Tokyo-Seoul-HK-Taipei trip"
date: "2014-04-05T11:33:10+1100
hash: [different goop]

I’ll be marking my earlier hack post as hysterical historical. Thank you Jekyll team and contributors, you made this guy’s day :”).

K-On! promotional movie artwork © Kyoto Animation 京都アニメーション

Remember Digg? The site Reddit ripped off, Digg was a social news site where the most “digged” stories bubbled to the top. After a botched v4 release, the site withered away, to be relaunched as Digg Reader last year. It’s actually pretty good.

And then, like PayPal did a few years ago, they launched a new email newsletter.

If you’ve been to Digg in the last year, you probably noticed some changes. Some big changes.

One thing that has not changed, though, is your email address.

Below is a preview of something we call The Daily Digg, a brief overview of our top stories delivered to your inbox. If it’s not your thing, of course please unsubscribe. But if you’re at all interested in finding the best and most current stories on the Internet without the clutter and noise, we think you might enjoy sticking around.

Hope you’re well.

-The Digg Team

Why are services sending us messages we didn’t ask for? Frankly, if you have to assure people they can stop receiving your messages, that should tell you something about them.

(I wrote a follow–up post to this in August)

I've been listening back to older episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast, and episode 41 is now among my favourites. If you're not listening, Casey Liss joins Marco Arment of Build and Analyse fame, and John Siracusa of the former Hypercritical podcast.

Earlier in the aforementioned episode, Casey made the following comment which I think ties back nicely to some of their more recent discussions:

I feel like I'm getting to the point, where everything I post, anywhere, in any capacity, is met with a million silly critiques. And, it gets annoying and it gets frustrating, and a lot of times I want to engage [..] but I'm trying to get better about not engaging.

A million little paper cuts

Casey is one of my new favourite podcasters. His reasoned, diplomatic responses to the crap he gets in his newfound fame are admirable. Plus, as an Australian who grew up in Singapore, I think his accent is adorable. If I become him when I'm his age, I know I'm doing something right.

But I digress. I'm not at the level of celebrity that Casey is, though the same feelings started to hit me in the last few years.

As I approach my eighth year on Twitter, the service has become all but useless to me, mostly because of the oceans of feedback I get no matter what I say. I don't get quite the level of negativity that Casey does, and perhaps that's a function of not being as internet famous, but I do get some, guaranteed. Additionally, if I don't reply to every response in a short amount of time, people construe that to mean I don't care about them, or I'm ignoring them, neither of which is true.

Along with spam, this was the primary reason I turned off blog comments as well. As I lamented last year in that post, if you say anything in a public space, someone will find something to complain about. You could post a solution to world hunger, and someone will tear you to shreds because you use the word "beverage" instead of "drink".

Yeah but why did you do XYZ instead of ABC?

In a related context, such negativity can also extend to areas where you've written something positive or otherwise airtight. In these circumstances, people feel compelled to ask why you would ever want to do something.

When I was all happy with a technical solution to an obscure problem, such feedback would bring me down to earth faster than some of my many trips to the floor. This was the logic behind my why post, which I will refer such people to henceforth, and encourage you to do so if you find yourself in a similar situation. Because, heaven forbid, you learn something that helps yourself or others.

It's enough to drive you away from wanting to blog, or podcast, or write, or paint, or do anything creative. I just want to start playing Critics by Ben Sidran, or Michael Franks' The Critics Are Never Kind.

Ultimately, I realised two things which made dealing with this far easier. One, pedants simply lack the empathetic perspective to relate to how and why people have thoughts. Secondly, there will always be pendants who derive pleasure from poking trivial holes in our ideas, while missing the context and greater point entirely. It's what people do when they have nothing constructive to contribute.

To Casey's credit, he seems to take it far better than I do! If you deal with regular pedantic feedback, I'd love your thoughts. How do you cope with it?

♫ The critics must earn their keep.
By using pedantic words;
Words never heard.
With razor sharp wit;
But who gives a sh… ♫

In my review of 1Writer earlier this week, I said:

Suffice to say, I’ve had it for about a week now, and adore it. [..] About all that I’m missing is Byword’s night theme for those evening train trips.

Well speak of the devil, 1.3.1 was released earlier today with that exact feature. I’m not entirely sure if the Default Extension setting was available previously; if not this a welcome addition as well.

Without a doubt now, 1Writer is my new favourite iOS editor. It’s fast, reliable, simple to use and has just the right mix of features I’ve been looking for on the platform for a long time. I look forward to our future textual collaborations.