Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Keeping an eye on you!

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Batman. Photo by Ferhat 72.

Two years ago, I was enjoying Michael Bublé's newly released holiday album. His distinctive voice, bubbly energy and big band sound rendered a happy, nostalgic, yet thorougly modern take on a lot of our old favourites. In a sea of holiday music, its this mix of old and new that really makes this album so wonderful to listen to.

Fast forward to 2013. It didn't matter whether you were at a dollar store or expensive supermarket, department store or market stand, large coffee chain or family run café, this year the album was playing everywhere. If the Australian public had a chord, it was struck by Michael Bublé this year unlike any one specific holiday album I've heard since Kenny G's in Singapore in 1999.

I'm not religious, and you'll certainly get a lot of snark from Christian and secular people alike if you admit to liking holiday music. For me though, nothing evokes those warm, fuzzy feelings of the season than hearing music like this. If we're not supposed to like it, Michael Bublé’s album is among my guiltiest of pleasures. Grinches gonna grinch.

For the first time, my dad wasn't here to celebrate the holidays with us. Depending on your spiritual persuasion, my mum is debating the finer points of art with Gauguin and Dali. As such, we had half the family here than we did in holidays past.

Turns out, this is increasingly normal. Elke invited over friends of hers in similar situations, and we ended up filling up the whole lounge room. Clara and I largely sat out in the dining room, but the sound of laugher and happy talking in our home again had such a profound effect. Excuse my use of the term.

Yesterday, Clara and I spent some time with our good friend Seb in his home in Marrickville. He cooked us up a storm I won't forget for a long time. I've only been exposed to South American cuisines since moving back here to Sydney, but its an amazing world out there.

Walking through the rain today, Clara and I found the one coffee place in Hornsby that was open today, the lovely Vietnamese restaurant near the station overpass. Australia is in summer this time of the year, but the grey sky and heavy rain were almost as fun to watch from inside the cozy restaurant by ourselves.

As spoiled Western kids (let's be honest), we were always excited for presents during Christmas. I can still remember the excitement at getting a Daffy Duck soft toy, or my first iMac. This year, Clara, Elke and Seb bought me some really wonderful, thoughtful gifts ranging from a replacement Kindle (wow, Clara!), a Thunderbolt docking station and a veritable tower of new manga to read!

Let's pause here for an animated stock art image of a Christmas tree from 2004. So glitter, wow!

At the risk of writing a hipster "I'm above the consumerism of the holidays blah blah" comment, while these gifts were all so thoughtful and kind, what I will cherish the most from these last couple of days are the presence of some wonderful people in my life. Thank you to all of you.

Happy holidays ^_^.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Speaking of roadways and country side~ photo of the Appalachian Throughway in the US by Nicholas A. Tonelli.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

There’s something about abandoned stuff that really fascinates me. Could stare at images like this for ages.

Abandoned Philadelphia Turnpike, by Jgera5.

The first dot release update for OS X 10.9 Mavericks is now available for everyone, meaning I now consider the OS safe for production use in my book. If my iBook G3 could run Mavericks, that is.

As an alternative to the App Store, Apple provides redistributables (is that a word?) for the update:

• OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 Update
• OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 Update for Mac Pro
• OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 Update for MacBook Pro with Retina Display (Late 2013)

I still think its a good idea to download updates like this manually, particularly if you have multiple machines in the same house and are burdened with Australian ADSL instead of your Singaporean internet connection from back home. I call it technical homesickness, or tomesickness for short. It can also help bring a new machine up to speed quickly if you have to reinstall the base OS at some point.

I've said for years that @JerryNovak is the de facto patron of the Rubenerd Universe. Of all the people who've bought me coffee, donated further amounts and—above all—offered kind words during times of need, there's no doubt ♔ Sir Novak has been the most generous.

Yesterday, ♔ Sir Novak tweeted this to me:

Just sent @Rubenerd a Christmas gift from his Amazon wish list. It didn't give me gift options, though.

I'm humbled beyond belief, and more than a little curious about what said gift is! No doubt when it arrives, I'll be posting all about it here.

Given his generosity and kindness over the years, I've decided to bestow him with the title of Rubenerd Patron ♔ Sir Novak, effective immediately. Yes, that includes the unicode crown, thank you very much!

If I offered peerages for the Rubenerd Universe, he'd be ♔ Earl Novak of Rubénerd America or something to that effect. Between this and figuring out how best to showcase our official patron on the site, I'll have a lot to think about over the coming days. Thank you again ♔ Sir Novak :).

Photo of Schloss Neuschwanstein by Sofetis on Wikimedia Commons.

Time flies when mosquitos sting Herb Alpert. You have no idea how tempted I was to leave it at that. Well, if you've been a reader here for a long time, you'd probably have an inkling. I always picture an adorable octopus when I read that word, birds notwithstanding.

Some nerdy history for those who care

This time nine years ago, I was in high school in Singapore and eager to start blogging. Armed with a simple shared hosting account and XHTML 1.0 Strict, I inaugurated (gesundheit) my weblog here. A few posts later, I decided it should be a podcast. Then it became a podcast and a weblog concurrently (and at the same time). Then back to a weblog.

It's been powered by plain HTML, a Perl CGI script I wrote, WordPress, brief stints with MovableType, Ruby on Rails, MediaWiki and Squarespace, back to the bovine-sounding WordPress μ and now finally its Jekyll form. I wanted to try Radio but couldn't justify the extra cost; a smart decision in hindsight.

For each transition I had a different theme, each as ugly as the last. But they were all mine, damn it!

MySQL4 and Suzumiya Haruhi

All these transitions were fun experiments. Unbeknownst to me at the time however, I silently lost posts during one of the moves, an error I only discovered years later. I also wanted to re-import my spun-off anime blog, but it was wiped during a university family leave of absence. Heartbreak!

With the big 10 now less than a year away, I'm determined to recover as much of this old material as I can. There are archives strewn across the net. I have some broken SQL backups. Ironically, the post series that went entirely was my introduction to learning MySQL4 from back in the day. My anime site had my first reviews of Haruhi, Clannad, Code Geass and a few other random series. Buried somewhere in my mass of high school and early uni backups, I must have this stuff. We'll see what I can find.

But back to the future

What a surprise, we reach a milestone here together, and I take the opportunity to get technical and nostalgic. I call it technostalgia. Or nostechnical. That one sounds like something you'd use to relieve nasal congestion.

I just want to wish my weblog a happy birthday, and thank all of you for taking time out of your busy day to read and listen to my ramblings over these nine years. You've been a bigger source of strength than you all could ever realise. As I've been signing here since (nearly) the beginning:

Peace, health, love and happiness,
~ Ruben