Rubenerd

It’s the built in excuse every Sydneysider has heard a million times: I was late because of CityRail. Today an alleged “twisted wire” overhead caused delays or total outages across two of the lines, including the ones my girlfriend Clara and I take to commute to town. Over all, a 37 minute express trip turned into a two hour ordeal with packed replacement buses and a skipped connecting train because of overcrowding.

Where to begin!?

The problems with the CityRail system (or “network” as they refer to it as) are too numerous and complex to detail here. From what I’ve seen as an outsider moving back to Sydney, most of these issues stem from the system’s age, the lack of foresight and planning that went into various line extensions, chronic lack of investment, and the bizarre convolution of CBD metro and suburban rail into one tangled, brittle, fragile mess.

Numerous politicians have proposed to fix the system. Our latest transport minister talked a big game as she entered her seat in state parliament, but unsurprisingly has failed to deliver. The problem is all these issues will take planning and foresight that will last longer than an election cycle to implement, and no politician wants future leaders taking credit for their work. Democracy in a nutshell.

What we need is for the City Circle to be severed from the rest of the network (ah they have me calling it that no!), expanded and turned into a true metro system. The suburban trains should be expanded with more lines and stations, and their electrical systems completely re-engineered. The result would be a more reliable, efficient system more people would use.

Of course the chances of those happening are slim to absolutely-friggen-nothing, so I propose a shorter term band-aid solution that’s so simple even our current Premier will understand.

Image by Kishi Nisen on Pixiv!

More communication

Most times when something bad happens, the poor staff at CityRail stations seem to know little more than we do as commuters. Automated announcements regularly contradict themselves. The CityRail website offers terse explanations.

It’s akin to going to a doctor and having he or she tell us that condition isn’t anything to worry about, but that we need a ton of tests and we should prepare a will just in case.

We just want to know what’s going on, and how we can get to where we’re going. You have all those wonderful LCD monitors everywhere, why not use them more effectively during such problems? Whichever system you’re using to inform your staff, it’s not enough. I can’t imagine how much grief they must get when another piece of your failing network falls off, and they’re the public face of the corporation that irate passengers have to deal with.

I’d love for the system to be fixed, but for now I’d just appreciate more information. Be kept in the loop, as it were. That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

When I first got my MacBook Air, naturally the first things I took care of were desktop backgrounds. I mean, these things won’t resolve themselves. Which is to say, they will, but I wanted something more fitting for a machine that would be used for coding, writing posts such as these, and watching anime.

I opted for this image of Nagato Yuki with Hatsune Miku for the main desktop, and on a whim an image of Yuki in her trademark blue mizugi as my Terminal.

Unbeknownst to me, my lovely girlfriend Clara tirelessly tracked down a mini-fig of Yuki wearing that exact outfit, and gave it to me as a present yesterday! In an ocean of packing boxes, tape, paper and other nonsense from our move still littering our house, her attire seemed oddly fitting XD.

Photo is by KawaiiKiri on Flickr, who lives up to her handle ^_^.

@risuchiin on The Twitters:

I must’ve spent 3 hours already just reading @Rubenerd’s blog. It’s incredibly interesting.

It’s readers like you that make blogging worthwhile, thank you ^_^

Now that I think of it, it’s all you readers. I blog partly so I don’t forget stuff, but also in the small hope that what I write may be fun dash useful dash interesting dash mildly amusing to someone else in the future. There were more reasons, but I forgot.

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

Photo by HunterX on MyFigureCollection, with creative use of the Mawaru Penguindrum Princess of the Crystal Figma combined with various Vocaloid Hatsune Miku figma.

See the original upload here

Remember the orgasmic furore we had to endure when Apple didn’t include NFC in the iPhone 5? The Gruber links to this Verge article:

When we asked why Samsung did not include NFC tap-to-pay features in Wallet, the company said that retailers prefer barcodes over NFC because they don’t have to install any new infrastructure to support it.

Good thing I’m not one of those people who says “told you so”. Filing under It’s Not Apple, So It’s Okay™

Links I saved onto Instapaper this month:

• The vast differences between the NBN and the Coalition’s alternative
  Australian Broadcasting Corporation

• Congressman demands answers from Google about Play Store and Wallet privacy concerns
  The Verge

• Japan PM Abe heads for Obama talks
  BBC World

• Oracle updates NetBeans for HTML5
  Infoworld

• Bankruptcy filing may be bad option for Detroit
  Reuters

• Treacherous Waters - By Ross A. Klein
  Foreign Policy

• International law allows cruise workers to be paid $2 an hour – and they may go nearly a year without a day off
  Salon.com

• Australia Proves Republicans Wrong With a Growing Economy and a High Minimum Wage
  PoliticusUSA

• The Internet’s Weakest Links
  BBC Future

• Stupid, Stupid xBox!!
  iLike.code )

• 1,000 paper cranes + message of #goodbyenukes delivered to President Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica.
  IPPNW

• Xbox co-founder: The last five years have been painful to watch
  The Guardian

• What is ADN File Manager?
  App.net )

• The NRA vs. America
  Rolling Stone Mobile

• Patrick Radden Keefe: A Mass Shooter’s Tragic Past
  New Yorker

• Believe the Hype about the ‘World’s Most Expensive City’
  The Atlantic Cities

• How Capital Cities Distort Reality
  The Atlantic Cities

• Friedman: India vs China vs Egypt
  New York Times

• John Lindsay, Ed Koch and the end of liberalism
  Salon.com

• Disgruntled employee spends three years destroying work computers with Cillit Bang
  The Telegraph

• Why we stopped using Drupal for our platform
  Varunarora

• The ALP needs to make it impossible for voters not to notice that “Tony Abbott is trying to pull a fast one”
  Anonymous Lefty

• Meet the NRA’s Top 10 Enemies
  AlterNet

• Austerity doesn’t work: Cuts in government spending are strangling the recovery
  Salon.com

• China’s Smaller Cities Are Home to Growing Middle Class - Michael J. Silverstein
  Harvard Business Review

• Dana Milbank: Tea party is losing a few of its revelers
  The Washington Post

I was all excited to see this new art of my beloved Senjougahara Hitagi, still the best character from the *monogratari franchise. If you believe otherwise, You Are Wrong.™ Well, Nadeko Sengoku is cute too.

Unfortunately, I was wrong, for a very different reason. This is someone (who?) from Grisaia no Kajitsu, a visual novel about an academy for socially awkward people. At least, as far as I can tell. It runs on the SOMY PSP, some obscure portable gaming device thing that doesn’t run iOS or Android.

It’s understandable why they’d want to take visual cues from one of the greatest modern anime characters ever, but still.

Don’t look now, but WordPress has assigned the ID for this post as #11011. That’s a binary number we’d express as 27 in base “10”, which ironically could also be expressed as a binary, but base “2” couldn’t be. When I finally make the move to Octopress, that’ll render everything as base 8, right?

I haven’t done a pointless milestone in a long time, it felt good!

A while ago I signed up to Pinterest, given a substantial amount of my uploaded media has been appearing there. Then I promptly forgot about them.

An email they sent me this morning:

Here at Pinterest… Get ready to change your life! We teamed up with The Biggest Loser to share tips from each episode. From Dolvett’s fitness guides to healthy recipes, The Biggest Loser (Mon 8/7c) on Pinterest has what you need to turn motivation into reality.

Something tells me I haven’t been missing much.

Just so I understand what’s going on: Gizmodo Australia writes an article asking how stupid people are willing to look for Apple, and uses a photo of me wearing an iPod nano watch to illustrate it. I leave a comment, and it gets deleted.

You can read the original in full on my post from earlier this week. In short, I calmly defended the reasons why I use an iPod nano watch, criticised their inflammatory headlines, and made a subtle dig at their US counterparts. Certainly nothing as rude, trollish or condescending as what Sam Biddle wrote in the original article, though apparently enough to warrant deletion.

I’m not looking for an apology, Gizmodo Australia have every right to delete my comment. It could have even been a technical or editorial mistake, or perhaps I was downvoted by the same users who have left far more inflammatory and rude comments than what I did.

Either way, stay classy Gizmodo Australia. I usually have a sense of humour about things like this, but this just wasn’t cool.