Illustration by 機助 on Pixiv. Granted this birthday image would have been more appropriate, but this was just too cute to pass up!
For those who don't watch/read K-On, Tsumugi is the one with the legendary eyebrows.
As I blogged about in February, Borders had clearly seen better days in Australia and are now in the process of closing down. I headed into their Bondi Junction store today to grab some bargains, and to explore a familiar setting one last time.
Of course, I couldn't have timed my expedition any worse! Bondi Junction is served by the Eastern Suburbs and Illawara line, which CityRail decided to perform track work on this weekend. Unlike most of the industrialised (or developing) worlds where train work is done overnight so as not to inconvenience ticket holders and taxpayers, CityRail regularly performs such work in broad daylight. Worse still, they replace eight double deck carriage consists with single buses that seemed to arrive and leave as they pleased. I've been to Canberra, and if they can operate buses to a fixed schedule, then surely an operation as large as CityRail could!
To their credit the Bus Marshals couldn't have been friendlier, and the one who served us at Central bore an uncanny resemblance to TechTV and TWiT luminary Leo Laporte. They could have been separated at birth, and raised in different countries. But I digress.
For those not from Australia, Bondi Junction is one of these upmarket mega shopping centres you would expect to find on Orchard Road or Jalan Ampang. The Borders itself is located at the end of one of the buildings. At its peak it was operating over two floors, though the top floor was empty by the time I got there.
Much of the stuff had already been sold (including a substantial amount of furniture!) but there was still enough there to occupy my time for a while. A couple of friends from my university and I explored the manga and computer book sections without much success, in the former were series we'd never heard of and plenty of Ken Akamatsu which we've all read but would never admit to (whoops), and in the latter there was almost nothing but thick blue Microsoft training tomes remaining! In year 11 and 12 I had to do several assignments in .NET, so I know of those books all too well!
Walking around with most of the shelves empty, burnt out light bulbs on the storefront sign, carpets askew, posters torn and hanging at weird angles, empty powerboards, hazard tape across entire sections, row after row of boxes… it felt eerily dystopian, like the rapture had happened for real this time.
I left with three manga volumes overall, for $18! That's a tad more that I would spend on a single volume in Kinokuniya or any of the small comic book stores in town! One was a copy of The Star Trek Manga which I disgust myself as a Trekkie for not knowing that it even existed! I don't remember the female characters being quite so… shapely, but the caricatures of Spock and Kirk are eerily accurate!
The other two were the first two volumes of Shakugan no Shana; I absolutely loved the anime with its Rie Kugimiya voiced, ultra cute zettai ryouiki heroine, but as is typically the case I was told by many a fan that the manga was better. Flipping through the books while waiting in the queue I could tell the graphics and art are just gorgeous! :)
You may recognise her on my site from the heading image for my OpenInternet post series… a spooky coincidence given Telstra's latest filter move! But I digress.
Now if only I had arrived there sooner, or had the trains been running as they should have been, perhaps I could have snagged some K-On! I mention this because one of the employees I talked to claimed two people between them had emptied out all the stock of basically every manga volume that Kyoto Animation had since got their hands on. You know the ones of which I'm referring ;).
With our recent move back to Australia it was mighty tempting to purchase some genuine Borders bookshelves or some of the signs that graced them, but money is a little tight for us right now (international moves and taxes are fun!), and given I had to get a CityRail replacement bus home with less space to breathe than a sardine tin, I wouldn't have been able to transport them home even if I wanted to! The only sign I was tempted by was a giant white on black ANIME AND MANGA sign, though some of the letters were scratched up. In hindsight it may have been nice to have anyway, just for nostalgia. I'm a sucker for that you see. Oh well.
Granted it was in their branch at Wheelock Place in Singapore, but I spent a large amount of my childhood exploring Borders. I can still remember when they first opened there with much pomp and celebration, and how crazy my little mind thought it was to have a bistro in a coffee shop! Sure Meg Ryans in Brisbane where we'd lived previously had coffee in the shop, but I had a smoked salmon and sour cream pizza with capers and onion, right next to the non fiction books!
Kinokuniya across the street in Ngee Ann City (the red building with Takashimaya) had a wider selection of books, particularly technical manuals, but Borders felt cozier. I bought (and read!) my first O'Reilly programming books in their computer section, and bumped into my first crush there. When high school came around and much of my cohort were experimenting with nighclubs and alcohol, I was spending my Friday and Saturday nights with my good friend Felix Tanjono exploring until they closed at 11pm. When my mum had those brief breaks from her chemotherapy in the 12 years she was having it, we'd make it a date and wander around there together.
I know it's not politically correct or cool to like chain stores, but Starbucks and Borders and Ikea were where I grew up. I'll be sad to see Borders go.
Google recently released Google+, a new social network. Do you think you need another social network? ~ The Daily Post
You mean, another Google social network, or another social network in general? I've had revolutionary Orkut, Knol, Jaiku, Wave and Buzz accounts that went nowhere, so it's hard to muster enthusiasm for yet another of this company's efforts. If it gains some traction I'll look into it further.
One thing's for sure, Facebook sorely needs some competition. I'm uneasy about trusting Google with my personal information (not necessarily their fault), but I trust them far more than Facebook. Then again, I'd trust Diaspora more.
As for the name, it's almost as lame as Apple's Ping, but not as bad as Qrocity!
I can confirm that VMware Fusion 3.1.3 (build 416484) fixes the Additions bug I documented (rather tongue in cheek!) last month. Windows NT 4.0 can have additions without BSODing, which makes me a terribly happy camper :).
Now I wonder how I get sound working…
Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends, from another of Her Majesty's realms ;). I haven't yet had the pleasure of visiting your country, but friends and family members who have claim it's the most beautiful place on Earth. Well, my old man claims it's a tie between Canada and Ireland, but the point stands!
As I heard a guy in a coffee shop today say "those Canadians are just about the friendliest people in the world!" There's a political statement there too :).
Photo is from my Flickr account thingy.
An incident on Twitter this afternoon has given me food for thought. Barbera Streisand.
(Adorable blue troll photo by Jacopo Prisco on Wikimedia Commons).
For those of you who didn't see the saga unfold, a couple of days ago I tweeted a fairly innocuous question on Twitter about how safe it was for freight and passenger trains to be sharing the same lines in Sydney, after a derailment of a freight train caused large delays on the Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra Line, which I blogged about.
I'm used to getting nasty messages online, for some people they just seem to get off on it, and the cloak of anonymity gives them the confidence to do so. None of this is new, and I've stopped taking them personally a long time ago, as I'm sure you have too. So when [redacted] rudely tweeted me about how I hadn't been using my head [link redacted], I quoted his tweet in a blog post and made a joke about how I'd been thinking with my elbow!
Low and behold, a few hours later [redacted] tweeted me with this:
@Rubenerd_Blog – Remove the links to my account now, I do not authorise any of that being on your site. This is your first/final warning.
Now I'm no big city lawyer! Aside from several flirtations with macroeconomics in high school and university, I have no legal training and am unsure as to whether a link to a public resource is owned by that person. I'd hazard a guess and say it's not. Still, I took the high road and granted his request by removing all links to his rude message.
I have some theories. He either:
In any case, [redacted] and other trolls simply need to learn to only troll people if they have the balls to be called out for it, and to realise that any attempt to hide their trolling only results in the Streisand Effect. Mmm, Duck Sauce. As @omegatron pointed out… and I'm sure he's okay with me quoting him!
[redacted] should think about privating his account if he’s going to get precious about what he’s said in a public sphere.
As for me, I've learned simply not to feed them. They're just not good sports.
Big thanks to @djackmanson in Brisbane and @omegatron in Adelaide for their support :).
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
In my latest #CityRail #CityFail post where I questioned the normality of freight and commuter trains in Sydney sharing lines, I received two gloriously salient responses, both of which I will regale you with here.
The person who was rude to me in his public Twitter stream, without provocation, has asked me to remove links to his accounts on the grounds that I "don’t have authorisation"… whatever that means. Because I’m a nicer person than he was, I’ve decided to grant his request, and encourage him to think twice before trolling people in public again lest it once more bight him in the behind.
From [link redacted] on Twitter:
@rubenerd – If you use your head, you’d probably realise there isn’t enough room to put any more train lines…
On his Formspring account (people still use that?), one of his answered questions [link redacted] was "What is one of the best pieces of advice you've ever received?". I can confidently say for me it's to "use my head" when discussing the safety of rail transport systems. Previously I'd tried to think with my elbows, which only amplified the pain I felt when I hit my arm against a closing door! Point taken.
As I've stated on Twitter and several times here though, I call BS on the idea we have insufficient space for more rail lines here. Cities with a magnitude of scale less space than Sydney (and in the case of cities like Munich, with less people) have more commuter rail lines, grade separation, and are actively building entirely new lines. The problem is a lack of serious investment, a car entitlement culture, and chronically poor long term planning, regardless of who's been in charge.
But I digress. Sally, in the post comments section left this feedback:
They try not to run freight trains during peak hours, but they do run them on a lot of the suburban lines, though as you can see this is considered problematic. The big south-west rail upgrade being undertaken at the moment is to duplicate the track between regents park and campbelltown so that they can run suburban trains along that line during the off peak hours again (they stopped them due to high freight usage, diverting passengers to birrong instead).
There are still a lot of places where the lines have to be shared (parts of the run from Epping to Strathfield, for instance), but they are doing what they can afford to put in more overtaking lines and getting freight off the central commuter network.
NOW some of that election stuff from last year makes sense! Thank you Sally :).
Given its diminutive size, Singapore doesn't have freight lines, and each commuter train line is on dedicated track, so the idea of multiple trains on the same lines and freight trains in the mix is new to me.
SINGAPORE (AFP) – New recruits to Singapore’s military, air force and navy are to get a new standard-issue item of equipment besides their rifle — the iPad. [..] The defence ministry said Monday it will be issuing “about 8,000″ of the sleek, touch-screen tablet computers — already wildly popular with the city-state’s tech-savvy youth — to recruits from November.
I originally wrote that I'd prefer governments used Android devices because they were open to different OEMs, but given the latest versions aren't open and are limited too, I guess my point was moot. MeeGo instead? :D
Speaking of good news, I just got my acceptance letter from the UAC for my followup degree at UTS!
After studying briefly at another institution (which we won't bring up in polite conversation!) and repeatedly putting everything on hold for extenuating family circumstances, the staff at UTS have been nothing but supportive. My application was complex, but they put it through, and I'm just so overjoyed!
UTS, my Michael Franks CDs arrived (a post for tomorrow!), I got a coffee from Hakeae, this will be dubbed Happy Day 2011 :)
