While these two images may look identical at first, the one above is of Isana from Yumekui Merry, and the one below is of the Singapore Istana. The difference? The President has more tea.
Sometimes I worry I'm too funny. Fortunately, such feelings subside quickly.
Every year or so I like to remind people that if they're still subscribed to my old web feed to please update their blog aggregator:
rubenerdshow.com/blog/feed/ → rubenerd.com/feed/.
In April 2009 I moved domains, and two years and one month later Google Reader is still reporting 45 people are subscribed to the old feed. I appreciate your readership more than perhaps life itself, but if you could do me a favour and resubscribe with the new address, then unsubscribe from the previous one, I'd really appreciate it! Why doesn't Google do this for us automatically?
I'll still keep it registered, but one of these days I'd love to retire that old domain with all its redirects, and stop paying my webhost to park it for me.
Do you get this unhelpful error sometimes when using Image Capture.app? The only solution I've found is to choose a different destination directory for the imported files, then try again.
Even if your chosen destination folder is on a recognised, writable drive with enough space, this error still crops up sometimes. Another bug that's lingered around since 10.4 Tiger, so Apple's developers either aren't in the mood to fix it, or don't consider it a priority.
Links shared from del.icio.us today:
Pallette [sic] is an adorable (and apt) name! Yumekui Merry #11: Pallette of Dreams
With exams and studying and assignments and all that other associated university fun I haven’t had the time to watch as much stuff as I should, partly because I know that if I did watch something I’d be blogging about it afterwards! First world problems, or developed world problems depending on your economic leanings.
Essentially this episode further built up the previous episode’s cliffhanger, with surprisingly few extra details. Decisions were reached regarding action with Isana, though said plans are more difficult to carry out once they meet Pallette and Merry has second thoughts about destroying dreams. Gosh darn its hard to write summaries of later episodes without spoilers!
Ironically exams played a part in the plot of this episode as well, in what I call the Anime Manga Convenience Factor. How many daemon overlords do you know that would halt an epic battle because things were interesting and/or to give the enemy combatants time… to do their exams? This was the same issue I had with most magical girl anime that I admit to watching far too much of back in the day; all the world’s evil seemed to concentrate just on Nippon, conveniently within fighting range of the protagonists!
Perhaps Mystletainn isn’t soft, she’s just intentionally drawing out the dread and fear as much as she can, akin to psychological torture. Dentists do this when they postpone appointments for braces fitting. Ruben scared. Anyway, if this is the case, touché.
Chizuro has also hinted which side she’s on, but her reluctance to part with pertinent information means we can’t trust her entirely yet either. I suppose being a shell of a person (her words) doesn’t lend itself easily to holding things like feelings, though perhaps its slowly changing.
Oh yeah, and don’t steal Merry’s hat. Just… don’t. You’re playing with fire!
In terms of animation quality, the scenery is still absolutely stunning; not being shackled to "reality" by being in a daydream world certainly gives the artists a great amount of freedom to come up with with some amazing designs, and the colours they employ are just wonderful. That said, the animators seemed to slack off a bit again, at times the characters themselves looked like they were drawn in a vector animation program from the 1980s. Nothing necessarily wrong with that (in and of itself), but it kinda lets the rest of the production down.
If I ever get any more anime figures or plushies, I want it to be a Pallette one. I’m just saying :).
This latest Pointless Rubenerd Milestone post is so useless (and derivative) it should not be read by anyone. If you’re just seeing this summary, leave it and move on. If you’re subscribed in an aggregator and you can see the whole post, disregard it.
Now that’s out of the way we can get down to bidness. Despite missing it by a few posts (this is actually post number 3669!) this post is a celebration of reaching the completely pointless mystical post number 3666, which not only contains the super evil number 666, but the first digit even represents how many sixes proceed it! It’s akin to a recursive acronym, but with integers in lieu of Latin alphabetic letters.
You know what isn’t a recursive acronym, AFAIK? Saskatchewan.
This is only the fifth time such a milestone has been reached on Rubenerd.com; I blogged about this pointlessness (is that a word?) with my:
And as I said on all of them, Elfen Lied scared the heck out of me.
Surprisingly, blogging about this pointlessness also serves to show some historicalness (is that a word?), like an even cruder Wayback Machine. With each celebration of this pointlessness (is that a word?) I take a screenshot as proof of what we’re up to here, and coincidently my theme has always changed in the intervening posts.
In another coincidence, Mac OS X Snow Leopard reports file sizes in KB not KiB, and the screenshot for today’s entry is 66KB (61KiB). If that isn’t a syncronicity of some sort, then… it isn’t.
I'm thinking of starting a Patrons of Rubenerd page, and putting Jerry on the top!
Over the last week or so I haven't been blogging as much as usual owing (hey, that's a pun) to assignments and upcoming exams. Sure I've maintained my Post A Day 2011 challenge with a series of shorter entries, but hardly anything that warrents a second glance!
This dip in quality however didn’t stop Jerry Novak from using the second donate button on my Buy a Coffee page and donating the highest sum I’ve ever received!
Jerry and I met through a mutual friend Frank Edward Nora from The Overnightscape podcast and now The Frank Nora Show. Back when I used to record the Rubenerd Show podcast he was one of my biggest supporters and most loyal listeners. For a couple of days before my family left Singapore he even made a stop over on a world trip to say hello!
Anyway, I just wanted to thank Jerry personally for his hugely generous donation, but even more for his friendship over the years. We've helped each other through some tough times and its always comforting to know you're out there on The Twitters. Thank you so very very much :)
Marshall Kirkpatrick's Blog: I will not blog what I can tweet.
I read someone say on Twitter the other day that they really appreciate it when bloggers just share news on Twitter if it’s short enough it can be reported in 140 characters or less. Writing a post about it for nothing but pageviews, when you really didn’t need to go on and on is just poor manners.
I see what he did there.
Chuck Norris doesn't plagiarise, he writes his columns then roundhouse kicks them through subspace into the past for others to publish first. If that isn't a Chuck Norris Fact, it should be.
As a matter of disclosure, the enclosed image is of Bruce Schneier's head superimposed on Chuck Norris, for my Bruce Schneier Facts post from 2006. One of the Bruce Schneier facts you may not be aware of: Bruce Schneier fully discloses his own vulnerabilities: none.
The NetBSD Foundation Press Release: libcxxrt C++ Runtime Now Available Under BSD License. This is big news!
The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale, a leader in high performance Fortran, C, and C++ compiler products for AMD64, Intel64, and MIPS. This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license.
Interesting that they chose the 2-clause BSD licence which FreeBSD uses, over the 3-clause BSD licence that NetBSD uses, or at least used last time I checked. But I digress.
Why is this so cool? Well for one, I've used it before in bidness! Secondly…
“This work complements other work done in the community and is a further step in letting us adopt alternative toolchains in FreeBSD,” said Robert Watson, a FreeBSD committer and Director at the FreeBSD Foundation.
Alternative toolchains != GPL, which for the otherwise BSD licenced NetBSD and FreeBSD operating systems can only be a Good Thing™.
There have been lots of interesting developments in this area recently. The GNU toolchain has served us well, but there are leaner, faster and more liberally licenced compilers, linkers, libraries and tools coming out now, and with Apple backing LLVM in a big way now (for example) this movement can only gain further momentum.
