Rubenerd

So this afternoon my poor sister could receive messages on her Nokia smartphone, but not send them. We theorised it may have been a billing issue but ruled it out when she was able to successfully lodge a phone call. Or is it make a phone call? Phone a phone call? So what was the deal?

Deal spelled backwards is leaD

Now we all know phone networks in Australia suck. I remember a conversation with my Aussie IT teacher in Singapore who said Australia was a first world country with third would infrastructure. I corrected him and said the railways built to carry ore from mines to those giant ships bound for China are state of the art and the envy of the world, which he was forced to concede.

While I complain about Optus's poor coverage in our suburb that's less than 15 kilometres away from the CBD of Australia's largest and economically most important city however, its practically flawless compared to the reception my sister gets with her Vodafone fone. Wait, phone, damn it why do people make cutesy names with words spelled wrong on purpose? Like those dumb preschools and daycare centres that call themselves "skool" and the like. I always thought to myself: wouldn't that confuse kids with their spelling? Can you imagine a child failing a spelling test because they didn't spell school right, when right outside the window there's the dumb, incorrect spelling on the sign of the building they're in? Did they not think of that!?

Now, what we we talking about again? Oh yeah, how to get out of jury duty! The key is to tell the judge you're prejudiced against all races. That Simpsons joke do anything for you?

In Soviet Telcos, Vodaphones you, if there’s a signal

There, I fixed the spelling. I hate people who intentionally misspell words. You're not clever. Sheesh, what a bunch of Rubenerds.

So what was the issue? Well it turns out the problems she was having with sending messages had nothing to do with her phone specifically, other than the fact it had a Vodaphone Red Sim™ in it; rather it was a nation-wide outage.

Judging from the furore on Twitter, it affected a great deal of people, with some suggesting they'd move carriers in a vein attempt to make a gigantic multinational corporation take notice and feel threatened. Ah the free market, its wonderful isn't it?

But I digress. According to their sstatus page which the Vodaphone ffolks referred to in their Twitter and Facebook aaccounts, the outage has been ffixed and service restored, maybe.

Users may have of experience ddifficulties in sending SMS. […] We apologise to customers for the inconvenience.

Yes I was mocking them for their sspelling. A little rich coming from the Typo King I know, but the difference between me and them is they have billions in the bank, and I'm just one guy writing a blog. They have spelling economies of sscale you see.

C-C-C-Changes

So where does that leave us? As with the worldwide Vodaphone troubles in the United Kingdom, their eager support of the Egyptian internet blackout and troubles elsewhere… it doesn't look good. Perhaps their local operations here in Australia will improve now they've had a legal slap on the wrist, and maybe these planned and unplanned outages will go away.

In the meantime, they'd better get used to being the top trending topics in places like Sydney and Perth, for all the wrong reasons!

Funnily enough, I was with Vodafone briefly in 2008 in Adelaide and they were surprisingly good. Then again, NetSpace was supposed to be good back then too. And their logos both used red… coincidence much?

This post originally appeared on the Annexe, in a post series pointlessly documenting every train I took.

S81 from Bardwell Park to Museum

Cleanliness: Ickyness!

Ruben attempts to guess the age of a photo, for no reason!

You’d think a travel agent would know!

While looking for recipies for Singapore noodles this evening on The Googles, I came across the IKB Travel website advertising the city state and all its attractions. What caught my eye though wasn't the links to the Singapore Zoo or any of the other thingy whatnots (they're technical travel terms, look them up) but rather the photo they had chosen to accompany the page.

If you aren't Singaporean or haven't spent any length of time in the city state you could be forgiven for thinking the photo is current, and presumably the travel agent folks (or their website designer) clearly thought it was or they wouldn't have included it! That said, those with an eye for detail may notice a few things that give away the photo's true age:

1. The slightly faded, old-timelyness (another technical term) of the colours
2. The retro looking buses in the lower right hand corner
3. The lack of visible WiFi beams

All these point to one unmistakable conclusion:

This is a retro photo of Singapore!

One of my loves (dare I say, passions!) is finding old photos of places where I've lived or been to, and comparing it to what I've seen myself. Particularly with South East Asia in the last thirty years, cities in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand have been almost completely transformed. I find it fascinating :).

So how old is this photo? Well judging from the fact virtually none of the skyline is there yet, I'd hazard a guess that it was taken in the late 1970s. This is corroborated by the fact the recognisable triangular tower of the OUB Centre isn't visible yet, nor does it even look like its under construction! According to Wikipedia, they started building it in 1980.

For comparison, here's a photo of the same area of the Singapore River in 2010, by chensiyuan on Wikimedia Commons. The building locals sometimes call the "calculator building" is almost the only thing that looks the same!

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

shaun's website

Quite possible the greatest website ever.

(categories: shaunlorrain twitter design gifs)

Merry Nightmare by saiki2

If only it were larger for a full screen desktop background!

(categories: merrynightmare anime yumekuimerry art)

Android phones record user-locations according to research | Technology | The Guardian

Seems MeeGo is the only option, and its being made by a sinking ship. Just our luck.

(categories: android phones google privacy)

The Falafel Album – EP by GoRemy – Download The Falafel Album – EP on iTunes

Saudis in Audis and the Metro Song are my favourites :). Despite the stronger Aussie dollar we still have to pay double though.

(categories: music goremy funny comedy)

Download Yumekui Merry Episode 8 – Anime Take

Who did that artwork? Its amazing!

(categories: art graphics anime yumekuimerry merrynightmare)

Jesus Venn DiagramYYxn4.jpg (JPEG Image, 342×320 pixels)

Zombie, Dracula, Frankenstein… ;)

(categories: religion funny)

Poster for Fundraiser 2011 | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Finally got a Marian Call poster! She's awesome :)

(categories: mariancall art design posters music independentmusic)

flukeformac – Play FLACs in iTunes – Google Project Hosting

"Fluke is a small utility for Mac OS that lets you play FLAC files right within iTunes."

(categories: itunes quicktime audio flac apple macosx)

Play .wma, Ogg, and FLAC files in iTunes | iPod & Entertainment | Playlist | Macworld

Wonder if there's a way to do this for FLAC > Apple Lossless?

(categories: itunes music audio apple howto flac)

Intel, Micron open US$3 billion NAND flash facility in Singapore

Micron are huge in Singapore, as are AMD. Interesting to see Intel was part of the mix too.

(categories: news singapore flashmemory memory)

IKB Travel – Singapore

Go the old photo!

(categories: singapore retro 1980s photos)

Marina Barrage

"Built across the mouth of the Marina Channel, the Marina Barrage creates Singapore’s 15th reservoir, and the first in the heart of the city. With a catchment area of 10,000 hectares, or one-sixth the size of Singapore, the Marina catchment is the island’s largest and most urbanised catchment."

(categories: singapore architecture design water)

Adam Levine on Twitter early yesterday morning:

prepare yourselves for cute OVERLOAD… /Users/adamlevine/Desktop/article-0-0973CBE7000005DC-472_634x404.jpg

I can't tell if he's being ironic or not. Perhaps making a statement about Windows Vista or Windows 7 users perhaps?

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

craigzoidz:

Puuurrrddddyyyyy.

WOW

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

sunnyxstars:

THIS.

Randy got Shoe :D

For those of you who want to support the web’s nicest, spunkiest, coolest, talented-est (is that a word?!) musician, Marian Call still has some swag to sell to support her production efforts for her latest album which is Something Fierce! See what I did there, I used the title of the album in the sentence! Huh? HUH!? :D

But I digress! Buy some stuff and leave a generous tip on her Fundraiser 2011: Releasing Something Fierce! page. Can’t wait for her next album, this is going to be sweet! Not that I’m biased or anything :).

Ben Parr on Mashable asking the question: What We Can Learn From Amazon’s Cloud Collapse?

Simple. While arguably cheaper, simpler and more accessible from different devices for clients, cloud services aren’t the more reliable, robust replacements for software we were sold. Just like every other complex transaction-based computer system, Google and Amazon’s systems aren’t perfect and suffer outages. Relying upon centralised systems only exacerbates the issue.

If anything, I hope people’s expectations become more realistic after this alleged "cloudgate" These are billion dollar companies, and even they can’t keep their services up. Oh my.

Someone should write a book about it! Or if its an ebook, should it be type about it? Ruben so funny.

Not that I’m frustrated or anything!

I keep reading report after report that books are dying and ebooks are outselling them. People are retweeting it, blogging about it, talking about it, retweeting it while blogging and talking about it. The story is everywhere, it has even started to creep into newspapers, those old fashioned paper things with ink they make out of dead trees. Problem is, as with most stories passed off as journalism thesedays, while there's a grain of truth to it, the overarching conclusions are entirely wrong.

I know I already gave away the answer to this post's title question in the title (whoops), but in case you need to see it again:

ebooks are not outselling books!

So where did this story come from? As usual a press release! This one comes direct from Amazon's PR department. I would include the link, but if you escape all their ampersands so your XHTML validates, it breaks the page.

The page you are requesting has invalid parameters
Click Back to return to the page from which you came

Other people can get around this, but allegedly the designer of the super duper reliable Amazon Web Services system can't parse well formed earls. Oh well.

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.

So there you have it, these news stories and headlines and people foaming at the mouth all excited that ebooks are outselling books have based their entire argument on the fact that a single retailer (albeit a large one) is selling more ebooks on their wireless device than regular books.

Books aren’t going anywhere

I reckon we have a long, long way to go before ebooks outsell their dead tree brethren. Why? I'm glad you asked! Some people…

• like breaking their backs, padding up their bags or they have a weird fetish for glue smell and the feel of paper
• like showing off what they’re reading to people, or use book covers to identify fellow fans
• like them because they don’t need batteries
• want a physical memento or keepsake from their favourite author or series
• want to tear out pages to stick on their walls, or to scrapbook, or to put on floors for pets to use

Then there are the legal advantages. Some…

• like to exercise their legal right to resell the things they buy at some point
• want to buy books from foreign countries and/or that are printed in foreign languages rather than local translations, manga being an increasingly important example
• like going to libraries, and lending books to friends, you know, all those things you’re supposed to be able to do and shouldn’t be making headlines when some company decides to partially let people do that again in electronic form.

Whatever the case, despite being a guy living and breathing all this tech stuff, and despite personally reading virtually all my books of late (including the entire Gibraltar Earth series) on my various iDevices with my eyeDevices, I doubt we'll see ebooks outsell books at least for the foreseeable future. Maybe they will and I'll be proven wrong, but I'm not holding my breath… because I'm not very fit.