Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Lotsa buttons.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Carrot cake and cappuccino at Adora Chocolate on the Cooks river :D

Cue Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy references regarding being too hip to see over your own pelvis ;).

Newspapers provide roughage and essential inks!

For puppy paper (as we call it), nothing beats Saturday editions of newspapers. They're cheap, plentiful, and decently absorbent. For rags like the Straits Times and The Australian, I'd even go so far to say that its the best use for them! Unfortunately, you may be tempted to read some of the articles as you're placing them in on the floor for the doggies to do their business, which can lead to frustration and the urge to deride it either in public or your blog.

"Extreme sports are an excellent way of capturing kids’ attention", Jim says.

One such article was in the March 5th issue of The Australian that discussed how cool people are keeping the faith. The article was about evangelical protestant Christians of course, presumably because that's The Australian's readership base, because people of other faiths in multicultural Australia don't count, and because non believers such as atheists, agnostics or philosophical systems such as Buddhism aren't cool. Fair enough, I know I'm not hip in the slightest.

It could not have been more cliché and stereotypical if it tried. The author Christine Jackman crammed as many photos of young, super hip and trendy people on motorcycles and covered in tattoos as she could, along with this quote in bold:

To old school Christians, worshipping this way might seem a bit like serving up a cool Jesus with a side order of fries at a convenient and groovy drive-through.

That's right, people of my generation allegedly only care about junk food and extreme sports. Point taken.

I’m the James Dean of the Blogging Scene

Most of the "facts" in the report were derived from a four year old publication. If we're to believe census data, the makeup of religions in Australia is changing rapidly and data from even a couple of years ago is outdated, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

In 2007, Singleton published The Spirit of Generation Y: Young People’s Spirituality in a Changing Australia with the Australian Catholic University’s Michael Mason and Ruth Webber […]

I remember a representative from the ACU came to our school in Singapore in year 12 to discuss why we should study at their institution. I asked if you had to be Catholic to join, to which I was told "no" because they "teach secular values", whatever that means. I suppose it wasn't entirely true after all, who'd have thunk it? ;).

What did the report say?

If spiritual health is measured by belief in God, then the news was dire.

Good thing spiritual health isn't measured by a belief in God. There's nothing stopping atheists, agnostics and other free thinkers from being spiritual. Teachings like Buddhism don't have Gods, and arguably they're far more in touch with their spiritual side than any of the Christian denominations the article discussed. Also, what about faiths such as Hinduism that worship more than one God?

Nooooo! Not a Shinto shrine!

No, this article had nothing to do with keeping the faith and being ultra cool and super trendy about it, it was a several page long advertisement for the Hillsong Church/Gloria Jeans (thank you Alex for clearing that up!) and Australian Idol, who's winner Stan Walker graced one of the pages with his super trendy tattoos. Presumably he's unaware of Leviticus 19:28.

Sorry Australians, if you're religious but not Christian, or you're a Buddhist, or you're a free thinking atheist agnostic naturalist humanist Jedi or whatever you call yourself, you're spiritually unwell and worse still, you're not cool! I know right, this is serious!

I suggest you repent by hitching a ride on a motorcycle wearing a bandanna, and hit the drive through for some fries. No seafood though, that's not allowed either!

Screenshot from CNET's News.com taken 13:33 AEDST. Go the order.

This comes hot on the heels of a report by the illustrious Mr Brown that Channel NewsAsia in Singapore used the Japanese earthquake as an excuse to sell high value advertising (Japan got earthquake, quickly book your CNA commercial slots NOW!). I'm sure all the proceeds will be donated, right? </sarcasm>

So-called "new media" is bad because it doesn't adhere to the journalistic and honourable standards of "old media", you see.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

The Code of the Geeks v3.12

Aww I remember this!

(categories: geekcode fun culture internet)

The Moe Coalition

(categories: anime moe blog)

New Chrome browser ready for the world

Taken straight from a PR release, no doubt

(categories: journalism google chrome software newspapers fairfax australia)

FeedFunnel

News from Gitmonation

(categories: news politics noagenda adamcurry)

Chinese XML FAQ

"This FAQ is about using XML for Chinese-language documents"

(categories: xml chinese katakana html standards web)

Employing the link rel > Tag

"This tutorial provides a guide on how to make best use of the link> tag"

(categories: html accessibility web)

Graphic from the United States Geological Survey site. :-(

Google has been caught manipulating search results again, but at least they admitted what they were doing!

Google mostly do no evil :)

Along with IPv6 and cloud computing in their current forms, I've viewed most of my concerns with Google in light of potential government and law enforcement abuses. Whereas even more privacy and security obsessed people than me have been quick to dismiss Google as hypocritically evil, I've been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Take the street view controversy. While I think Google engineers were short sighted by not closely studying the source code of the software they put on their trucks and drove around the world, I don't believe they did it maliciously. These signals were being broadcast in the open, and while the scale of Google's downloading may warrant further scrutiny, it skips the real issue that people are still broadcasting unencrypted data out of their homes for anyone to gain access to. Rather than blaming consumers (which is always an easy thing to do) however, I place the blame on network hardware manufacturers for selling devices that didn't make this clearer.

Basically, while I've taken issue with some of their policies (labelling Android as "open" and broadly copying the iOS interface, the Verizon net neutrality thing, Eric Schmidt's baffling statements about not having things to hide, pushing WebM and Flash, claiming redundancy is built into Gmail only to have all that redundancy fail), I still believe they're a force for good online and we benefit from their presence. Clearly, Bing does too ;).

Whoopsiedooddle

Unfortunately, it's come to light that Google has been misrepresenting aspects of their search algorithm's operation. After steadfastly and repeatedly denying in court that they use whitelists to inform their search results, both Google and Bing have admitted their existence. These so-called "exception lists" are claimed to consist of sites that Google and Bing engineers deem to have been false positives in their farmer site targeting algorithms.

As with all stories of this nature, how its being reported is almost as fascinating as the story itself. Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand catches out Google for denying whitelists are used in their anti farming efforts but otherwise sticks to reporting the facts.

Matt Cutts explained that there is no global whitelist but for some algorithms that have a negative impact on a site in Google’s search results, Google may make an exception for individual sites. But didn’t Matt tell us there is no whitelist for the Farmer update?

Cade Mets at The Register was less charitable and accused Google of lying to European Union anti-trust regulators.

The trouble is that Google spent years refusing to acknowledge that these manual interventions exist – and, in some cases, outright denying them. Google spent nearly a decade telling the world that its search engine was completely objective, and it has only recently begun to freely admit that this is not the case, presumably as a result of the EU investigation.

Ruben gets nervous talking to people

I've talked to people at university and my old work about this, and as usual the opinions are pretty evenly divided between "Google is guilty of denying the true nature of their operations and must be punished", to "Google's exception lists are a valid approach to dealing with false positives, these stories are just sensationalist".

Sensationalist sounds like it'd be a good thing. What a sensation! How sensational! YAYS! The English language is weird.

I'm of the opinion that while Google have been guilty of search result rigging in the past, we don't have enough evidence yet to suggest Google are abusing these exception lists. If they are as benign as they suggest, I'm sure Google shouldn't have any problem with providing us with further details as to their operation. If they remain obtuse, then we have severe cause for concern.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

anoceanofsweetemotion:

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

newlyyorked:

Chrysler Building

No other Art Deco designed building comes close :).

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

S76 from Wynyard to Central