Rubenerd

I haven't been this dumbfoundedly awestruck in a very, very long time; why I've even started making up contractions. NASA has made available some of the first high resolution images and HD videos of the sun taken from the shiny Solar Dynamics Observatory. If you haven't checked it out yet, do it now, unless you're in a place where having your jaw drop to the floor might be embarrassing.

I'm so glad to be alive in this period of time, and deeply humbled at the same time. Galileo could have only dreamed of seeing such images.

A big manhug and thanks to Ken Jones for sharing this story in Google Reader.

Ladies and gentlemen, this evening it has come to my attention that I grievously forgot an event so epic in size and importance that I may be feeling the repercussions for many millennia to come, assuming my plan to live forever pans out. I forgot @Zombie_Plan's Birthday.

Guards!

Now you must understand, I've never met Mr Plan. Our communications have primarily consisted of 140 character or less Twitter messages and the occasional blog post. As such I have long since suspected that he isn't real, he's either:

1. a different person I’ve already met who’s putting on a secondary fake persona (so he can talk about Pokemon without fear of being ostracized by ditsy, arrogant socialites with more hair bleach than intelligence) or…

2. he’s in actuality a sophisticated Turing Machine capable of reproducing all human interactions and thought. The photo above is a rough representation of what the Zombie_Plan Turing Machine could look like.

So here's my thinking. If the former assertion is true, then this person is a fake and therefore doesn't have a birthday, unless you count the day the fake persona went online. If the latter is true, as far as I know computers don't have birthdays because they're not birthed, unless you consider programming and sophisticated fabrication and construction to be a metaphorical equivalent.

In either event, I submit to you dear reader that I did not forget Zombie_Plan's birthday, for in fact he/she/it does not possess one. Happy Birthday sir, when I make it back to Adelaide for the last time we'll have to do coffee or beer or pancakes or grilled cheese sandwiches or a sickening combination of all four!

Guards!

And finally some blatant spam linking on his behalf:

• ZombieSkittles, the site I based my navigation bar on
• @Zombie_Plan on Twitter
• His very own Rubenerd Blog ZombiePlan tag
• A screenshot demonstrating him breaking The Googles

ZDNet Australia is reporting on yet another bug caused by terminals running anti-virus software on a consumer level operating system instead of using a more efficient and secure embedded system that wouldn't need such code running in the first place.

Australian supermarket behemoth Coles was today hit by a McAfee bug that affected 10 per cent of its point of sales terminals and forced it to shut down stores in both WA and South Australia.

While this would have been terrible for business and a huge inconvenience for customers, somehow I feel better knowing they were software bugs and not some creepy crawlies that closed them down. Software bugs are much more hygienic, unless they're messing with QC I suppose.

That reminds me, I need to do my belated review of Windows Security Essentials at some point too. It's been so long since I've had something positive to say about a Microsoft product that it took me quite by surprise. This still doesn't mean that Windows should be used on sales terminals and other such devices though, what a terrible idea. It hurts my brain in an excruciating way.

Given the veracity and frequency of my posts on the proposed mandatory internet filter in Australia I'm surprised it took me so long to sign their online petition. The record of online petitions doesn't suggest this one will do anything towards changing attitudes, but it's still critically important we all show our support.

Reading the excellent Open Internet blog by Electronic Frontiers Australia, I came across this excellent piece about the proposed mandatory filter that puts it into some badly needed perspective. It doesn't protect children, it patronises them.

The whole post is worth reading, but for those in a hurry:

After all, while children may be vulnerable to certain elements of the internet, they are typically more digitally savvy than the rest of us, precisely because they have grown up with the World Wide Web.

But conservative moralisers rarely acknowledge this. Instead they tend to hinge their arguments on the patronising, victimised view of children as inherently vulnerable and corruptible. Even worse, by using the figure of the innocent child as a political pawn to advance their own agenda, conservatives are guilty of exploiting children.

Whether or not Senator Conroy cynically is aware of this and is exploiting it or he's genuinely ignorant, the result is the same: some of the internets most savvy users are being ignored and will be opressed by a system being designed and proposed by people who probably don't even know how to program their microwaves to reheat the meals their poor wives and husbands may have made for them while they were debating this nonsense in Parliament.

It's easy to blame the voting public for not being aware of these issues, but who can blame them when their primary sources of information are the Government who have a vested interest in keeping them in the dark, and when [most] of their media on television and newspapers believe the issue is worthy of debate despite all the technological flaws guaranteeing such a scheme wouldn't work even if the dubious ethical grounds it stood on were more solid.

Forgive the huge long sentences, I haven't been able to blog for a few days and I have a lot of pent up language in my brain stack. Whenever I talk about stacks I think of pancakes. If the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, then the way to mine would be epic pancakes. And a wicked sense of humour. And striped socks. Wait, what does this have to do with the filter? Nothing? Or everything?

Can you imagine if Conroy got his cronies to write a filter to heuristically block illogical nonsense? Not only would most of my site here be blocked, but he probably wouldn't even be able to access his own. That'd be kinda funny.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Largest U.S. Magazines by Circulation

(categories: culture statistics usa magazines)

巡音ルカさんと言ってもいいですか？ on Twitpic

(categories: anime twitter twitpic art)

cosplay costume switch hirano aya izumi konata izumi konata (cosplay) kikutake ranmaru lucky star school uniform seiyuu joke suzumiya haruhi suzumiya haruhi (cosplay) suzumiya haruhi no yuuutsu

(categories: anime cosplay funny haruhi luckystar)

Taichi no Yume: Saimoe 2009: Torneo principal: Grupo F – Día 2

(categories: anime moe reviews)

I've been so frantically busy with all the scanning and throwing away of junk here I haven't had the chance to blog for a while, so I figured I'd quickly weigh in with my own proposal for who should buy out Palm. I reckon mine is just as good as any.

From the We Could Have Told Them That department, the reprehensible management at Goldman Sachs have been found guilty of fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission.

What I want to know has nothing to do with the crooked economics behind deregulation so championed by Milton Friedman and his cronies, but why this decision was reached in civil and not criminal court. These people destroyed the lives of millions, they should be in prison. Sincerely, I weep for their victims.

For those reading this post in a blog aggregator and can't see the tag links; and in case you've forgotten; Keynes is my Homeboy.

Usually I ignore email addressed to me that isn't relevant to me, but in this case I'm making an exception because it's for a good cause and becuase I'm in an awesome mood :).

G’day Ruben,

For all of you Australians in America is time to rally behind a good cause. My good friend Duncan Schieb is driving across America to raise funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and he needs our help. Whether you can say hi along the way, help him with a fund raising event if he is coming through your city or just make a donation yourself, then its time to stand up and help a fellow Australian help others.

We have got behind him and are offering a prize to those that get involved or donate, so here is some incentive. How about a trip for 2 to New York, 3 nights accommodation and coming into the VIP Suite at Yankee Stadium for the game on the 19th June between the Yankees and Mets!

Hopefully that is enough incentive for you to get up, dust off your wallets and make a small effort to make a big difference.

You can find out more about the trip and competition at Duncans Website at http://www.aussieacrossamerica.com but hurry, he has already started and left LA and moving across the middle towards New York. You can find a travel path on his website.

Come on, get involved and lets show them how much spirit we have in our
Australian blood.

Cheers

I sincerely mean no offence, but…

The internet is an incredible place to gather grassroots support for noteworthy and important causes such as Duncan Schieb's ride to support the American Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. I absolutely support Duncan 110% and if I were in America I would absolutely be doing my bit to support him.

That said, the internet also makes it much easier to tailor messages to individual recipients rather than mass mailing messages to people who may or may not be eligible for their contents. All good email marketing applications have this capability.

For example, if someone like me on their account profiles with a site states they're an anti-patriot, that they do not live in America, nor are they interested in sport, then it should be simple to modify emails to either include relevant passages, or to not send them to certain people at all. It's not just non-profits that don't do this, even organisations such as CNET which has a ton of public data to mine routinely sends out email that's irrelevant to many of their recipients, as I talked about in February.

I don't mean to come across as rude or that I don't care about good causes like this — far from it. I feel as though if these techniques were used, grassroots efforts would garner more support. As a tiny example, imagine if in their email they had recognised where someone was living and had a specific PayPal donate link in the recipient's local currency.

In the meantime

Go to Duncan's site and support his worthy cause!

http://www.aussieacrossamerica.com/

For those of you wondering why my usually verbose stream of consciousness has only resulted in a few blog posts over the last few days, I've been scanning, shredding and backing up thousands of documents for my dad again. We're also taking the time to do a full scale apartment and rented storage cleanout.

If we don't need something, its being:

• scanned, in the case of documents, receipts and science journals
• ripped, in the case of computer data CDs
• donated
• sold
• recycled

Our aim is to reduce the amount of stuff we have by half, perhaps even more. For far too long we've been slaves to junk and material possessions we don't need, and we've decided to do something about it.

There's no real Buddhist nirvana motivation behind it, it just makes sense. Less stuff means we don't need to pay for storage, and we can move into a smaller apartment to save rent.

Other factors [insert prime number pun here]

Since my dad started working from home we've had to accommodate business and home stuff under one roof and its started to feel like we're living in a dense jungle of bleached white paper and boxes. Couple that with our family's tendency to hoard everything like frantic hermit crabs and there's a recipe for a really smashing chowder. Sorry, I got distracted by thinking about seafood.

Now that it's been a few years, we're also starting to make some tough decisions about my late mum's possessions as well so we can start to move on. It's really, really hard, far harder than I ever imagined, but we're making progress.