Rubenerd

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Colour balance is way off, but I really like it.

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

They know me by name here, really, really friendly folks even to a shy guy like me :)

This post originally appeared on the Annexe.

Singapore has so many beautiful trees, even right in the middle of town. I loved the way the shadows turned out :)

Some good news from the team we thought had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Good thing I would never let any of my own projects end up like this.

After a mysterious unexplained hiatus, we’re coming back. iPhone User News .com will be rebooting around the middle of next week. We’re coming back with daily dollops of news about Apple’s humble portable telephone.

We’ll also be launching a sister site all about that pad thing, in the near future.

Thanks for visiting.

Neal at iPhone User News.

Google's creative and unconventional logos celebrating certain events and milestones throughout the year are fun to watch, but their latest one for Google Singapore shows the local versions of their sites aren't so local!

The current localised Google Singapore logo is the same Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics logo featured on the primary Google.com site. While it certainly is cheaper to do homogenous worldwide marketing, one would think the local Google Singapore site would have reflected an infinitely more important celebration here and the rest of the Sino world: Chinese New Year.

In terms of value and importance, CNY is the equivalent of every Western holiday rolled into one. I walked along Orchard Road early this afternoon — one of the busiest shopping precincts in South-East Asia — and it was practically deserted. It is HUGE here. No, let me say that properly:

Chinese New Year is HUGE here

The other thing to keep in mind is Singapore is a tropical country. The temperature barely ever falls below 29 degrees C during the day. People here could barely care less about Winter Olympics, especially during this time of the year.

Something screwy going on?

I hadn't even thought of this, but Dean (@dg01844) on Twitter even suggested an ulterior motive for not putting Chinese New Year graphics on their Singapore site:

@Rubenerd could be a snub given their troubles with China

If that's true, and it could very well be, it's a snub against independent Chinese communities around the world and not just the PRC with whom they've had difficulties. I would be extremely disappointed and quite angry if that were the case.

Anyway some free advice to Google if they're listening: if you're going to operate local versions of sites, you would do yourself a huge favour by celebrating (or even just acknowledging) local holidays and events and not using blanket marketing for sites around the world that some of your customers either don't know or care about.

The weird thing is, I remember seeing Chinese New Year graphics on Google in the past. Again I hope they're not snubbing all Chinese people around the world just because they've had a spat with the PRC, and perhaps on a lesser level I hope they don't really think a Winter Olympics here are somehow more important otherwise I worry about the long term viability of their "local" site!

</rant>

Speaking of photos in Singapore, here's one I also took this afternoon of the brand spanking new apartment building outside me bedroom window here. When I was in Singapore in January last year it wasn't there, now just over a year later it's finished! It took them longer for the people next door to us in Adelaide to build a semi detatched one story house!

The colours seem a bit over-saturated, but I did very little post production other than converting from RAW. And no, I didn't build the building.

For those of you who've never been to Singapore, Chinese New Year weekend is similar to Christmas in that everywhere is almost completely deserted! It was such a stunningly bright and gorgeous day I replaced my workhorse 35mm with the much slower but wider 18-55mm VR to take some photos around the neighbourhood :)

The photos of the roads around the Orchard-Tanglin area don't seem terribly interesting until you realise this was taken on an early Saturday afternoon. It's usually one of the busiest roads in the country and it's almost deserted! And check out the footpaths!

Coming back from Starbucks where my dad and I chilled for an hour or so to take a break from scanning, digitising and collating his work documents I couldn't get over how beautiful the sky and trees looked, so I took a few more shots. They're not the sharpest photos, but set on 18mm the kit lens really captured the light and shadows well I thought. My 35mm would have been much sharper with less effort, but you would have obviously seen less.

Am I a professional photographer? No! Do I obey the Rule of Thirds? Only when I could be bothered. Do I have fun? Yes! ^_^

The full Flickr gallery is here if you want to see a few more terrible shots.

I've done a similar test to this back in 2008, but I always like to compare my results. In fact I may have done this one before too now that I look at the title!

Anyway I'm listed as a liberal-libertarian, which is about right. I admire the libertarian view that people have the right to self determination, but I also believe health and education are fundamental human rights not privileges offered only to those who can afford the extravagant premiums and school fees asked for by a free market. Those who think a free market can offer everything as deluded as communists who think governments can provide everything.

Of course I'm in my 20s now, perhaps a few decades from now I'll be different. Heck, when I was 10 I thought a libertarian was someone who worked with lots of books.

It's the kind of thing you'd already know about if you were interested in it, but OpenOffice.org just released 2.3.0, wait sorry, 3.2.0. It helps to know what you're talking about before you start taking. I wonder if it'll have Oracle branding?

Update

I've been using it for a few hours on my Core Duo MacBook Pro on Snow Leopard and it's fast. I never thought I'd use the word fast along with OpenOffice.org but they've really improved the load times and general responsiveness.

The primary OOo application I use is the Calc spreadsheet application. I prefer Gnumeric's clean interface and it's faster and more stable, but Calc does a better job with importing Excel files I'm sent. Calc still isn't as fast as Gnumeric (nothing else is!) but it's noticeably better than it was before. My GCC optimisation sheet I've talked about a few times in the past here that has thousands of rows loads more quickly and scrolling is much smoother. In my opinion this 3.2 release is bigger news than the major 3.0 one.

I'll post more details when I've had time to play around with it some more. Is it a sad state of affairs when a guy like me gets more excited by a new office suite than a new FPS? ^_^

Another update!

Within minutes of posting my update above, it seems the Lotus folks have released 3.0 beta 2 of their IBM Lotus Symphony suite. Wonder if the code base has been brought up to parity yet? The interface of their app is the best I've ever used.

It's an interesting time for office stuff. Wonder when iWork 2010 will be out?

J-Walk, surprisingly the proprietor of The J-Walk Blog, posted an entry about a neat gadget that lets you use those tiny pencil stubs by sticking two of them together. This may have (nay, probably has) already been invented, but what about a longer gadget that you stick a short pencil stub onto the end of so you don't need two of them?

On a related note…

On a related note (wait, I just said that), this post has got me thinking just how little I use writing instruments at all anymore. This is not a joke, I am serious: when I took one of my required mathematics classes last year and broke out the pens to take notes for the first class (formulae are still very difficult to generate quickly on a computer) I couldn't remember how to write lowercase letters. Literally the only time in the last few years I had ever used a pen was for filling out immigration forms which require you to print in caps. That's it!

Before my late mum got cancer she was a professional calligrapher for weddings and other major events, her writing was absolutely breathtaking. I remember back in primary school when she'd write our lunch orders on those brown paper bags to give to the tuckshop and often we'd get our lunch in a generic plastic bag because the tuckshop mums had kept the originals! Not only that, she could speak and write fluent Elvish — the language of the Elves from the Lord of the Rings — which when coupled with her penmanship was stunning.

When I can work up the courage to go through her belongings, I'll get some of work and scan it to show you all. She really was amazing.