Rubenerd

Often I find when I'm confronted with a situation that is not of my own making and that has the potential to negatively affect me in some way, I start developing a blog post in my mind to discuss the experience in order to exact some time delayed literary revenge of sheer genius. When I realise I'm neither a genius nor capable of literary masterpieces that could adequately used in revenge situations I decide against forming such posts and they never get submitted. Against my better judgement, I am eschewing such precautions for the duration of this evening, and apparently using pompous language.

Given I lived in Singapore most of my life and therefore never found the need to get a drivers licence I am not qualified to discuss the first and second points on Monnie's Things that have annoyed me this week blog posting on her Vanilla Silence blog of doom, but the last two I felt I must share and relay my thoughts given I've found myself faced with the exact same situations myself on countless occasions of countlessness. I'm pretty sure that isn't a word.

I'm still not entirely convinced the likes of ZombieSkitles and Monnie aren't in fact sophisticated Turing Machines, but for the sake of the argument: tell us Monnie, what has annoyed you this week?

- People who continually stop walking in front of me in the shopping centre… Yesterday was a good one, they stopped right in the doorway of the shop I was about to enter, so not only did I almost walk into them, I couldn’t get in. Also, when you ask people like this to move, they glare at you. Be considerate people, you’re not the only ones at the shopping centre.

Yes! Thank you! As an addendum to this, I'm similarly irritated when I'm in a hurry and a slow walking group of friends are taking up the entire footpath in front of me without any room to scoot past. A part of me is jealous that they have friends they can walk along with in the first place, but mostly I'm just irritated that I'm stuck behind a few lumbering people when I have class in five minutes and the coffee I drank an hour ago was decaf. Please move out of the way people, this is public space!

- People who think they know everything about something and are completely incorrect. I know I shouldn’t fight with these people as it is akin to high school when everyone thought I’d said something and I didn’t. There’s no changing these peoples minds, they have it firmly lodged in their heads that I am incorrect and no amount of discussion will remove this thought. No one wants to admit you’re wrong about something, ever. EVER. It means admitting defeat, and no one wants to do that. SUCK IT UP AND DO IT. ADMIT YOU’RE WRONG AND SAY YOU’RE SORRY. IT’S EASIER THAN FIGHTING CONSTANTLY. Also, this behaviour still continues, and while we label it “high school behaviour” it is actually how people behave and act in the real world. It’s not high school or childish, it’s how people are. It’s sad.

When I was 14 years old and my mum had been diagnosed with cancer (again), I took the day off school to visit her in the oncology ward. While I was away, the PE teacher informed all the people in my class that he thought I was lying about her condition because he saw her a month previously and she had hair. You see, people who have chemotherapy lose their hair… and apparently there's no such thing as wigs.

Unfortunately there will always be people in life who think they know more than everyone else, and when they're confronted with contradictory evidence they'll still stubbornly refuse to admit it and instead attack your character.

People have this weird idea that admitting when you're wrong is a sign of weakness. Far from it, I think if you can admit you're at fault and save face you're far more resilient and strong than the people who cover their ears with their hands and should la la not listening! I could talk about high school people types, politicians, religious folk… I'll leave it at that!

- People who title their blog posts as "Things that have annoyed me" when clearly they’re discussing "People that have annoyed me"

I would consider that more of a mild irritation than an outright annoyance personally, but fair enough.

- People who like cupcakes, quotation fabricators, people who are intolerant of other people’s cultures, The Dutch, and those who get childish thrills by using police tape to cordon off streets and pretend a crime syndicate is being busted to the detriment of neighbourhood land values.

Not so sure. Cupcakes are awesome, and those other things sounded kinda funny.

Just spent just over nine hours straight without breaks programming; suffice to say my eyes are protesting but I got the job done! To celebrate, I thought I'd publish a post that's been sitting in my drafts folder for far too long just waiting for an opportunity such as this.

My question I pose to you is this: What are all those girls looking at? Do you have any ideas? They all look interested in whatever (or whoever) it is. Makoto almost looks bemused and Ami is so shocked she's twisted her leg into what looks like a very uncomfortable position. My theory is Tuxedo Mask probably genetically engineered a rose or something. If we were to take it more literally, if you're reading this in a blog aggregator they're probably staring in disbelief at your unread post count!

I'm glad there's someone out there on the Internet asking the tough questions. We can't trust newspaper journalists to do that any more.

BBC World reports from The World which is useful for me because I live there. Genius, right? One of their latest stories concerns a NASA mission whereby they'll be deliberately crashing two spacecraft into the moon to determine whether or not water ice exists.

@bbcworld: Nasa is set to deliberately crash two spacecraft into the Moon to try to learn whether there is water-ice on i.. http://bit.ly/hqUYM

Well that blockquote didn't really introduce anything I hadn't already mentioned. I'm better at summarising than I thought I was.

Leaving aside the knee jerk reaction I had initially ("oh great, humans are going to start dumping garbage on the moon now!") I thought of a way they could accomplish this without having to invest money in new procedures. Get a team together and inform them they want a probe that will orbit the moon, and make sure some of the contractors are programming in metres, some in feet. We know this works already!

I say this with confidence because I'm perfect and never make mistakes, of course.

Ever since I postulated back in April as to what a combined Oracle-Sun company would do, in the back of my mind I've also been thinking what it would look like. Now we get a glimpse in the form of the Oracle Exadata V2 server, the second advertisement after their triumphant "Oracle Buys Sun" faux billboard graphic.

I'm surprised they kept the Sun Microsystems logo and the basic design of the hardware, but I'm even more surprised they positioned the Sun logo above the Oracle one. I get the feeling it's not something that should be read into much, but perhaps it's a symbolic tip of the hat and to appease people scared about what Oracle may do with Sun. Don't worry guys, Sun is still alive, and all that. Or maybe it's because "Sun Oracle" is much easier to say than "Oracle Sun". I have no idea what I'm saying here.

Most likely this is a transitionary product, we'll probably see completely new designs in coming quarters that probably won't include a Sun logo. Then again when Commodore Business Machines bought MOS Technology in the 1980s they ended up rebranding the subsidiary but it largely operated independently and still put their logo on all their integrated circuits, so who knows.

Personally I think it made far more sense for Oracle to be Sun's suitor instead of IBM given that they already had a lot of money and time invested in parallel products. Solaris is an excellent operating system, and an Oracle database on Sun software and hardware is a compelling mix.

I guess I'm still just a little sad to see such an iconic company slowly get eaten by another; as I've repeatedly said here I really admire Sun Microsystems. Perhaps I'll have a greater chance of owning my own Sun workstation after buying one on eBay after a few years. That is, if having original Sun hardware without an Oracle sticker doesn't increase its value too much.

Enclosed above for your convenience and for posterity is my avatar on Twitter for one of the shortest-lived memes in the history of the intertubes in mid September. Lots of people had this on their avatar but I thought it particularly made sense on mine seeing as I was on a phone and all. In the middle of a canola field.

I would write more on this post, and I'm being told I'm going to be allowed to finish it, but apparently there are other bloggers who's posts are better. To be fair, I'm not in disagreement with him. Because he likes fishsticks! Wow, two memes in one. Now that's value for money.

In retrospect I should have used this super cute avatar of Yui instead. I've changed my mind, she's my favourite character along with Mio instead of just Mio; apparently I just needed to watch K-On again to be reminded of her awesomeness. That reminds me, I still have BluRay episodes to watch and review. Take that lowly widescreen versions! Mua har har!

Ima let you finish. On a side note, when I first heard about Kanye West years ago, I thought his name was Kayne (as in Cane) West. True story.

This originally appeared on the Annexe, back when I recorded daily puzzles.

Earlier this year I decided I couldn't keep up all my disparate blogs scattered over a wider area than all that foam that ended up on the walls when our washing machine had problems, so I merged them all into this one. This means for each practical software tip there are several needlessly pointless posts such as this one that perhaps would have just gone into a journal before, but it's an infinitely easier setup. The word infinitely has lots of skinny letters in it.

Had an impossibly busy day today with lots of demands from many different people and from classes. I spent most of my school life taking care of my mum and fixing computer problems for people, and it seems I'm still stuck in that mindset of just taking tasks people present to me and running with them without really thinking about the commitment I'm setting myself up for.

It's a tired, worn out cliche to admit, but I need to learn to say no sometimes: perhaps I really do need a Shirt of Ultimate Disambiguation! I'm more than happy to help people who are willing to learn and do a little research in advance, but I get perhaps a dozen questions a day in email, on Twitter and in person asking me how to do things and I just don't have the time. Believe me, if I didn't have work and study commitments I would be more than happy to help people with their computer problems.

In an interesting way though, days like this with work, studies and helping people are tough to get through as I'm living it, but when I go to sleep I feel good. Like I contributed something to the world at large. I guess it really is a mindset.

For those of you wondering what happened to those photos I promised I'd be uploading a few days ago, alas I've let my so-called Flickr Pro account expire and while I've got the money to plonk (plonk?) down for another year, I need to transfer it into my super special separate Visa Debit bank account I use for the intertubes which will take a few days.

In the meantime, I have attached an entirely pointless image from a previous Grilled Cheese Sandwich Observation Lesson. I need to do another one of those.

Merci, merci, das ist gut! Wait a minute.

My dad, sis and I have decided to go back to France on our Eurotrip at the end of the year if only for a few days. Last time I went there was 1998, wonder if its changed much since then? And I insist on buying a beret this time! I'm sure that'll go down really well wearing that around Deutschland and Eire.

Wait, why did I use the real names for them but I called it France? Wait a minute… again.

I'm sorry, I know I keep talking about things that aren't technology related but something has been bugging me. The stunning US Navy photo above of the USNS Mercy framed with a rainbow might give you an indication on what this post will be about, if you couldn't discern from the title.

I'm not an American, but I speak the same language and use the same Internets so therefore I'm exposed to many of the debates going on over there. One in particular has haunted my thoughts in the last few days even more than the war in Iraq and the debate surrounding healthcare reform, is the fact there's a debate about healthcare reform at all. Honestly, if people see the current system and they think it's not broken, or they don't want the government giving people public healthcare the way they have a public police force and fire departments, perhaps they should seek a mental health professional. If they can afford to, without insurance if they don't have it or in spite of having it because they've been denied.

I could ramble on about the care and treatment my mum had for cancer for over 12 years, or the fact my sister was ill a few weeks ago and all she needed to do was flash her Aussie Medicare card here to get treatment and a prescription, but all I'll do is meekly admit that I thought the whole point of government was to help people, that medical care is a right under the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that ultimately we're discussing whether or not we believe our fellow brothers and sisters should live or die.

For an issue with so much debate going on, it seems simple enough to me. Again though, I'm not an American so I don't know the details.