Rubenerd

@Oliyoung on Twitter shared a link to a story talking about the possibility a right wing military coup against Obama. It seems shared resources that allegedly border on socialism like public healthcare, public education, national parks, roads and garbage disposal are turning America into a Stalinist state. No, this is not The Onion!

Unintended political hilarity aside, there was one part of the page after the article that I didn't find so amusing, and it had nothing to do with ill informed political hot air. Under their Special Links heading was the following statement…

Beat cancer, heart disease, and slow aging.

The link directs to this very dodgy looking 1990s-esque infomercial page on their Newsmax store for a book about green tea. I added a rel="nofollow" so linking to it doesn't translate into any extra Google Juice for them.

Yes I am aware green tea is a healthy beverage and can reduce the risks of several diseases, but to claim it beats cancer and heart disease is complete tripe. In the same link they did claim it merely slow[ed] ageing not beat it, so it seems they are capable of talking about its benefits in more rational terms.

Its interesting for me that political pundits can spin nonsense as much as they want and it causes me mild amusement, but as soon as someone starts spouting uninformed nonsense about health I'm not so amused. Or to quote Penn Jillette: "Once you've felt the pure grief [of losing a loved one], seeing those feelings exploited can… take away your sense of humour".

Pardon the bluntness, but get a clue Newsmax. And Glenn Beck, whoever you are!

Warf: Captain, I’m detecting terrible 1980s computer generated graphics from the planet below.
Picard: Warf, how many times have I told you not to break the forth wall? It is a clear violation of the Temporal Prime Directive.

I was sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe this morning thinking of all the work I was supposed to be doing, and it was so overwhelming I decided to write a nonsensical Java application to tell us The Tale of Alan A'Dale instead.

Feel free to paste the code into your favourite text editor then execute it on your machine if you wish to feel the wondrousness. That is a word isn't it?

/**
 * Tells us The Tale of Alan A'Dale
 * Adapted by Ruben Schade 2009
 */
public class AlanADale {
  private String theTale = "n";
  public String tellUsTheTale() {
    for (int count = 0; count < 3; count++)
      theTale += "This is The Tale… ";
    theTale += "of Alan A'Dale!n";
    return theTale;
  }
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    AlanADale NotOnlyButAlso = new AlanADale();
    while(true)
      System.out.println(NotOnlyButAlso.tellUsTheTale());
  }
}

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

For those of you who haven't had the chance to check it out yet, my good Twitter friend and a very smart guy Rodrigo Haenggi in Switzerland has started a blog.

Yay, here goes my first blog post on the new site! How are you doing? My name is Rodrigo Haenggi I’m 21 years young and I’m an aspiring OS X / Web developer. This blog will be covering my thoughts, computer science and some anime related stuff. I hope you enjoy the stay and please, feel free to post some comments!

His interests and site description match my own so much its uncanny! I'm really looking forward to reading his posts.

Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing. Oh wait, that's me.

Online responses are automatically more authoritative if they’re preceded with a condescending and entirely superfluous "Err…", "Umm…" or "Whaaaa?"

Thank you.

My shrink and good friend in Alaska Sir Jim Kloss esq. suggested I take a break from computers and see some nature. I didn't have time to take an entire day off, but on Monday morning for several hours I left the house and walked around the gardens in Mawson Lakes taking photos. It did me the world of good.

I took far too many [amateur] photos to upload all at once, so I'm staggering them over a few days. Today's selection are all the photos I took of avian friends. Well they weren't really friends, aside from the ducks they all flew away as soon as I got close :).

Taken with my Nikon D60 and my 55-200mm Nikkor lens. You can view the evolving Flickr gallery here.

Its unusual for something like this to generate so much controvery and hysteria, but then again this product isn't usual. Well that was a lousy opening sentence. In short: I tried the Vegemite iSnack 2.0 spread this evening and found it surprisingly good. However I side with virtually the entire population of Australia in decrying the name as terrible and a missed opportunity. Hold on, let me finish this cracker.

For those of you outside Australia or for those of you in Australia who have been living under a rock for the last couple of days, the spread and Australian cultural icon Vegemite referenced in Men At Work's (I come from a land) Down Under has a new flavour, and nobody seems to be pleased about the name which won the naming competition.

While I agree that it would be akin to renaming Uluru iUluru or the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House the iBridge and iHouse with the same resulting cultural insignificance, I think its brilliant marketing. The team behind it have got such a surge in interest and free publicity on television, in newspapers and online, including blog posts like this. Had they named it something sensible and clever, it would not have got the level of coverage it has, and to be honest I might not have gone out and bought a jar of it this evening as a result.

As far as I know, no jars have been produced with the name and a small part of me thinks none ever will, it's simply a marketing ploy. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see shelves stocked with something else soon.

If not though, iMight have to give up eating Vegemite for a while. Even though I spent most of my life in Singapore and have far less in common with my Aussie bretheren as a result, I still feel violated that they'd call my Vegemite something like that!

The more I learn about Facebook, the more I've decided I don't want anything to do with them. Privacy is dead online, but actively recruiting third parties to gather further information on you and other such archaic TOS gems creep me out even more than most sites. It seems while Google is at least tacitly going forward with their Data Liberation Front, Facebook is going backwards.

I've decided to look into deleting my profile and starting fresh by re-adding many of my friends again but none of my personal information short of my name (with something appended to it to make it harder to data mine with), and a vague location. I won't be using applications either because of the terrible privacy implications and because I liked using Facebook Lite so much.

Some of my concerns I need to look into first:

• There’s no such thing as a real, permanent Facebook delete, but it’s a lot better than nothing.
• Given their closed nature I suspect not, but I wonder if there’s a way to export your friends list, say in an OPML file?
• Conversely is there any way to back up my Facebook messages short of transcribing them? Might need to write a little Perl script to download the pages themselves and extract them

Will advise on my progress, stay tuned!

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