Rubenerd

They play mahjong and they’re DANGEROUS!

What I love about slice of life anime like Saki and whatnot is how their own issues in their little universe seem so critically important that everything else pales in comparison and without being taken care of could destroy the very fabric of the space time continuum as they know it. Saki wants to go to the Mahjong Nationals?! Well this changes everything!!! When you think about it, that mirrors real life too for many of us. If I bump my RAM up to 4GiB I can run Oracle, and I'm an introverted loser! This changes everything!!!

I guess I misunderstood episode 02, but I was under the impression our intrepid Mahjong playing superhero Saki had already enrolled to join her school's Mahjong club, or perhaps she had but she hadn't made any commitment to the Nationals yet either through expressed intent or because she just kept playing +-0. Does that make sense? Does anything I ever write make sense? If I had the time I'd draw up one of my erroneously described super detailed diagrams to make sense of it.

"You kids with your mahjong and your loud music!"

We learn in this episode that Nodoka became an Epic Mahjong Player of Super Awesomeness by playing online into the wee hours of the morning, and after a brief encounter with a reporter and her cameraman who only wants to take pictures of Nodoka's boobs and who gets a whack to the head as a result (aaaah anime) we learn she appeared regularly in mahjong magazines given she was such an epic player. Are there mahjong magazines in Australia or Singapore? I'd read them!

"We’re gonna Catch Them All!" "…wrong game Hisa"

Given they have such a great team now that Her Sakiness has arrived, Hisa and Mako decide it's finally time to enrol their school mahjong club in the Nationals (I'm assuming the championship not the insignificant Australian political party. You're allowed to laugh, why the silence?), so they go to the revered halls where the events will be taking place and sign up for the first time, and to see who they're competing against. I know Kyoutarou is a bloke, but I saw very few others in that hall, mahjong isn't a so called girls game is it? Is it okay for me to admit to liking it? Ah never mind, back to my purple themed computer and business shirts. It's my favourite colour dontchaknow?

Back at the club and the gang sans Hisa and Mako are playing a game of… brace yourselves… mahjong, when Yuki begins to get frustrated over not winning a game for a while, so Saki passes off another mind bogglingly good set to let her win a round. When Nodoka notices, she flips out (if you'll pardon the Mahjong related pun) and storms out with Saki running along behind her.

"Sorry, there’s no way your hairstyle is more awesome than mine."

This is where what I was talking about before with frames of reference in our own narrow interests start playing (I'm sorry, I'll work on my puns better for the next one) out. Nodoka confesses the reason why she acted so cold to Saki isn't because her name sounds like a type of rice wine of which I am quite partial but nobody else in my family is (canned laughter, thank you!), but because she doesn't think Saki is taking the game seriously, and if they want to enter the Nationals she'll need to be at the top of her game. Canned laugher? Doesn't Sake come in bottles?

Aww, nothing says commitment like a contract :)

In a climactic moment of reverence that rivals all the cheesy love confessions in far too many anime series I would never admit to watching here (Shuffle! cough cough!), Saki gulps and exclaims that YES she wants to take her team to the Nationals! Like a typical girl in the aforementioned type of scene, the light behind Nodoka changes, she gasps and her hair flails wildly in the wind! Are you sure Saki? You willing to put all your effort in? Wow, this changes everything! Cue dramatic exit. Oh yeah, and to make life interesting, Saki's sister who lives in The City is a legendary mahjong player that Nodoka is aware of but who Saki hasn't been in contact with for a while.

I guess you could say the mahjong table has been set for the rest of the series. Of course, if you weren't very witty and that's the best thing you could come up with. It's 7am on a Sunday and I have to study and work all day, so my wittiness isn't up to its usual calibre. My wittiness has calibre?

Ooh, good idea!

Time for some shameless self promotion! I've started a new website for a pet project of mine that isn't a website at all, it's just an RSS feed. Technically I could have published all the stuff here on my blog, but I thought I'd give this a try.

//rubenerd.com/puzzles.xml

Some people start blogs about their obsession with cupcakes, so I’ve decided to create one to keep track of the pretty sudoku puzzles I try to do on a regular basis. I figure my blog already has enough stuff on it, and I don’t want to fill up my Flickr account which already has enough things that aren’t photos!

To keep things simple, this page is just an RSS feed I craft myself. Most modern browsers will generate a pretty page when they encounter a web feed, which means I don’t have to worry about CMSs, HTML, themes, maintenance, blasted PHP! You can even subscribe to it if you really care.

Peace, health and happiness ^_^
~ Ruben (@Rubenerd)

Unless the purpose of your site is to be an Ajax application, regardless of whether you're using it to dynamically load in comments on pages from services such as Disqus, or your own comment systems on sites such as Lifehacker, or for some reason static text and images, using JavaScript to compose pages is just a dumb thing to do.

I linked to The Nationals (an Australian political party) for a joke on a previous post and noticed this garbled mess of text and images along with an appropriate image of an irritated kid, presumably because he's just as unimpressed as I am and feels bad being associated with such a page! I shouldn't have to re-enable JavaScript just to read a static web page.

Friends, don't let your web designer friends use JavaScript to compose pages!

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

Photo above is of my bedroom in Singapore in 2004 shortly before we moved again. The reason why its there in a second!

I'm not at liberty to divulge what or for whom for the latter, but over the last two days I've been frantically working on two programs, one for an assignment. 3,900+ lines for the work, 720+ for the assignment, neither of which were particularly complex. Still, my eyes only just stopped protesting when I gave them some eye drops!

Unless you count XML or SQL I've never programmed concurrently in two different languages before, fortunately Java and Python are different enough that I wasn't accidentally writing Python code and expecting javac to interpret it properly! One thing you do really start to appreciate when you do Python and Ruby is just how verbose (and to a large degree tedious) Java is. Having to write entire setter and getter methods to just return what is essentially primitive data, not having a brain dead simple way to read characters from prompts, the gloriously simple Ruby way for dealing with arrays, I could go on. I guess in Java's favour for a learner like me it's fairly consistent and the Javadocs are very thorough and relatively easy to follow.

It's funny though how my brain has started thinking of programming languages as tools in which there's a right one for a job. I could have used Automater on Mac OS X but when I needed to organise a bunch of files and rename them for both projects I wrote a quick Perl script. I never really learned much shell scripting, so for my Perl fills that roll, and it does a superb job. I can remember when I was learning Perl in high school, those were happier days so it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Acme! CPAN! Perl golf! Like I've said here, I feel as though my life peaked in 2004, it was a magical year.

Earlier in high school we did Visual Basic, but I'd sooner call my foot a toaster than dignifying it with the title of "programming language"! Well okay I did have fun with that too, I remember showing Ms Coupland some really stupid nonsensical applications that didn't do anything.

The other funny thing is I while I did do some rudimentary QBasic and QPascal in primary school, the "programming language" I used the most when I was a kid were simple DOS BAT (batch) files. I remember writing silly text based games and at one point I even had a crappy flat file organiser for our CD collection which I lost interest in once I realised my dad was so impressed he wanted me to type all the CDs into it! I really wish I could find it.

The next things I want to get involved with in my own spare time if I ever get any again is to continue playing around with my second hand Sinclair Spectrum or even better giving some PDP-8 assembler a try.

I'm sure most of you have some nostalgic programming stories, anything fun or interesting you want to share?

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

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One of the most common uses for the Stacks feature on Leopard and Snow Leopard is to have an icon for the primary hard drive sitting in the Dock; it allows you to navigate most parts of the entire filesystem include user folders, applications and so on. Problem is, you need a separate icon for each drive.

This afternoon though I found a way to have one Stack icon for all your drives: drag the /Volumes folder onto the dock instead! /Volumes is the hidden folder on your Mac's primary hard drive that contains the mounts for each of your other drives.

To unhide /Volumes so you can drag it onto the Dock:

1. open the Finder
2. click Go to folder on the Go menu
3. enter /Volumes (including the forward slash) and hit Return
4. click the column view toolbar button

Unfortunately, the bad news is List view just displays a series of aliases that launch in the Finder. If you use the Grid view on Snow Leopard though you can now navigate to all the folders on all your mounted drives with one icon.

Because another episode of Bakemonogatari is out, it means a new vector desktop background of Her Senjougharaness! Here's hoping her lack of appearances in episode 09 and episode 10 are rectified next week!

Honestly, she is one of the most compelling characters I've ever seen in an anime series and one of the first truly weird and unconventional people since Haruhi before her disastrous second season. Maybe it's because I love office supply shops ^_^. I see your stapler Hitagi, and I counter with… my stack of multicoloured post it notes! Haiya!

I'd also say that I like her character because she has purple hair and purple is my favourite colour, but that might give people the wrong idea at a time when I'm mistaken for someone I'm not far too often enough as it is. My sister clearly doesn't have that problem! Ruben-ko? Wait, Suruga would be interested in me then not Hitagi, whoops!

I had a point somewhere in this post, but I forgot what it was. Oh yeah, new desktop background. As Marvin Martian would say, Earth shattering kaboom stuff!

Because I took an extended leave of absence to take care of my mum, I hit the ground running and launched back into studying and work at full speed again once I arrived back in Adelaide. For the first time since resuming though, I'm starting to think I've bitten off more than I can chew.

Fortunately I have things like Twitter and my blog here. Most of said blog's posts you read here I've typed on my iTelephone while commuting on the train and consider them a pleasant distraction and break from my responsibilities; I suppose I just wish the ratio was a bit more favourable!

My father back in Singapore who works his brains out 24/7 has assured me such studying and work is giving me experience for what to expect when I'll [hopefully] hold down a full time job when I graduate! If you're a student, or a worker who's probably doing more for less now in a difficult economic climate, or an unemployed person who's desperately searching for work, or a parent taking care of a crazy infant, or some combination of all of the above, what are you strategies for remaining sane?

Thanks to the power of The Twitters I've made friends with people in a new home who I've never met. Presumably they actually exist and are not just Turing machines. That reminds me, the UK government apologised to him! Only took them half a century. Century has cent at the beginning like centimetre and a cent coin because it deals with units of 100. Devilish cunning.

This isn't good, I was going to post a link to something but I've point blank forgotten what it was… I think I mixed up a couple of analogies there. I'm not going to glance over at the tab bar, I want to remember this for myself. Something I read on Twitter. Dollar reaching new low? Some guy forgot to… CUPCAKES! Yes, I remember now! And it only took my cheating by glancing up at the tab bar to see it!

Welcome to MonnieCakes.com! Soon this website will become my little hub for all things cupcakes. I bake cupcakes, make them out of polymer clay and make them into little charms and earrings, I draw them and I collect everything I see that is cupcake related. They are adorably cute!

I will start posting up recipes and also my vanilla and chocolate cupcake recipes that never let me down and are incredibly delicious. I hope to start posting photos and videos of my cooking too, so you can see what I’m making/drawing :).

I’ll also be posting cupcakes to Ruben in Mawson Lakes that I make on a regular basis from now on because not only is he extremely intelligent and articulate, but above all he’s modest, humble and would never fabricate quotations to suit his own appetite or culinary interests.

Check back for more updates soon!

xx Monnie

I like the idea, the theme and the colour scheme. Hehe, that rhymed.

Unless I were to print nonsense on sugar paper and wrap it around a slab of apple crumble which I would have claimed to have baked myself but really I bought it from down the street, I don't think anything I blog about here could be construed to suggest dessert preparation. The girls on K-On always seem to be eating good cakes :).