Rubenerd

This check-in was imported to the Annexe from Brightkite, one of the first geolocation social networks.

Checked into Adelaide Airport SA (Adelaide Airport SA, Australia).

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It's the Rubenerd Blog's 2000th blog post, and what better way to celebrate than to show my current desktop background. Yup, on my MacBook Pro which is my primary workhorse I've given up on them because as I put in this tweet here:

I just realised something: I don’t need a desktop background/wallpaper anymore because I never minimise TweetDeck! #Obsessive

It looks like I'm not the only one either. Who would have thought back in 2007 how much Twitter would become such an integral part of our lives?

Happy 2000 posts everybody! Not that I'm counting ;-).

"Okay Yui you’re scaring me now!"

Isn't it always the case that trifling little things like work and studying get in the way of fun? Death, taxes and whatnot. In this epicly cute episode of K-On! we're reminded that these people are actually at school and have little things called mid year exams to prepare for, not just their club!

I thought it appropriate I talk about this particular episode when I'm supposed to be doing homework.

Sorry girls, you ain’t got nothing on the Bakemonogatari campus!

Yes so before I got sidetracked by talking about my own homework commitments, this aptly titled "Training" episode is about Yui learning what we thought was guitar and chords, but it turns out she couldn't even read sheet music! I have to say, one of the highlights of this series is seeing Mio's and Ritsu's frustration that's always exacerbated in new ways by Yui's antics. A 250,000 yen guitar and she can't even read sheet music? Ah I guess the beginning of a journey is the first step right? :)

Anyway there's one small problem with all this preparation and practise, her long time friend from kindergarten Nodoka reminds her she actually has to study for these things called midterm exams. In typical Yui fashion she smiles and nods in response to this, only to have it settle and dawn on her several long seconds later. Ah that's nice… wait we have WHAT?

"Aaaaaaaaaaa… choo!"

What ensues is Yui's flunking of her exam because she was too busy playing with her new guitar, and her subsequent week of studying so she can retake it, much of which is occupied by… playing with her new guitar. I should be doing this assignment but here I am taking about an already syndicated anime series, I can empathise!

Now here's where the scary plot-twist stuff starts to set in. Technically their school won't allow people retaking exams to partake in club activities, so if Yui fails a second time she'll have to stay away from the club indefinitely which means once again they'll have insufficient members to stay active and they'll fold. Game over, no more series! Fortunately Yui is still able to come and enjoy Tsumugi's bean deserts :).

"X & Y? Yeah that Coldplay album messed me up!"

Well the week goes by and it turns out Yui has done very little stuyding at all (no, really!?) so they all end up sitting with her in her room until late in the night helping her cram… oh wait, sorry Mio I mean "study". During that time we're introduced to Yui's younger sister Ui who's more mature than her sibling! I can relate, my younger sister is more mature than me!

And of course in typical silly K-On fashion she aces her test the second time around, only to then forgot how to play her dang instrument because she confused the algebra x and y for the chords! Yui Yui Yui…

So far this could be my favourite episode because it tackled such a mundane problem we all seem to face, and the characters still refuse to be pigeonholed. Mio in particular is the stereotypical shy bookworm but she also vents frustration rather than just blushing like so many others would in her situation.

NEENZ: If you want your favorite restaurants to stay in business, you have to eat there and share with the world! – http://bkite.com/0blZR

Done and done :)

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.

Articulated buses have better grammar.

Thank you.

Here's something interesting that I thought was interesting and took my interest because it was interesting. If you click About on the Help menu in applications written for the Gnome desktop environment and click Credits you can view the people who wrote the program which is pretty cool, but you'll notice they're ordered by first name not surname.

I thought that was highly interesting, didn't you?

This should really have been formatted as a Fun Fact.

"My lousy guitar skills are an illuuuuusion!"

Snow Leopard has a problem with MKV files. Oh bother.

It's been almost another week since I posted about episode 01 of K-On!. I gotta say having them in widescreen was worth the wait, on my old anime blog I would never review a show until it was in syndication because the DVD releases are higher quality and because when I get into a show I can't stand having to wait for the next one to come out! Short, fickle attention spans are… oh look at the cat.

"I just wanted to be a band, not for anyone to see me!"

Having committed herself to joining the light music club, Yui now faces the daunting task of actually learning how to play the gosh darn guitar, only a minor inconvenience when she's the lead of the band! It's even worse than this though, because she doesn't even have a guitar and certainly doesn't have the 50,000 yen to buy a decent one. A fail trifecta!

Not to worry though, because at this stage the Light Music Club is basically a Parisian cafe with cakes and tea that the ever so gracious Tsumugi provides. Honestly I can't really play any musical instruments well except for the drums and even then I'm terrible, but I'd go along with the flow and join a music club if I was offered all that good stuff in return :). Wonder if she can make a killer latte?

"Aw, you don’t want to make me mad do you?"

Unlike most other shows where the first episode establishes most of the cast, we're given an extended introduction through the eyes of Yui of the personalities of her friends. I think we'd all pretty much much established it all for ourselves, but fair enough!

Most of the rest of the epsode consists of Yui falling in love with a Les Paul electric guitar, seeing the 250,000 price tag and proceeding to figure out how the heck she can afford it. The club members pitch in and help her by taking up some dull, repetitive work but they simply can't make it up fast enough. Fortunately the rich and gracious Tsumugi can offer her services not by buying it outright but by providing certain "persuasive" arguments. I need someone like that for me at Apple, Sun Microsystems and/or Lenovo!

"How do you make the sound come out!?"

Yes in the end she gets her beloved guitar and yes she does look like a real musician, even if her guitar skills are as good as mine. Don't unplug that while the volume is still turned up! Argh!

What I continually love about this show aside from it's lighthearted nature and high life escape value is the characters are well defined. I've read plenty of scathing reviews of K-On where people proudly state that they hate them, but I like the way that Mio and Ritsu especially will display irritation and frustration just as I imagine many of us would in certain situations. A moeblob fanservice flick wouldn't have that. Disagree? Fair enough, don't watch it then!

I've been told by the folks over at GetUp that the Australian Federal Government will be trialling their Great Australian Firewall internet filtering system shortly, despite the overwhelming evidence presented that shows it will be ineffective and only serve to further slow down Australia's comparatively poor telecommunication infrastructure suffering from decades of chronic underinvestment and decay.

Dear Ruben,

A decision on the Government’s internet censorship filter could be just weeks away. It’s crunch time for our campaign.

Live trials are nearly complete on the filter technology which will allow the government of the day to add any "unwanted" site to a secret blacklist. This isn’t China, Saudi Arabia or Iran – we could see a mandatory filter of all internet traffic right here in Australia as early as this year.

In response do this issue I've decided to do three things. Firstly, I will continue to blog about this issue as I've done in the past using the NoCleanFeed tag. Be it ever so humble my blog is still on the intertubes and the more this issue gets discussed the harder it will be for people like Steven Conroy to merely sweep this issue under the electronic rug. You think that's a metaphor, but I reckon people like Conroy actually do believe such a thing exists. It's a flat surface above all them tubes.

Secondly, I've decided to try getting myself filtered by continuting to blog about anime series I'm watching, some of which occasionally have scenes which are considered by the Western media to be a bit "too sexy" compared to the blood, gore, graphic autopsies, gang warfare and gun violence on dramas and shows like A Current Affair which they consider perfectly acceptable for the viewing public. Thanks for the moral lesson guys!

Thirdly, I've decided to take the advice of GetUp and write to my local federal memeber of parliament and to Stephen Conroy directly:

Stephen Conroy
The Canberras
Australian Capital Territory

Dear Hon. Senator Conroy,

Dude.

Sincerely,
Ruben Schade

When appeals to logic, common sense no longer apply, how else do you approach problems? It's like dealing with people whi think Cheez Whiz is a food. Did you get me my Cheez Whiz boy?

On a somewhat related note, is Nick Xenophon still supporting the Great Australian Firewall so he can block gambling sites? In other words good intentions wrapped around a poorly executed and ultimately fruitless endeavour?

Decided to try Firefox 3.5.2 again now that I formatted and installed Snow Leopard fresh on my machine. Took even less time to crash this time. Back to 3.0.13 again.

The problem is Firefox is often shown as the poster child for the free and open source software movement and an alternative to unstable, slow and expensive software with vendor lockin. They're not doing the cause much good with these repeated problems.

It's affecting lots and lots of people on Windows, Mac and *nix, but fortunately it's not affecting everybody who uses it.

Given I've done pointless milestone posts celebrating 1960 and 1980 posts, it seems only fitting to now do one about the 1990s now that I'm inching closer to 2000. Wonder if my blog will have a Y2K like explosion when it reaches that?

Yes so I was born in the 1980s, but I think it's safe to say I "grew up" in the 1990s. The decade was about a ton of change for us as a family, we moved interstate three times and finally moved to our de facto home in Singapore, then moved apartment buildings twice. My sister and I changed schools three times, our schools changed campuses twice. About the only constant in that decade was the knowledge we had that it was useless to become too attached to a particular place because we weren't going to be there that long. It was a hell of a ride, and I wouldn't have traded it for anything… most of the time!

Of course the 1990s was when I first got interested in this little field called computing. Our first home computer that we bought ourselves instead of my dad bringing it home from work was a 486SX tower with a huge 4MiB of RAM, a 100MiB hard drive and MS-DOS with PowerMenu and XTree Gold, later Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, later Windows 3.1. We had Commander Keen 1-3 and Monopoly Deluxe 1.0 both of which my sister, dad and I play now! After that I got a Pentium MMX machine with a spiffy Zip drive (I escaped the click of death problem), we got Pacific dialup internet in 1997 and we got our first broadband connection with SingTel Magix in 1999.

On the entertainment front my sister and I grew up watching Agro's Cartoon Connection in the mornings when we lived in Melbourne and Brisbane, and cartoons on Premier 12 and Channel 5 in Singapore. Much of what we watched was British TV from Fireman Sam and Postman Pat to Banana Man and SuperTed. We also had really weird shows like LiftOff which I can still hear the guy complaining about all the silly things you're not supposed to do in the Foyer even now! Then there was Gumby which my mum hated but tolerated when it came on and we had to see.

Then there was the Japanese pop culture invasion. We all had Tamagotchis (my sister had a dozen!), we watched DragonBall Z and Sailor Moon (we both still do!). We had yo-yos upon yo-yos upon yo-yos which neither of us were very good at but they were nonsensical fun! We had Pokemon Red and Blue, I can remember a school camp to Thailand where the jocks got fed up trying to tease all us nerds because we were ignoring them as we were glued to our Gameboys trading Pokemon with those purple cables!

What else? Oh yeah the Beanie Baby shop in Wheelock Place in Singapore which closed down and is now a Japanese pasta shop. I didn't have too many of them but my sister collected them religiously, even when we went to Europe she'd get my parents to buy her bags full of them! Ah the blatent consumerism, that was the real hallmark of the 1990s, you gotta love it!

Ever since I was a little kid I never really liked pop music, one of the first CD sets I ever got for my birthday was a complete works of Ravel and another set of the Rat Pack! In the 1990s though we had the blasted Macarena and Mambo No. 5, we had Britney Spears back before she became a symbol for all that's wrong with the music industry, we had Oasis, Alanis Morissette and Robbie Williams, we had Ricky Martin who seemed to literally come out of nowhere.

Unfortunately the 1990s also marked the last time my late mum was healthy before she got cancer and spent most of my sister's and my living memory going to oncology wards and not having the energy to do anything. I can still vaguely remember when I was very little her painting and stitching all those stunningly beautiful pictures for our bedrooms with all the bright colours as well as her drawings and paintings of angels and views outside windows. Her favourite thing to draw was eyes. She also had a calligraphy business for place cards at formal events and weddings. She fought the f*cking Big C for over 12 years when most people give up after only a few because she said she wanted us to have memories of her. We do, and there isn't a day that goes by where we don't miss her.

Anyway what else about the 1990s? Oh yeah, my dad drove me up to Malaysia to see my first Formula 1 race! And while waiting for my mum at the hospital at weird times of night I unwittingly started my love affair with the coffee bean, later going to the then-new Starbucks and the surprisingly titled Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs that were popping up all over the island. We'd occasionaly make trips back to Australia to see relatives and I'd feel surprised at how little I rememberd about my birthplace and how disconnected I'd become. I'd feel weird walking around with my parents and seeing caucasian people everywhere! Where are the MRT stops? Why is there litter on the street? Why do people smile at me at shops even when I don't know them?

If you grew up in the 1990s what memories do you have? I'm sure I've left out a ton of stuff!