Rubenerd

C’mon! Eat the can! C’mon!

I haven't done something like this in several years on my blog here, but this one article I read in the USA Today just begged to be investigated by a computer science student who uses and loves Twitter and who's supposed to be doing homework.

SAN FRANCISCO — Dave Magnusen has never used Twitter, yet it bugs him.

"It’s a form of communication, but it’s not very social," says Magnusen, 55, a database administrator in Durham, N.C. "You can’t ignore (Twitter), but it’s kind of sad how it’s replaced people talking."

That's right, I don't make dozens of international phone calls a day because I don't have the money or time, it's because Twitter makes me not want to talk! Glad we got that straightened out.

Tony Fuda feels the same way. The Niles, Ohio, native is particularly irked by tweets that insist on sharing the most mundane details of life.

“Do we really need to know that you just put your pants on, just brushed your teeth, just ordered a hamburger, just finished dinner, just walked out of the bathroom?” he says.

If he's not interested, why does he read them? Why are we also not hearing about how he finds certain magazines he doesn't have an interest in mundane?

Magnusen’s and Fuda’s gripes underscore a strong undercurrent of resentment — and incredulity — by non-Twitter users toward the social-media service used by tens of millions.

Just like popular fiction in the eyes of literary critics, if lots of people like it, it can't be good.

Earlier this month, Twitter bashers had another reason to send their tongues wagging: A new study concludes that 40% of tweets are “pointless babble.”

Pear Analytics categorized 811 out of 2,000 random tweets over two weeks as babble. It categorized 751 (38%) as conversational, 174 (9%) as moderately interesting and 117 (6%) as self-promotional. Spam accounted for only 4%, or 75, of the tweets.

So in other words, Twitter has a higher percentage of useful material than the Internet in general? Why is this being presented as a bad thing?

Callie Greenberg is not sweet on tweets. “I can’t stand it,” says Greenberg, 25, a medical-sales rep in Denver who is a loyal Facebook user. “Twitter is basically the same as updating your status on Facebook — only 20 times a day. It’s overuse, almost stalkerish. Get a life.”

The problem with using sweeping generalisations is most often they're complete nonsense. Twitter is not "basically the same"; you use Facebook to keep in contact with friends, you follow people on Twitter because you're interested in what they have to say.

If you "can't stand it" Callie, don't tell people who find it useful to "get a life" and don't use it. Very simple.

Many bemoan the loss of face-to-face communication among a generation of people glued to their smartphones, netbooks or websites.

All but half a dozen of the 270+ people I follow live overseas, and I'm sure if you talk to most other Twitter users they'd say the same, if you had bothered to while researching your story.

“It’s a look-at-me technology that seems to be more about vanity and competition than about information,” says Jason King, 32, of Maysville, Ga. He does not use Twitter or Facebook.

I use it to keep in touch with people I care about and who I'm interested in. If that's vanity and competition about information, then call me a vein competitor!

Bottom line folks: if you don't get Twitter or don't see how it could be useful to you, don't use it. Very simple.

Thanks to Sparx for sharing this story from Dispatches from the Culture Wars in Google Reader. It seems many of our suspicions over Palin's effectiveness as a running mate were true:

A new study of polling data from last year’s election shows that it was not the financial crisis last fall that boosted Obama over McCain, it was the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate that destroyed any chance the GOP had of winning the election. The data reveals that the financial crisis that famously prompted McCain to “suspend” his campaign did very little to change voters’ minds, but once he named Palin and she began to be known to the voting public, it was all downhill from there.

I find this oddly comforting. As I said back during the American presidential campaign last year, while I would have been pleased if Barack Obama beat John McCain, I was far more afraid of Sarah Palin being in a position of power. To put it as mildly as an American mustard, her proud anti-intellectual stance creeped me out no end, and the fact some people took her seriously scared the living daylights out of me.

I blogged about how picking Sarah Palin had backfired amongst voters of my age in the United States back in October 2008, it's heartening to see this turned out to be broadly true.

If you're really interested, all my ramblings about the 2008 US elections were tagged as such.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Index of /pub/gnome/binaries/mac

Mac OS X binaries for the Gnome Gedit, Tomboy, Glade3 and Tasque apps

(categories: gnome floss software macosx)

Today has not been a very good one for the intertubes. For the second time in the last couple of days Rubenerd.com went offline for an extended period of time, fourth time if you count database connection errors. SegPub guarantees a free month's hosting if uptime dips below 99.5%.

The timing could not have been worse, some of the blog posts I had written regarding OpenSolaris and Java were supposed to be used in a practical today because I thought I could get some valuable feedback (which I did) instead of just writing it up in OpenOffice or Word. I showed the results of a well known downtime indicator to the teacher, but he was not impressed. Serves me right for trying to think outside the box.

I got a reply from the SegPub discussion mailing list regarding the matter:

I can assure you we haven’t had any outages recorded today. We monitor all our services from 19 redundant locations, if 2 or more report an issue then we consider a service to be down and we’ll react immediately.

I’m not saying it wasn’t down for you, but just in regards to our monitoring, we haven’t had any outages today. To give you a bit of background, this is the first time since February 2009 that we’ve had any kind of issues, its just unfortunate when things happen they tend to happen all at once.

It’d be great to see if we can get some source IP addresses you were connecting from so we can trace the issues at our edge routers so we can trace back and work out if perhaps there’s a network issue along the way.

I can assure you we take downtime VERY seriously, and we strive to maintain our excellent uptime and stability.

I believe them when they say they take downtime seriously, but respectively their claim that there was no downtime today is simply not true.

I could understand if it was just my isolated IP address or ISP having connection problems, but I was able to confirm with people living in Singapore and London that it was offline, and as you can see from the screenshot from the following website they were reporting it down too.

I've had nothing but positive experiences to report with SegPub, they run a tight ship. Here's hoping these last couple of days were just one off occurrences. If it does happen again I'll be running a dtrace to see where the problem starts.

Frog 1: BUD…
Frog 2: WEIS…
Frog 3: ER…

Frog 1: BUD…
Frog 2: WEIS…
Frog 3: ER…

For people of my age who have left high school and university and haven't been in the workforce long (or for people like me who for family reasons ended up taking a leave of absence and are just starting to study again) invariably conversations tend to drift towards discussion of people we knew from high school and spent so much of our lives with, and how little we see them now. I guess it's normal for us to think we'll buck the trend compared to every other generation and stay in constant contact with those in our last high school year when we graduate, but it never happens!

There are two conflicting phenomena here I can talk about from personal experience related to this, one of which is the problem with being a third culture kid from an international school where people I went to high school with have since scattered themselves around the globe. Unlike other kids who grew up with a common history for where they were living, we were together simply by the chance that our expatriate parents happened to wind up working in the same country. Don't get me wrong, the expat lifestyle was fantastic, but we weren't kidding ourselves that for the most part we were a tenuously held together, closed little community in a foreign country that would break apart when year 12 ended. A meaningful reunion in our case would be next to impossible, at last count I have people in my year living in Korea, Japan, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan… I could go on.

By being third culture kids we experienced life outside the comfort zone of our home country and got used to somewhere else which I can say really changed me in profound ways. Patriotism seemed less important, roots even less so. I guess you could say it turned many of us into nomads without a sense of where home is. Many of us (like me) who lived the formative years of our life there lost what little connection we had to our home countries, but unfortunately we didn't entirely assimilate into the new one either. Given what we got in return though, I'm not complaining!

With the advent of sites like Facebook (or MySpace and Friendster before that) people of my generation have been able to keep in contact and see what the people we shared our high school experience with are doing in a way nobody else has been able to do. The ironic thing is, one thing we expat kids have in common with those who grew up and lived in the same city their entire lives, is that many of us are apathetic towards such people! I guess that's another thing us expat kids have to our advantage, we can choose to study in cities where nobody else from our year group went to!

I honestly wonder sometimes what it'd be like to be studying at university in the same city with the same people you went to high school with, you'd be bound to bump into some of them sometimes. While I don't envy that, I do envy the sense of attachment and purpose people must get from being able to point out where they went to primary school, and high school, and where they had their first date, and where they got their first car… all in the one place. I'm sure there are plenty who would be willing to dismiss such stuff as trivial, but they're lucky.

I suppose for me I don't feel tied down, so if I did take that job offer in Toronto I wouldn't hesitate. Would be harder to leave your loved ones, friends and history to a place you've lived your whole life. Heck, most of my extended family live in Sydney and around Germany.

Adelaide has been a great adopted Aussie home for me so far though, I'll grant it that. It's nice to have a place in Australia where I have memories and some resemblance of history that happened after I was 5 years old and therefore incapable of remembering much. I did live in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane I'm told!

I've been so good these last few weeks restraining myself by not blogging more than five new posts a day, but this sudden, spur of the moment event desperately called for something to be posted… in this case quite literally! Sometimes I have to remind people I'm hilarious otherwise they'd forget you see.

Shortly after it went live here in Australia I placed a pre-order for Snow Leopard! According to them it'll be shipped on the 28th.

Take that Windows 7 Starter, Windows 7 Home Basic, Windows 7 Home Premium, Windows 7 Business, Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 7 Ultimate and Windows 7 Whatnot! :)

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for shopping at the Apple Store. We’re processing your order now.

Please visit Order Status to review, maintain, and track your order at any time.

If you have questions about Payment Details, What Happens Next, or Shipping and Delivery Details, please visit Customer Service.

We will let you know by email when your order ships.

ORDER
Part Number: MC223Z/A
Product Name: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Unit Amount (ex GST): A$35.45
Quantity: 1
Net Amount (ex GST): A$35.45
Ships by: By August 28th

ORDER SUBTOTAL: A$35.45
GST AMOUNT: A$3.55

ORDER TOTAL: A$39.00

And to think it only seemed like yesterday when I was in Singapore for the launch of Leopard and uploaded some photos. Can't believe that was in 2007, time flies huh?

That is the view outside the Boatdeck Cafe where I typed up this post early this afternoon as I drank a huge cup of frothy coffee to warm me up. The rain stopped as soon as I came in of course.

Weather is an unpredictable beast, to the extent that meteorologists can sustain their lives by attempting to predict it with newer and more expensive equipment which themselves are funded by the preoccupation we all have with not getting ourselves wet when we leave the house and ensuring we're wearing adequate clothing for the temperatures we'll be facing. That was a very long sentence, especially when compared to this one.

In a day where other cities in the country were experiencing mini heatwaves (Sydney and Brisbane I'm looking at you!) Adelaide was blustery and frigidly cold. Blustery is a word right? It was insanely windy, so windy that the glass in our windows was rattling and creaking and the rain was falling almost horizontally. I also saw a semi trailer loaded up with bricks and cinder blocks literally sailing through the air outside the window, though that could have just been a Matchbox car.

The screenshot above was from the SBS World News bulletin from earlier this evening. We were told two low pressure systems acting on each other so disruptively isn't unusual in itself, but that it typically happens in Australia in September-October not August! Adelaide is right in the middle of the two bands of white cloud stuff.

Why am I boring you with bad weather talk this evening? It has to do with personal safety, from personal experience. You can safely ignore the nonsense I've belaboured so far, but I'd start taking notes from here on if I were you.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you per chance find yourself facing the daunting task of taking on extremely heavy rain and strong winds, do not take a very large umbrella thinking it will help to shield you from getting too wet. For one thing it's entirely ineffective; when rain isn't obeying gravity or the laws of physics your crappy piece of material held together with tiny metal rods isn't going to do squat.

Secondly, and more importantly, by using a huge umbrella in strong winds and rain you are essentially unfolding a gigantic sail which if you hold on to makes you the servant in the relationship, not the master. This afternoon the wind was so strong I was being pulled by the umbrella and as a result was nearly forced off a bridge twice and onto the road in the path of an oncoming automotive driver in their motorised vehicle. I would not have wanted to be the person to clean up that mess.

If my terrifying message of hope has been useful, consider donating me a cup of coffee by clicking the link on the right hand side of the site here. It's a small price to pay for your safety am I right? Wait, that really didn't sound right. Did I mention I saw a semi trailer loaded up with bricks and cinder blocks sailing through the air?

I won't be giving up Xfce on my FreeBSD desktop any time soon, but Gnome on my ThinkPad X40 keeps finding new ways to surprise me. Its a beautiful thing, and its free!

This might be an old feature, but its one I've found wildly useful: the ability to set locations in the panel clock. Other desktops let you do this, but it's all the little extras that Gnome does. Perhaps KDE 4.2 does, I haven't had the chance to try yet.

When you define a series of locations they appear on a map of the world complete with an approximate night/day cast. Under the map each location is shown with digital and analogue clocks, and what I've found absolutely brilliant is each timezone is displayed relative to where you are, NOT to GMT! For example I can see Singapore is 1:30 behind us here in Adelaide, and Jim Kloss is 17:30 behind.

By default it's turned off, but if you use Gnome click the clock on your panel and click Locations.