Rubenerd

It's been a very weird day. In the morning I locked myself into my house by accident when I had a test (the subject of another post, don't worry it had a happy ending!), I tripped over and landed on my arse when walking to the train station on a perfectly flat footpath, and throughout the whole day my energy fluctuated more than a shot capacitor.

ASIDE: I wouldn’t know if that capacitor comparison was apt or not, I’m doing computer science not computer engineering. Dang circuit boards ain’t worth squat if software isn’t written for them, am I right science guys?

Anyway I saw this and thought it was hilarious enough for me to justify staying awake after all ^_^. For those who don't know, this is Hirasawa Yui from K-On! dressed up as Suzumiya Haruhi from her self-titled series. Despite having the getup down pat, somehow Yui just can't convey Harhui's sinisterness!

Ever since seeing the Flintstones Meet the Jetsons (did I get that the right way around?) when I was a tiny person I've loved seeing crossovers. Like when Haruhi showed that cover from Shuffle in the original series, or with all those references in Lucky Star. Or that scene in Code Geass when Lelouch said he'd met Captain Kathryn Janeway from the Federation Starship Voyager. Yeah, that happened, look it up.

The prophecy has come true! In a kind of half-arsed way. Too bad the shirts from February 2008 are no longer available.

So here's the deal: Yahoo and Microsoft have formed a partnership of sorts where Yahoo uses Microsoft search technology and Microsoft leverages Yahoo's media and eyeballs — I think. Our attention is naturally drawn to Google, the dominant search engine in the English speaking world and how much of an effect (if any) Microhoo will have on it.

As I mentioned here already, Dana Gardner and I briefly talked on Twitter about the possibility of Microsoft using it's newly acquired clout to undercut Google on price and in effect kill off their only major source of revenue. It's an interesting prospect; certainly history is ripe with examples of formerly big companies that Microsoft has taken down with such shrewd (and sometimes legally dubious) tactics. The word dubious is.

In the short term though I don't see it happening. The assumption here is Microsoft and Yahoo can offer a lower priced product; in this case paid search advertising; and therefore take customers away from Google. As with GNU/Linux on netbooks though, price alone has been shown not to be enough to get people to change. The other simple fact is it's not a level playing field. Google commands the lions share of the search market, if people want to do business online they go to Google.

When I first heard about Microhoo 2.0 I made this diagram to illustrate. To preempt any negative comments, yes it is very exaggerated but it makes my point!

Could this change in the medium to long term? With Microsoft's previous MSN, then Windows Live, then Bing efforts I felt bad for them, but with Yahoo it's a possibility. Adding two failing ventures doesn't automatically create a successful one though; if they both largely continue business-as-usual nothing will change.

It's a brilliant move on Microsoft's part; they got to butcher Yahoo without having to spend much money at all. Not sure what's really in it for Yahoo.

I tell you what though, I'm nervous about logging into my Flickr and Delicious accounts and seeing Bing logos everywhere. What about people with Yahoo email accounts?

Both these photos were taken in Mawson Lakes with my beloved little Nikon D60. I only had my 18-55mm kit lens with me instead of my prime 35mm f/1.8 but I think they came out okay. Aside from a little cropping/scaling they are exactly as they were taken without alteration and all that whatnot.

Look out, it's a gigantic coke can!

For those of you who don't know ZombiePlan, he's apparently a walking undead person who happens to have a plan. I'm envious; I'm neither a cool walking undead person nor do I have a plan. Unless drinking coffee, studying and typing incessantly on a keyboard to create a haphazard string of conciousness in the form of words on a blog counts as a plan.

ASIDE: If you spell plan by dropping all the letters except p and add the letters l, w and z, you end up with grilled cheese sandwich. Spooky huh?

Anyway I've never met this guy who lives in Adelaide but am fascinated by his various blog iterations and somewhat jealous that he's been able to churn out more interestingness (is that a word?) in fewer posts than have I. IBM. Really? How long have you been M?

This part of his latest post though had me confused:

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of Billy Mays, and found himself deleting the WHOLE of his public_html folder. […] His reign of terror must be stopped; we are not even safe after death. What will he target next?

And this part had me even more confused:

I like pie.

Perhaps he's talking about the plot for that alternative reality screenplay he's been writing for the last six years in secret, the one with the futuristic robots from the past that delete websites by throwing baked goods at law enforcement officers to distract them while they enter server rooms and delete specific files from servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they om servers, all while they all while they all while they they they they they

I'm sorry I crashed. What was I talking about?

Today, my friend Novephel was fiddling with his FTP folders, when he was possessed by the spirit of I like pie.

I still don't get it.

You'd think that decades-long thing called the Cold War would have taught us all this. Kind of sad for example that David Krieger penned this article in 2001 and so little has changed. It's sadly ironic the lengths some masochistic people will go to justify possession when they're [unwittingly I hope] justifying their enemies having them too.

Perhaps this is what George Orwell described as being the necessary constant threat to keep people scared, because everybody needs an enemy. Cue the conspiracy theorists!

Welcome to the real world I guess. I need some cheering up… perhaps I'll make a grilled cheese sandwich :).

Remember back when I discussed how since I started using it in 2007 Twitter had allowed me to contact famous people I admire and actually get replies from them? At last count I had Steve Gillmor, JD Lasica, Stephen Fry, John C. Dvorak, Mike Rann, and Alex Lindsay, now I can include Dana Gardner!

For someone with so many (sometimes conflicting) interests, I'm clearly still quite a simple person; one brief chat with someone like Dana is enough to make my evening :). You can keep your Britney Spears and other Twitter celebs, these people are the real deal.

What we swapped tweets about will be the subject of a future post, specifically Microhoo's ability to undercut Google. Interesting for lots of different reasons.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:16 – Getting hate messages a sign of honour; maturity by being able to laugh at yourself; news still being news if its not new; IRC and Twitter mudslinging whatnot; people getting snippy at me quoting David Letterman's comments on Aussie Rules football; scoring points if you miss; making fun sounds with buckling spring keyboards; the awesomeness of Unicomp in the US of A and this thing called a sense of humour!

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

There have been so many comments in both my Google Reader and Bloglines accounts about the problems with dodgy Facebook applications taking photos of your friends and deceptively using them in advertisements targeted at you as well as Facebook publishing things it's not supposed to I was all ready to write my own response in them both… when I remembered I had a blog for that kind of thing. I used to write longer things here at one point, uncanny.

I think the problems with so many of these flare-ups online can be traced to one flawed assumption, that privacy exists online. I'm guilty of having these thoughts too. Once you remove the assumption, it's surprising how trivial so many of these online problems seem. It's cliche, but Steve Rambam said it best when he decried that "privacy is dead, get over it!";. I've yet to see a convincing rebuttal of this.

These problems existed before Facebook (and Orkut, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster…) and they'll still be with is for the foreseeable future despite some mantras. If we all just assume there's no privacy and conduct our online lives accordingly, we'll be in a better position.

What is it they say? The power of accurate observation is often called pessimism by those who don’t posses it? Or is that cynicism?

Any gains made in privacy should be viewed in this context. Plus then it makes genuinely honest sites like Whole Wheat Radio that buck the trend that much more of a surprise and a joy to use as a result :).

In an ironic twist for my Singaporean readers, the WordPress post ID for this entry is 4888. Seems the 4 in that number is enough to offset even three 8s!

I've fallen victim to many avatar related crazes, but this could easily be the best one I've ever wasted a solid half and hour on. If you go to MadMenYourself.com, you can make yourself into a Mad Men style character with all the great 1960s graphics! When you're done, you're given three different sized images for various social networks and a spiffy desktop background. I like my blue suit and coffee cup :).

It's a great advertising campaign, it shows people don't mind advertisements if companies actually take the initiative to try something new and engage with their audience — though some people apparently aren't a fan of such thinking ;-).

I've never watched Mad Men before, but if appears locally I'll check it out. According to The Wikipedias it does play on SBS.