Rubenerd

You remember when I posted about that women who was being rude to me on Twitter? Looks like her account was suspended:

WomanwithBite won’t be troubling you any more, because (s)he’s been breaching Twitter’s terms of service, regarding abuse etc, (s)he ain’t on twitter any more.

But I’m sure (s)he’ll come back in a different guise.

What's interesting is the person who posted this comment pointed out something I hadn't even given a second thought to: perhaps she was a he. Not sure how much of a difference if any it would have made when I was reading his/her messages to have been suspicious of that, but given he/she didn't link to any external accounts and his/her profile didn't include anything except reels upon reels of rude comments to a handful of people, it's entirely conceivable the person was a fabrication.

The funny thing is, I wish Twitter would get more serious about spam accounts than just rude people like her. I thought she was harmless :).

I downloaded her page from Google Cache and uploaded it here if you want to read the last few tweets she made, including the one where she called me a clown. If I am a clown, I don't get paid enough!

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

Checked into 1.347943, 103.634563.

• Location URL
• Checkin URL
• View Larger Map

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

Checked into Harbourfront MRT Station (Bukit Merah, Singapore).

• Location URL
• Checkin URL
• View Larger Map

Okay everyone I'm going to be blunt here and just come out. If you follow me on Twitter or read my blog here you may have noticed I sometimes talk about religion, and most of the time I have nothing positive to say about it.

I've mentioned here and on Twitter I'm an atheist and people ask me why. I responded in the past the same way virtually every other atheist does; by saying there has been no scientific or empirical evidence ever put forward to justify the belief in any god from any religion. People distort this to claim I'm saying there is no god and that it takes as much faith to deny it as it does to believe, claims which are nonsense of course. It turns out at least for me this is only part of the story.

For most of my life I was agnostic, but it wasn't until my mum died that I finally figured it out. I guess you could say it was a cynical Newton moment. She was one of the nicest, most moral people I have ever known, but she spent the last 12+ years of her life in slow, agonising pain and died around Christmas in 2007.

Now here's the part I don't understand. I'm told God stands by as earthquakes and the like happen because of the concept of free will, that god can't stop us living in earthquake-prone areas. If we lend this explanation credence we're still left asking: why did God create fault lines that cause earthquakes in the first place? And why go to all the trouble to create us in His image but leave dangerous and sloppy imperfections in our genetic coding that predispose us to diseases and mutations like cancer? Why did He invent bacteria, to punish those who can't afford sanitation? God can't stop us smoking to cause lung cancer, but my mum was healthy. It's obvious when we dig below the surface of this free will explanation, its bunk.

It's claimed god is all powerful, all knowing and all wise, and that most importantly he loves us. Much like a good piece of computer software cannot be made quickly, cheaply and well at the same time, all four of these conditions about God can't be true. The classical Greek philosopher Epicurus made this observation 2,000 years ago.

Given the amount of hate mail I get this doesn't seem to be self evident when I thought it would be, but if religious people are allowed to discuss the ways in which they saw the light and converted to their particular faith, it seems only fair I should be allowed to discuss why I became an atheist. If you were offended by what I said, I encourage you to take as open a view as you would with a person of another faith to your own instead of reading it as if I were an atheist and try reading this entry again.

Because this is a very personal family matter, I'm doing something unprecedented on the Rubenerd Blog and turning comments off. Believe me, I've heard every single possible response to this anyway. Feel free to comment on other sites and places, but don't expect a reply.

I'm now putting this issue to rest and moving on. I may discuss spirituality and science at some point though, I'm absolutely fascinated by the idea. When we applied science to astrology we got astronomy, when we applied science to alchemy we got chemistry: what will science yield when we apply it to spirituality? I'm really excited by the idea!

Thank you everyone. Peace, health and happiness,
Ruben

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Father's projects

Some amazing ship models!

(categories: models liners)

» Americans respect science – they just don’t understand any of it Dvorak Uncensored: General interest observations and true web-log.

"According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of Americans think science has had a mostly positive effect on society, and scientists are held in high regard – But along with all this adulation comes a shaky grasp of science"

(categories: science usa education)

Here's something interesting. If you use WordPress you can assign separate templates for different categories; presumably I'm assuming (what a redundant few words) this also means you could give different categories different CSS styles too.

The WordPress Codex says you can define different templates in your current theme based on the ID of the category you want to customise. If it doesn't find a specific template for the category, it reverts back to the theme default.

For example, the Rubenerd Show category here has an ID of 277 (the unfortunate legacy of using categories as tags before WordPress has native tag support) which means if I wanted to create a custom theme template for it, I'd create a category-227.php file. Other categories don't have that ID, so they'd continue to use the basic category.php template.

My plan of merging all my blogs into this one while giving the appearance of separate sites seems to be a neverending story, but all the pieces seem to be falling into place. So far I've learned:

• Each category can have its own RSS and Atom feeds
• Categories can be selectively blocked from appearing in the master site and feeds
• Using the this plugin and method the term /category/ can be hidden from URIs

I'm starting to think it may have been less work to just move my blog here to my Django system after all, but I guess I have the advantage in this case that someone else is maintaining the code. I've gone this far though I guess, so no point stopping now!

For those who may be interested, my dad now has an official website over at RainerSchade.com. We may be setting it up as a wiki based system for him to upload and write material to, but for now it's a simple link page to his Flickr and Last.fm accounts.

Now I just need him to finally get a Twitter account and we'll be in business!

Here's a little trick you can use to check how long a Twitter tweet is if you're specially crafting it in a text file or somewhere else and you don't have access to an editor that can count characters in real time. It sounds stupid, but this super-high-tech trick really works!

1. Open your text editor that uses a monospaced font
2. Write ten characters in a row (not literally, like this: oooooooooo)
3. Highlight them, then copy and paste 14 times
4. Write your tweet underneath and check the length!

This brought to you by the Rubenerd Blog Department of Redundant Information Department, a subsidiary of the Bureau of Oversight. Patent pending, and whatnot.

Speaking of latest photos on Flickr, I recently uploaded another comparison photo of my Commodore 16 (Wikipedia) and my new Unicomp SpaceSaver which you can see above.

A photo of my Commodore 16 home computer from the 1980s above my new Unicomp SpaceSaver buckling spring keyboard made to the same specifications as the venerable IBM Model M keyboard which came out around the same time.

They’re uncannily similar, right down to the texture of the plastic! Perhaps I need to get a Commodore 16 sticker to put on this :)

In this photo their similarities are less striking than this photo I took which really shows the colour and texture of the plastic to be similar, if not exactly the same.

I love tech nostalgia from a bygone era. If as I said in the photo comment above I could get a Commodore 16 sticker to place on my Unicomp SpaceSaver that'd just be… what was it the kids were saying in the 1980s? It'd be… radical!