Rubenerd

It may shock you beyond recognition, but I'm typing this post as I sip an oversized coffee at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes. This time tomorrow I'll be on the last part of a flight back to Singapore, the closest place I've ever had to a so called "home" that people seem to have attachments to.

The problem with being an expat growing up and going to an international school in a foreign country is it's next to impossible to see many of your friends ever again because they've all since returned to their respective homes or even gone further out. Since the beginning of this year I've got word that some of my friends from Singapore have since moved to Seoul, Tokyo, Boston, London… and it struck me… that all these place names have a similar number of letters in their names. I'm entertaining the notion that this is some sort of government conspiracy, and like all conspiracy theories I base this on absolutely nothing.

What I love about living in Mawson Lakes in Adelaide in particular are the bike paths which snake their way alongside the river, then go through the science park and finally through a series of parks. I don't have a bike, I walk through them instead, often listening to IntoYourHead, Security Now and random songs about Chacaron and Surfin Birds.

I may not have a spiffy new iTelephone 3GS, but my lowly iPhone 3G was still with me so I took a few pictures, with the camera. I thought taking pictures with the camera would make more sense than attempting to reproduce the scene in front of me by drumming out trillions of binary digits on the iTelephone's keyboard. I may have still been there typing after I'm due to be back in Adelaide again in August.

I have grand ambitions for this trip home to Singapore; firstly I'm going to have real hot chocolate from Max Brenners at The Esplanade, teeppnyaki after teeppnyaki, masala chicken and sates from the Newton circus hawker centre which is just down the road, Japanese-Italian pasta from Wheelock Place, Sakae Sushi until I can't bear the thought of eating more raw fish, litres of Starbucks coffee with my laptop, authentic German grub at Werner's Oven, Brotzeit, Baden Baden and the Paulaner at Millennia Walk… then I'll spend the last day of the trip at a liposuction clinic.

One thing people comment on when they visit me in Adelaide is how it very rarely changes, whereas if you leave Singapore for even six months a dozen shopping centres and apartment buildings have been razed and rebuilt! I've been told three new shopping centre towers have been finished along Orchard Road, and the 70+ floor condo outside my bedroom window has been topped off.

What I'm looking forward to most is seeing my dad, he's been under a ton of stress with the latest project he's overseeing, hopefully we'll be able to make a budget airline trip to Bali or Vietnam while we're there.

Anyway better go, this place is filling up fast. Bird bird bird, the bird is the word.

Murphy's law has been striking me with a vengence today, with three unrelated online events that will be taking place while I'm in the sky between Adelaide and Singapore or shuffling through airport Xray machines.

Firstly, one of my favourite Whole Wheat Radio artists Steve Durr is performing live at 20:00 Alaskan time. Last time I heard Steve live at Whole Wheat I managed to buy a CD to share with my dad and we even got a signed poster! When I found out about the time I promptly kicked the table and stubbed my big toe. As my mum used to say about herself and eye shadow, I never looked good in purple.

The second is of course the epic Facebook landgrab where you'll be able to register for a username to finally rid ourselves of those narly user ID numbers. The username registration will be going live at 13:00 US Pacific time. Granted I have a fairly unusual name combination, in fact searches online have only ever returned one other Ruben Schade who happened to be a part of the Roswell investigation of all things. Still, it'd be nice to be sure.

The third is grilled cheese sandwiches.

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Upgrading All FreeBSD Ports via portupgrade [StartupCTO]

(categories: ports portupgrade freebsd)

Full Moe Panic!!!: Minami-ke is dead. Long Live Minami-ke~okawari

(categories: anime reviews blogs)

Winter 2009 Anime Season Preview « Tekky99’s Anime Blog

(categories: anime reviews blogs)

For a bit of a change in Xfce on my FreeBSD machines I've decided to eschew the Tango Project iconset and use the Gnome Desktop icons available from the ports collection:

# cd /usr/ports/x11-themes/gnome-icons
# make install clean
# echo "Grilled Cheese Sandwiches"

They're very classy and quite minimalistic which really appeals to me, and even though I use Xfce instead of Gnome which the icons were originally designed for, they work smashingly. Did I just say "smashingly?"

Now if only the folder icons weren't that dull sand colour we'd be in business!

So here's the deal, at some point we can't determine my sister's passport was water damaged. We thought it would just be a simple matter of going to the Australian passport office here in Adelaide and renewing or replacing it.

Of course we should have known it wouldn't be that simple! Unfortunately she isn't entitled to a renewal or quick replacement because her current passport was issued to her when she was under 18. For all intents and purposes she has to literally apply for a brand new passport which means she needs to present a series of documents to confirm her ID.

Now here's where the problems set in. Elke hasn't been back here in Australia very long, she was still in Singapore right up till midway through 2008. As a consequence she doesn't have Australian bank accounts, an Australian universal healthcare Medicare card, utility bills in her name, nothing. She has her birth certificate, her currently valid but damaged passport, her university student card and a bank card with a Singaporean bank, but that's it. Even though all have her name, two are photo IDs and two have her signature, they're not enough.

As a result we've been frantically dashing around applying for things using whatever ID we've been able to scrape together at the time, and slowly building it up from there. It's a chicken and egg disaster, whenever we apply for something we need something else as ID which needs the thing we're applying for as ID!

I'm grateful people take identity verification seriously, but I can't help but think these ridiculous requirements are like DRM and copy protection on digital content; it only inconveniences honest people. I have to think if you wanted to perform identity theft, you wouldn't be stopped by this stuff.

Now if you'd excuse me, we're off to get Elke a bank account so she can use the deposit book from it as ID to help get a Medicare card so she can apply for a passport, hopefully by today otherwise it won't be processed in time by the priority service before we leave for Singapore on Saturday. Fun times!

All clear for takeoff!

In part one of my sister's and my saga to get her a new passport when her current one suffered water damage I talked about our frantic dash to apply for accounts, Medicare, proof of age cards and other such riff raff so we had enough ID for her to satisfy the conditions.

Our efforts were not in vain; after a grueling interview comparing tens of provided documents to the official forms to find a combination that satisfied all the conditions, we finally got one that worked. The women serving us was extremely friendly and understanding, she even saw our last name and started speaking German to us!

Elke will be receiving her passport this Friday.

Unfortunately it wasn't until after we left that I realised I hadn't got the women's name who served us. So many people in banks and government offices treat us like crap on a regular basis that when exchanges like this happen I try to always send positive feedback which I'm sure is ignored most of the time but it's the least I can do. At least I got to say Haben Sie vielen Dank!

This shows my own ignorance, but did you know the Midnight Commander I talked about recently (If you've never tried Midnight Commander…) also comes with it's own fully featured editor? I've been using MC for years and never knew this!

To edit a file with the Midnight Commander editor, invoke it with the e option:

% mc -e [filename]

The key commands are similar to Midnight Commander's file management mode and are presented along the bottom of the screen, and a convenient bar along the top lets you know the current line and character position of your cursor amongst other things. Hitting [F10] brings up up an easy to use menu system.

I won't be giving up on my beloved Vim and nano editors any time soon, but using an editor with a blue background, grey text and menus is a nice DOS nostalgia trip!

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

MacMatte

An official blog encouraging Apple to bring back the matte display options in MacBooks. Much needed.

(categories: apple hardware blog)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Twitter hype punctured by study

I use and love Twitter because I have so many dear international friends on it, because it's fun and because it's a pleasant distraction from studying. While I have largely given up on blog aggregators because Twitter and trending topics let me know when things happen almost instantly (India's new PM, the recent Air France crash appeared before anything came through Google Reader), people claiming it's the future of journalism and the greatest thing since grilled cheese sandwiches I think could benefit from a reality check personally.

(categories: news twitter internet bbc)

If you can’t view the officially greatest video of all time here, try it on YouTube directly. The song is none other than Chaccaron Maccaron.

I have a very sophisticated palette. By that I mean colours.

Update 2019: The original video was taken down, but I found a replacement.

If you're interested in Apple hardware you're probably already well versed in the changes Apple announced and the last thing the blogosphere needs is another personal blog talking in detail about changes you could read about in hundreds of other sites.

What I will say is that it's fantastic that Apple listened to their customers and once again includes FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 on ALL their models now. If you recall late last year I had an entire series of posts tagged the MacBook FireWire Debacle where I was discussing what a terrible decision it was to remove FireWire from the MacBook at the time:

• Possible reason why there’s no MacBook FireWire
• MacBook a winner, unless you need FireWire
• The penultimate plus one MacBook FireWire post
• Addressing some MacBook FireWire arguments
• Apple still claims the MacBook includes FireWire
• Obituary for FireWire 1999-2008
• Apple’s tragic FireWire MacBook mistake

I seem to recall there were several people posting comments on my blog here disputing what I was saying by claiming FireWire isn't necessary anymore, and that Apple was removing a "legacy" port. I like Apple products but I'm not an apologist; I called them out for this bad decision and it's good to see they've corrected their mistake.

What I am disappointed about is despite the improved screen technology in the 15 inch MacBook Pro model, it is STILL only 1440x900 resolution. It baffles me that the 17 inch model was updated from 1680x1050 to 1920x1200 without problems, but the 15 inch model is still stuck with essentially the same resolution as the PowerBook line from years past. As I've said here, I'll upgrade when this changes.

Overall I'm impressed with the new lineup, but as a proud owner of a first generation MacBook Pro from 2006 with a 2.0GHz Core Duo CPU I still don't feel as though it's worth upgrading yet. Looking forward to Snow Leopard!