Rubenerd

Anyone else having this problem on Slashdot this evening? Running Firefox 3.5b4 with NoScript.

Doing my bit by passing it on. Won't make a lick of difference, but we bloggers like to pretend our words do right? :-)

Dear friends,

President Obama just made a remarkable speech in Egypt, committing personally to building peace in the Middle East. Unexpectedly, his first move is to directly challenge the new far right-wing government of America’s ally Israel — pressing them to stop their self-destructive policy of settlements (illegal colonies set up on territory recognised by the US and the world as Palestinian).

This is a moment of rare crisis and opportunity. Obama’s bold strategy is facing powerful opposition, so he’s going to need help around the world in the coming days and weeks to strengthen his resolve. Let’s start right now — by raising a massive global chorus behind Obama’s statement that the settlements in occupied territory must stop.

We’ll advertise the number of signatures in key newspapers in Israel, as well as in Washington DC (where some are trying to undermine Obama in the US Congress). Read Obama’s words now and add your signature to them at the link below, then forward this email to friends and family so they can do the same:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/obama_stop_settlements

There is broad agreement that the settlements are a significant barrier to peace, a view also shared by a silent majority of the Israeli public. Combined with a network of roadblocks and barriers, these colonies now blanket the West Bank, seizing territory and forcing Palestinians to live effectively as prisoners in smaller and smaller pockets (see map at right).

Until this problem is tackled, it seems impossible to build a viable Palestinian state or any kind of lasting peace. For Arab states deciding what more they themselves can do for peace, stopping the settlements has become a crucial test of Israel’s seriousness.

We’ll need to urge the other parties to take bold steps too. If we can help Obama to stay the course on settlements, shift Israeli policy and encourage the Palestinians and key Arab states also to stretch out their hands, a new beginning for the Middle East is possible.

But none of this will happen without a growing global movement of citizens taking action to support it. Read Obama’s words, add your signature and spread the word today:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/obama_stop_settlements

With hope and determination,

Paul, Raluca, Ricken, Brett, Paula, Graziela, Rajeev, Iain, Taren, Milena, Luis, Alice and the whole Avaaz team

Sending birthday wishes to Tetris which turns 25 today. It's two years older than I am!

I was born slightly too late to have been a part of this amazing early computer game revolution, but that's not to say I didn't partake of many early DOS games on our IBM machines, then our 486SX clone. While I always have a special place in my heart for Commander Keen as the greatest game of all time I used to rush home from school excited to play, we did have a DOS clone of Tetris too.

What strikes me about Tetris (and to a certain extend Commander Keen) was the design and premise were so beautifully elegant they didn't need flashy 3D graphics to become immersive, addictive and a real pleasure to play. The people who developed games like this were geniuses, plain and simple.

Aside from the Sim City and The Sims franchises, I don't really play many games any more. In fact my current obsession is still Bejeweled on my iTelephone because it's simple, addictive and fun. More games need to be made like Tetris!

What happens when you have a Nikon D60 and an affordable, ultra sharp AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D but only half an hour or so to spare? Backyard photos!

It's my belief as an amateur photographer that there's subject matter everywhere, you just need a keen enough eye to see it. One of the magical things about cameras is their ability to take something plain and ordinary and record it in such as way that makes said subject matter look anything but plain and ordinary. Or maybe that's just me.

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don't care why this happened, but I'm so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don't have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I'm putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won't be ready for a few days. Another post I'm positive you're all anxiously awaiting ;-).

Back on the 21st of May I reported here that I was giving up posting comments on News.com because I couldn't be bothered dealing with the mudslinging (CNET News.com comments are getting old). Well, I lied! I saw a few comments from people on this article about Steve Jobs' health and subsequent return to Apple and had to post something.

joetesta70, ace10134, you guys have no class whatsoever. You may dislike Steve Jobs, but this article was merely a report regarding his return to work after going through medical hell. My mother died of a related condition that lasted over 12 years, let me tell you it’s brutally painful and difficult.

If you don’t like the guy or his business, there are plenty of places online to voice your anger, frustration (or I suspect envy). In the meantime, don’t go trolling on news stories about a person’s health; if anything all it does is attest to your lack of character.

It’s sad that intelligent discourse online is drowned out by such childish antics, same goes for "fanboyism". For me I’m only 23 and it’s already getting really old.

My basic point is, even if you don't like somebody bashing them for health problems is just wrong. I really did not like former American White House Press Secretary and Fox News commentator Tony Snow one bit, but that didn't mean I couldn't wish him the best during some scary medical problems back in 2007 (Wishes for Tony Snow) which he only just died from last year.

[…]

Let me make it clear, I think George W. Bush (along with my home country’s Prime Minister John Howard) is a war criminal and that his administration is dangerously incompetent when it comes to handling world and domestic affairs, and I agree with virtually nothing that Tony Snow has said or apparently believes. But I can imagine what his family is going through, and I would not want anyone to have to live through that. Nobody deserves it.

I wish you and your family the best Mr Snow.

I guess I'm just old fashioned in that way.

Sometimes it's not a good idea going through Google Reader first thing in the morning, because an image from a shared article makes you jump out of your chair and spray the cereal that was in your mouth all over the place.

I was half expecting the book that was attached to an article Sparx shared was a satire piece, but it turns out it's real. From Amazon.com's product page:

Don’t laugh when you see the title of a new book that challenges the elite’s view that President Bush is no brainiac: The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush. Really. “We did it,” says coauthor Carolyn Thompson, a leadership expert, “because he’s so widely underestimated and because everybody thinks he’s not what he really is.” That would be Master Leader, she and James Ware conclude in their scholarly study. More in-depth than others like The Rumsfeld Way, it charts Bush’s 10 common-sense leadership lessons, like: Hire smart, build trust, talk straight, and leave aides alone.

I was unaware expecting the leader of the most powerful country in the world to display more intelligence than a sock puppet made me an elitst. Then again, the book was published in 2002; while it would have still been difficult to pull off back then, one thinks it would have been infinitely more difficult if they did it now.

The comments included with the the book seem especially tragic especially given what happened after 2002. I think Robert A. Watson and I are thinking of two different George W. Bushes:

“Carolyn Thompson and James Ware have it right . . . leadership is about what one is, not just what one does. About character, not just charisma . . . about credibility, not just credentials. This timely account of The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush will truly encourage and inspire readers.”
–Commissioner Robert A. Watson, Retired National Commander, The Salvation Army, U.S.A.

I'm hotly anticipating the followup "Microsoft: 10 common sense lessons in ethical business"!

Given it's been over a month since this milestone it almost seems silly posting about it here, but for some reason I never got around to doing it. I blame the current financial crisis and several weeks of bad hair days. Yeah, that works.

If you're as avid a user as me of Xfce, the latest 4.6 release which I blogged about back in March has been updated to 4.6.1. There have been quite a substantial list of improvements and additions including more comprehensive I18n support and many bug fixes.

Now if you speak Polish, Japanese, Galician, Portuguese, Norwegian and/or Spanish, you don't have an excuse any more to try this beautiful piece of software!

If you're a FreeBSD user like me, you can access 4.6.1 from the ports collection.

Thanks go out as always to Olivier Fourdan and the team for their tireless effort on this project. Show 'em how it's done guys :).

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam…

One technique spammers use to circumvent spam filters is to embed natural language sentences into emails to spoof the reverse Turing Test as it were by trying to appear as a human sender. With more sophisitcated filters these efforts aren't really effective any more, but for me they can be a fascinating source of random thoughts.

Take a gander at this latest gem; this spammer even went so far as to create an intruiging unordered bullet point list. There's something poetic about spliced material from different sources which when combined randomly… make absolutely no sense!

sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walkedgang-planks are raised. white moon already well sunk in the west; northward was a little flickeringup, old!’ It would bring tears to your eyes.” floor, through which came a dazzle of blue and gold and green. He lookedthe newspapers tell the truth.”

• the side of these carriages stood a rank of splendid servants, all dressed
• "To France."
• 1920 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. The original manuscript and corrected
• in the middle of the encounter at the request of one of the combatants. But barn.

Almost as Syme heard the words, he saw on the sea of human faces in
dressed like an enormous hornbill, with a beak twice as big as himself–the a long way off, “by God! if this is true the whole bally lot of us on the chance.” “Yes, indeed. But you two come in and see us; we are dying of the

Wanna slim down for summer? Go to [redacted] to learn how.

I tell you what, if I were an author, song writer or painter and I were out of ideas, I'd just consult my spam folders. There's a Hollywood blockbuster right here.

The irony wasn't lost on me either that the link to the weight loss products this spammer was selling was placed directly after a comment about dying from something. One would think this would be checked!

7-Eleven in front of Ngee Ann City on Orchard Road in Singapore, by Ke Wynn

If you had been checking the post count here, you'd know the previous post was number 1711. If we lend ourselves one of the tricks the Nostradameans use to contort their prophet's predictions to actually make sense, if we drop the first digit we're left with 711. Put a hyphen between the first two digits and we get 7-11.

One of the biggest shocks both my sister and I experienced when we came here to Adelaide to study was the lack of 24 hour 7-Eleven convenience stores. We both grew up in Singapore, a place that has more 7-Elevens per square kilometre than… well, Adelaide. They're almost a Singaporean institution, there are hundreds of them. We'd leave our international school and grab a Slurpee just as all the kids from local schools were leaving with their Slurpees. The 7-Elevens in Singapore also sell local drinks and snacks, English Premier League football cards… even Japanese manga translated into English!

In Singapore I tend to stay clear of many fast food chains, preferring to drink coffee in the hundreds of Coffee Beans, Starbuckses or the local chain of Killiney Coffee houses that dot the island. That said, I also really enjoy reliving part of my childhood by going into 7-Eleven and getting a sugar filled beverage every now and then :).

Unbeknownst to me, Wikipedia has an entire sub-section on 7-Eleven in Singapore:

In Singapore, 7-Eleven forms the largest chain of convenience stores island-wide. There are at present 419 7-Eleven stores scattered throughout the country. Stores in Singapore are operated by the Dairy Farm International Holdings, franchised under a licensing agreement with 7-Eleven Incorporated, headquartered in the United States.

The first 7-Eleven stores in Singapore were operated in 1983 with a franchise license under the Jardine Matheson Group. The license was then acquired by Cold Storage Singapore, a subsidiary of the Dairy Farm Group, in 1989. At present, 7 Eleven plans to expand its base to include 300 stores, within the next few years. 7-Eleven has also recently signed an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell to include its convenience stores in all Shell Petrol Stations.

Laugh all you want at this silly obsession of mine, but it's the small things like this that do make you really homesick. I could have worded that better!