Rubenerd

A belt sander which curiously has absolutely nothing to do with this post whatsoever.

J-Walk has published a series of questions on the J-Walk Blog (of all places) for readers of his to answer and submit to him through electronic mail so he can perform identity theft and advance his own personal wealth beyond his revenues from printed Excel guides and consulting.

I don’t think I could match the wit or sheer interestingness (is that a word?) of so many of his other readers, so instead I’m posting my responses here in the hopes they’ll be mildly entertaining. At worst there’s enough material here for you to print and make an armada of paper planes to throw at unsuspecting coworkers, room mates, family members or people on the train.

1. How did you first hear of the J-Walk Blog, and how long have you been reading it?

I’ve been reading the J-Walk blog since I was in high school in 2004 after I heard Jim Kloss mention it on the Whole Wheat Radio audio magazine I downloaded out of curiosity. It’s been one of those stable, reliable things I’ve turned to over the years when everything else in my life has been changing.

2. What’s the significance of your screen name?

I’ve been using the name "rubenerd" since 1997 when I was 11 and had registered for a Hotmail account of all things. My little brain was horrified to find "Ruben" was taken, so in what I thought at the time was a stroke of unadulterated genius, I merged my name and "nerd" and removed the superflous n.

3. Do you read this blog from work or at home? How many times a day?

I have it subscribed in Google Reader and read it during lectures. If you’re a professor reading this, I mean all the lectures except yours.

We then got to choose five from a list of =18-3 questions. I’d enter that subtraction problem into Excel, but I’m a Gnumeric guy.

4. Basic stats: Age, sex, location, marital status, employment, etc.

Almost 23 years, male, Adelaide and Singapore (but not at the same time!), painfully available, part time computer system consultant, studying computer science and economics, atheist, no, yes, a Japanese girl who digs introverts, none of your business, the episode where she steals the computer, yes but I tell people no, purple monkey dishwasher.

5. Send a copy of the weirdest photo of yourself that you can find, and describe what was going on.

This is a photo of me attempting to make a phone call and look philosophical in the middle of a gigantic canola field on our trip to the Flinders Ranges outside Adelaide in Australia last year.

7. How many different places have you lived in?

I was born in Sydney but moved to Melbourne when I was a few months old, then Brisbane, then to Singapore where I spent most of my life but moved three times when they kept knocking down the apartment buildings we were living in, then to Kuala Lumpur, then back to Singapore. I’m now studying in both Adelaide and Singapore with plans to move back to the latter permanently because it’s the closest I’ve ever had to a "home". Always fantasised about living for a few months in Kyoto and Stockholm though.

8. What other blogs to you follow?

Blogs where computer spell checkers go two dye. I’d never be caught baking such an obvious mistake on my blog. Why am I Hungary all of a sudden? I’d be a hilarious comedian if I could form and deliver good jokes.

9. Which are your favourite topics covered at the J-Walk Blog?

To be honest: religion. It’s a sinful guilty pleasure.

17. Which celebrity would you most like to have a beer with?

Michael Franks at the Blue Note Jazz lounge in Tokyo after a set with Aya Hirano, the voice actress who played Suzumiya Haruhi. Is that cheating?

Wait a minute, I think Gnumeric computed that wrong, I answered six questions instead of five. Must have forgotten to turn on the Analysis Toolpak. Wait, Gnumeric doens’t have an Analysis Toolpak. I’ve already said enough.

Screenshot of my faulty exported WordPress export file from 2007 with Smultron.

All the way back in October 2007 I penned a post describing some maddening problems I’d be having with the then-new WordPress 2.3 WXR/RSS export feature. The file didn’t contain all my posts, and it was suffering from encoding issues.

Screenshot of my faulty exported WordPress export file from 2009 with MacVim.

This evening here in March 2009 I decided to try exporting this blog using the WordPress 2.7.1 WXR/RSS export feature. The file didn’t contain all my posts, though to be fair it doesn’t have encoding problems. One problem down in almost 18 months, just one more to go.

While a great idea in principal, I officially give up on this feature. Back to phpMyAdmin I go.

Much to my excitement, one of my favourite free and open source software projects finally hit the big 4.6 release recently after over two years of development, and I’ve finally had a sliver of time this afternoon to take a look at it and type up a quick review.

I’m glowingly talking about the lightweight, zippy and very attractive Xfce Desktop Environment for Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix-like systems. Xfce is perfect for older systems with more modest specs, and for people like me who value clean design even on fast hardware.

Because my ultra-souped up FreeBSD desktop tower is back in Singapore, I installed the latest release fresh from the pacman system for Arch Linux on my little Armada M300, a 600MHz subnotebook with 320MiB of RAM. I’m typing this as we speak in Firefox inside the Xfce environment. Yes, it even runs beautifully on this machine!

I could go on and on listing the new features, bug fixes and changes, but the Xfce team have already done a great job documenting these. Instead, I thought I’d briefly talk about the thinks I’ve noticed and liked so far.

Click for the original size

First of all, the design looks much more professional now out of the box than version 4.4.x. It has a slick default background and an integrated panel which I moved to the top of the screen given I’m a Mac user. I also use the ThinIce GTK+ theme that comes with the Gnome theme pack, and the Tango Desktop Project’s iconset.

Given I use other desktop systems one of the most nagging problems for me had always been Xfce shows you the Xfce Menu of launchable applications when you right click the Desktop. Now it presents you with a clean list of Desktop related functions as well as the Xfce Menu at the bottom if you still want it. Icons on the Desktop also behave more predictably as well: you can now select a series of icons by dragging your cursor.

Visually a new feature is the redesigned window manager titlebars, unfortunately this is the one feature I’m not sure I like. The default appearance now looks a bit too Windows Vista-ish for my tastes; I always thought having the buttons off-centre at the top instead of in the middle looked really silly. Still, Xfce does make it easy to change them to a dizzying array of other styles in the Window Manager settings manager pane. I use the B5 BeOS style title bars which you can see below because I use keyboard shortcuts instead of the widgets on window titlebars anyway. It’s clean and minimalistic, and matches the ThinIce theme perfectly.

One of the great things about Xfce is it’s lightweight but still has a comprehensive Settings Manager system like Gnome and KDE. Many of these panes have been reorganised and redesigned, the most notable of these is the Desktop pane which lets you change backgrounds and colours much more easily than before.

These are the things I can show you visually, under the covers there have also been some huge changes. The mixer application now uses the Gstreamer audio framework by default which makes it really easy to get going with audio applications (WWR streaming anyone?). The Thunar file manager now supports encrypted volumes! I could go on and on.

If you’re on FreeBSD this version of Xfce is in the ports system, as it is in the Arch Linux pacman repositories. If you’re a Gnome user in particular, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised!

A huge thanks to Olivier Fourdan and all the contributers for this amazing software. The love and care you put into this project shows.

It’s been several long months since we’ve had another Rubenerd Fun Facts post… so here are another ten fresh Rubenerd Fun Facts! As I’ve mentioned previously, all these facts are irrefutable and 110% true.

If you missed them, feel free to refer to the previous Rubenerd Fun Facts posts (part one, part two, part three, part four). And as usual, feel free to take notes.

1. While laughter is an excellent medicine, it’s a poor substitute for sleep.

2. Due to a single letter misprint in a brochure in 1996, thousands of tourists flocked to DBS Bank branches in Singapore expecting to find duty free products.

3. The words "mangrove" and "Fokker 50" have no numbers in common.

   

4. No two forks jabbed into power sockets will generate identical electrical sparks.

5. While keyboards with [RETURN] keys are inherently more reliable than keyboards with [ENTER] keys, keyboards with half note keys are more reliable still.

6. Dubious facts becomes true if you shout them.

   

7. The "if" statement is often confused with the "not getting paid enough for this" statement by inexperienced programmers.

8. Ergonomics experts in Switzerland agree that cereal is more easily eaten with a butter knife than chopsticks.

9. The time it takes to recharge a mobile phone is inverse to the time you have between realising you didn’t charge your phone and when you need to leave the house.

   

10. There has never been a New Zealander called Larly Browkart.

11. Common sense is a wishful phrase, not a statement of the pervasiveness of certain views in society.

12. Despite her exhausting occupation, Siesta from Zero No Tsukaima claims she never has had one.

The breathtaking Aukštaitija National Park in Lithuania on my MBP desktop

Don’t you just hate it when you’re so tied up with work and studying that all you write on your weblog for two days is a lousy post with only one sentence on it? Fortunately this isn’t an example of this because this post clearly has two sentences. No wait, three.

That’s not to say we can’t share in something constructive and fun even though I only have five minutes before I’m due to go to sleep in… minus one hour. Bummer. Taking a break from using cute introverted anime characters as my desktop backgrounds, I’ve settled on this stunning photo of the Aukštaitija National Park in Lithuania. User:Wojsyl on Wikipedia was generous enough to upload his photo at 2560×1920 so it will scale down beautifully on most resolution monitors.

While everyone else chose to do their year 11 and 12 high school economics reports on countries like China and Australia, out of the blue I decided to study the Baltic states. A tactic just to make my reports different from the others in our little group ended up fuelling an interest outside of school in me for this part of our tiny world, at some point I’d love to tour around there. A very, very close friend of our family is from Latvia originally; I remember shortly after my mum passed on and we were back in Sydney for the funeral I talked for hours with her about Riga and how much it changed since the fall of the Soviet Union. I could have talked for much longer about it!

I’m aching to do some travelling. First things first, get on track with my degree again!

I do economics at university. I’ve been doing economics since high school. I read Bloomberg every day and have their iPhone application. I sometimes talk about here on my blog.

With the recent ridiculous bailout of AIG in the United States though, I’ve come back to this one inevitable question that I’ve been asking for years and have never got a satisfactory answer for. I’ll put it in a blockquote for emphasis:

If companies become large enough that they’re deemed too big to fail, why were they allowed to get that big in the first place?

The only answer I’ve ever heard about this is that capitalism is designed to allow businesses that can most efficiently produce goods and services to do so. My two counterpoints have been:

• how true to the idea of capitalism is the bailing out of gigantic companies with incompetent management by… government? To me, you can’t claim you’re being a capitalist then cry to a government when you screw up!

• just because this is the potentially inevitable endgame of capitalism doesn’t make it desirable, just as the inevitable endgame of communism isn’t.

It also bothers me that we’re supposed to bail huge companies out when their greed and arrogrance gets them into trouble, but when they do well we still hear people complaining they’re being taxed too much. Again, there are clear double standards at work here. That was a terrible pun.

To me, capitalism is like democracy. They’re both awful systems but they’re unfortunately the best systems we have to choose from! Aside from the question I asked above, the other then becomes: what now?

Working on a site design this afternoon I got a kick out of this CSS statement I had just written; it seems that my designs and programming are affected by my political compass! See if you can get it.

#heading {
  background: #009900 url("heading.png") center left no-repeat;
}

I guess if I wanted to make it more specific I could change some of the variables around:

#compass {
  background: url("libertarian.png") center left;
}

This kind of reminds me of Perl Golf and Ruby Poetry. Good times.

Well pardon me sir, but what if what if I wished to partake of said microwave by attempting to cook metallic objects?

He didn’t say that, but I saw this scene and the sign and just had to take a terrible screenshot along with an accompanying fabricated quote. Along with, and accompanying… together. And at the same time. Together and at the same time. Both.

I don’t watch much television (ridiculous anime, Cranky Geeks and The Simpsons aside of course!), but Boston Legal is one show I really enjoyed watching. Fantastic writing, and a huge shame it ended so abruptly.

This fabricated quote that didn’t actually happen also reminds me of these particular lines from John Lennon’s Nobody Told Me (There’s Be Days Like These):

There’s always somethin’ cookin’
But nothin’s in the pot

Well there you go, it seems John Lennon was unaware that the food wasn’t in a pot but rather in a microwave at Crane, Poole and Schmidt. Or perhaps he knew somehow in advance that somebody had placed a metallic object in the aformentioned microwave therefore rendering it incapable of cooking food given a resulting explosion.

Lennon had said he and the Beatles were bigger than Jesus… perhaps we should have taken this admission more literally.

So there you have it. On a related note, what did you do on your Saturday night? Were you witty and were you able to connect two seemingly unrelated quotes from two different mediums, one quote of which you blatantly fabricated having seen a backdrop in a scene?

I think I’ll stop now.

UPDATE: This post was originally written yesterday on Sunday, but I hit the "Save Draft" button instead of "Publish". Looking back at it now, I wish it were still Sunday.

I’m sitting here at the Boatdeck Cafe this Sunday afternoon with just my iPhone and a stable wireless network. Sometimes I need to lug the glorified monitor and keyboard stuck together, but today just typing on this feels fine.

It is definitely starting to show that it’s Autumn here in Adelaide; after almost every day being as hot as Singapore when we came back here, this weekend has been in the low 20s and drizzling. To the astonishment of many a person in the real world and online I’ve readily admitted I prefer overcast days; there’s something about them that allows me to relax more. Perhaps it was the positive cool change overcast days have on tropical climates that made me think of them positively.

Mugachinos are good!

As for today, despite university now being back for a fortnight now I’ve still been having a nagging enrollment issue that I thought would have been fixed but clearly not, so I had intended this afternoon to work on that, but unwittingly I forgot the online enrollment system isn’t functional on Sundays! Or at least the part I’m trying to access. I still haven’t even got a new student card yet!

So to be productive I’ve been watching some more Code Geass and going to the Boardeck Cafe! I figure my life is so dreadfully confusing and filled with anxiousness and dread that a Sunday where I only have a few responsibilities is, for an Atheist wanting a better word, a godsend! Plus it’s overcast, good times!

I’ve also finally recorded a Rubenerd Show again, the first since coming back to Adelaide. I had forgotten that I was supposed to be keeping shows under 10MiB so people on iPhones and iPod Touches (the phrase "iPod Touches" just doesn’t sound right, if you know what I mean) can download them on mobile phone networks, so I rambled on just as I’m doing here without any thought to the time until it was just time. The result was I had four things I wanted to discuss and I ended up discussing one thing, then getting sidetracked and talked about something else! Good times.

Well that’s my Sunday! Now if you’d excuse me, I’m going to turn to the Stanza iPhone app and continue reading The Counte of Monte Cristo [Wikipedia] while I finish my Mugaccino. Sundays are fun.

I just noticed that despite WordPress assigning this post the ID of 3892, this is in fact Rubenerd Blog post number 1221. This is a ground-breaking milestone given the number 1221 is a palindromic number, meaning of course it can be read the same way backwards. The next time this will happen here will be post 1881. Seriously, try and find an earlier number that’s palindromic… it just can’t be done.

But getting back to the magical number of 1221, we can prove it’s palindromic by spelling it out in English.

One thousand, two hundred and twenty one

If we were to spell this backwards, it would be this:

eno ytnewt dna derdnuh owt, dnasuoht enO

As you can see, this number comes out exactly the same when read backwards. Aren’t palindromic numbers amazing?!

I just noticed that lightbulb icon isn’t turned on.