Rubenerd

Photo taken this morning of Romeo, the older of our two family doggies. Even though he's seven, he looks and acts like a puppy still. Really friendly little guy :).

I generally don't like to get too political on my blog or on Twitter, but given the once in a lifetime circumstances we see ourselves in with the election of President Barack Obama in the United States, I figure I can post a miniaturised epic series of posts here and get away with it. Politics and computer science have more in common than I thought; though that's for another post!

Yesterday evening after I had started penning my previous post about how relieved I am (and I could tell many Singaporeans were too) that Obama is now president, I was surprised to read this tweet by Corrie Bergeron on Twitter:

Reading comments on some blogs today, I wonder where the Bush-haters will turn their vile invective. Must be horrible to have that much hate
(tweet link)

I couldn't resist, I just had to reply to it.

@skydaddy Very few people are worthy of such contempt, but I’m confident that Bush Jr qualifies!
(tweet link)

I can honestly say I was not prepared for the reply.

@Rubenerd I’m sure it tears the haters up that Bush doesn’t care about the hate. He’s a bigger man than that. History will judge him well
(tweet link)

At that point I wasn't sure whether this was denial playing out, or whether it was a carefully and brilliantly worded work of satire. Given history I suspected the former, though I did give a little and admit that not everyone literally hated Bush… I'm positive at least 1% of people around the world will remember him in a positive light!

@skydaddy “History will judge him well.”… oh man my dad, sister and I are roaring with laugher! But I guess some will judge him better
(tweet link)

He replied with some American history which alas I haven't been versed well enough in at this stage.

@Rubenerd Truman was despised, Nixon even more. Time has a way of telling. Nixon was a bad man, but a pretty good President looking back.
(tweet link)

To my American readers, is this statement true? I've heard the names Nixon and Truman thrown around, but know little about their past or their tenures as President. Ask me about former Aussie Prime Minister Paul Keating or former Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and I'm somewhat more informed!

I guess Bush can take some comfort in knowing that 18% approval ratings mean that at least some people liked him. Just not the vast majority of the world! Did I mention I was relieved Obama is president now?

Now that the United States is finally no longer in control of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and we've all heaved a collective — and much anticipated — sigh of relief, the work begins cleaning up the royal mess this incompetent pair made domestically and internationally. It's not all their fault of course, but even if you thought none of it was (and believe it or not there are people on Twitter telling me this) you can at least admit they did nothing to improve the world during their tenure. Yuck.

Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their team have their work cut out for them, if by "work cut out for them" I mean "they have Mount Everest to climb to even reach the base camp at foot of the summit".

ASIDE: I think I can be confident in saying thought that Obama and Biden would have to royally screw up on a scale unseen in history to beat the Bush/Cheney record. Would it be safe to say George W. Bush was the worst American president of all time?

All around Singapore today as I walked around you could see the change.

As you could see from the photo above, the front page of the local Straits Times broadsheet were all about Obama. Given the media control in Singapore (the only negative things about living here in my opinion) I generally don't read the papers, but let's just say yesterday and today were special occasions.

I walked past the Starbucks in Shaw House and noticed an American couple roaring with laugher with a barista as they talked about Bushisms and the relief they felt. In the underpass between Shaw House and Wheelock Place the buskers were singing about Obama. The radio waves were saturated. Plasma TVs in shopping centres, restaurants and bars were playing the swearing in on what seemed like an infinite loop. Mmm… infinite loop.

Less tangible was the overall jubilation but at the same time a sense of restraint and calm. You could tell some people were pleased and relieved at the same time. When I strolled into the Coffee Bean at Wheelock Place the women serving me asked if I was an American before I opened my mouth. My accident quickly showed for her that I wasn't, but she commented that it was such a relief to get that "bleeping moron out of ruling the world!". She was cute :).

This may be a honeymoon period, but boy does it feel good! I remember when our Aussie Prime Minister John Howard was relieved of duty and all those who didn't support the war in Iraq felt so much better in an instant. I can't imagine what Americans themselves must be feeling now.

ASIDE: I’ve been letting unfinished blog posts build up again to unmanageable levels, so this afternoon while I’m waiting for the next batch of Rubenerd Shows to upload to the Internet Archive, I figured I’d get through some of them. The timestamp on this post is dated 17th of January 2009.

With all the recent talk and news surrounding the conflict (to put it mildly) between Hamas in Gaza and Israel, I thought I'd share a somewhat related story of my own that occurred back in 2006.

I had been in Adelaide for over a year and had made it a habit of visiting this one particular restaurant for takeaway that made the best Lebanese food I'd ever tasted. Come to think of it I hadn't really had Lebanese before so I didn't have a basis for comparison, but even after I had moved with my family to Malaysia and I had more opportunities to sample Lebanese food, my opinion didn't change. These guys were good! Chicken yiros/kebabs made fresh in front of me with plenty of veggies and sauce… my mouth is watering thinking about it!

As a consequence of going there so often I became friends with the owners and their son. It's such a good feeling to be able to travel to a place and have a chat while they make me "the usual"! They were extraordinarily friendly folks.

I guess you can see where this is going. In late 2006 the tensions (again putting it lightly) between Lebanon and Israel began to flare up and soon war was happening. While Australia is such a multicultural and diverse country with people from all over the planet, there were unfortunately more than a few thugs who took it upon themselves to ransack Lebanese restaurants and the homes of Lebanese families by breaking windows, spray painting Israeli and Jewish symbols on their walls etc. To be fair I suspect Hebrew communities suffered from opposing groups as well.

My friends' restaurant fortunately escaped the carnage but they were understandably worried. As I walked in one afternoon they were watching the TV news mounted on the wall and shaking their heads.

I asked them if they had any relatives in Lebanon and whether they were okay. The dad (bothering me that I can't remember his name) said that I was the first to ask them. Fortunately their family was safe.

It struck me how divisive and scary such a conflict can be, even if it's thousand of kilometres away. This poor family were being accused of being "terrorists" and "supporting enemies of Israel", when they had not done a damn thing.

I think at times we can all be guilty of painting entire groups of people with one brush due to the actions of political, military, business, religious or spiritual leaders, and it's just wrong. Unfortunately I admit I've been guilty of this this myself in the past.

I also think it's important to remember that while we're told that such conflicts are between Israel and Lebanon, or Israel and the Palestinians, or Georgia and Russia (and that's only a tiny range from just the last few years), they're just worthless, hollow labels. What these conflicts involve are human beings, with families, friends, loved ones and dependants. You can get as politically or religiously heated as you want, but it still doesn't change this fact.

I haven't been back to that Lebanese restaurant in North Adelaide for a while now, but I'm looking forward to going back there when I return to Adelaide to study.

Now just don’t screw it up.

That's a lot of people!

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

21:00 – You've joined me at a tremendously exciting moment; unabashedly ripping off IntoYourHead; microwaving coffee after I said you shouldn't; Family Guy; Germans can make better Christmas food than the French; family trip to Europe in 1998; asking for the bathroom with sign language; Frankfurt am Main; time speeding up as you get older; Melbourne since 1990; remembering primary school; flag carriers and whatnot; Tom Keene talking about ridiculously expensive bottled water with David Zetland on Bloomberg on the Economy; the political compass thingy; and a Paul Shaffer smoke alarm. UPDATE: The date for this episode has been fixed to show 2009 instead of 2008 after I received a smartarse comment!

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

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

20:56 – Can I get a monocle? A monocle? Also discussing my displeasure over companies that just make money from money; the financial crisis; the infamous red light Orchard Towers in Singapore; the Jason's Gourmet Grocer; hard versus soft energy drinks; Irn-Bru; review of Alton Brown's Good Eats programme; Jamie Oliver; the joys of steel cut oats; how much Singapore has changed in a decade; Bob's Red Mill in Oregon; finding out buttermilk isn't as horrible as it first sounds; Pepsi is in fact better than Coke; why instant oats suck and can I get a monocle?

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

While checking my server records I noticed I was getting a few hits from Blogged.com. It seems they added my blog to their database and filed me under "miscellaneous" and "management". Funny how my blog has as much to do with management as an echidna would have to do with a large shoehorn, but there you go. The miscellaneous tag I'm not disputing, but then again wouldn't every self respecting blogger have more than a few miscellaneous posts in their blog that were off the primary topic?

Anyway they've given me a bunch of HTML to include to verify that this is my blog. I'm not going to put it in my template file (on principal and because I don't want advertising on here), so putting it here is the next best thing. By encapsulating their code into a simple blockquote on a post I also keep my stuff and their stuff separate and apart. That's right, separate and apart, at the same time. You'd better believe it.

Yet another example of a blog post I could have condensed into just one sentence, it didn't need to be this long. Grilled cheese sandwiches.

I have received now four rude emails, two comments with explicit language which I've deleted, along with a friendly email and comment here asking me why I decided NOT to use an automated script to do my Internet Archive uploading written in my beloved Ruby or Perl for example. There are several reasons, but the primary one stems from this simple fact:

You cannot automate a system to pick up and transfer data that doesn't exist.

The problem is, up until the beginning of last year I didn't tag any episodes. The Internet Archive requests tags, and I figure because they're providing the space and bandwidth gratis I should provide them. There really is no automated way to generate tags, only humans can tell what subject matter is and provide appropriate tags. If computers could accurately generate tags, the Google Image Labeler Project wouldn't exist!

I could probably use the Advanced Contribution Engine system and upload episodes en masse, but this simply doesn't address this underlying problem. I could spend my time writing scripts to write XML files and mass upload them, but until I've manually written the tags for each episode and posted them on my own site first, none could get uploaded. The effort it takes to upload files individually after I've created the tags and have all the data I need is minimal, I may as well do the two operations in tandem then wait until I've done everything on one end, then execute a script that could potentially cause cascading problems… for 262 uploaded media files which each have their own associated files!

ASIDE: Jim Kloss, the scripting wizard behind Whole Wheat Radio once said on air that throwing technology at a problem doesn’t automatically make it faster or easier to solve; in many cases you just make it more complicated. This would be an example of this.

I'm not pretending that this won't take a bit of extra time, but I feel this is the best way to do it. I just wish I had been able to spend my time uploading shows rather than defending what I'm doing, sheesh ;-).