Rubenerd

The first 14 pages of The Australian broadsheet newspaper today are either about the swimming in the Olympics or the latest AFL, despite the humanitarian disaster going on in Georgia right now. And if you think I'm just disappointed with Australian newspapers, I've been told by my dad that Singapore's Straits Times is just as lacking, though decidedly less AFL coverage for some reason.

ASIDE: Don’t visit The Australian website if you use Camino on Mac and have Flash disabled, it crashes! Don’t pour maple syrup or Vegemite on your laptop either, I’m pretty sure that’ll crash Camino too, amongst other things.

The sympathetic part of me appreciates the fact that most of us have disaster fatigue, and it's nice to take a break from all the bad things going on in the world by reading about how someone managed to swim a certain speed or managed to lift a certain amount of weight instead of another bomb somewhere. The hippie in me though (an inheritance from my beautiful late mum!) sees hypocrisy and the glorification of drugged up athletes when so many people are doing so much more for the world right now, and conversely so many others are getting away with cold blooded murder on a national scale and their victims get virtually no attention at all. The rational part of me says "what's new?".

ASIDE: → Kaname doesn’t look terribly impressed at my insinuation that somehow swimmers in the Olympics don’t contribute as much to humanity as, say, a medical researcher.

I think much of this just stems from my own frustration at how much media attention and praise athletes receive compared to people who are actually making a real positive difference in the world. I wouldn't say it makes me sick, but it does make me sad.

While I'm on my preaching high tall horse poppy soapbox (talk about a collusion of cliche metaphors!), it's a similar situation with music: people somehow think that most Top 40 singers (if you can call them that!) are somehow capable of being excellent role models and deserve even more of our money and attention, when there are these people called singer/songwriters who think of their art as more than just a job, and who you'll probably never see reviewed in a traditional newspaper. Just like computer software where giant corporations rake in billions of dollars for software that could easily be replaced by free (as in speech) software but can't because users are locked into closed, proprietary file formats and pseudo-standards. Do I sound like I'm in my 80's yet?

Dave Winer will be very proud of me if not for this post but for the following line (if he were ever to read it): thank (insert deity here) I have weblogs and more independent media now to read instead of just relying on traditional newspapers! Save me Slashdot!

Buy Marian Call's Vanilla on CDBaby

In other news, Marian Call (WWR) has moved up to my fifth top played artist on iTunes, just ahead of Greg Brown (WWR), and just behind The Renovators (WWR), Jack Johnson, John Lennon and Michael Franks. I think mummy would approve, and Jimbob would 50% approve :-).

ASIDE: Michael Franks is your most played artist Ruben? What a surprise!

When I upgraded three of my sites to WordPress 2.6, two of the installations went smoothly and without any problems, but for some reason I couldn't log into my primary weblog site after the upgrade. Whenever I entered my user credentials, I wasn't told that my username or password was incorrect, it just told me to try logging in again.

My first instinct was to clear my browser cache which thankfully in the case solved the problem, though it did give me quite a scare. If you still can't log in, there's a question dedicated to the problem over on WordPress.org; apparently many, many other people are having more serious problems.

It's funny how my opinion of WordPress has steadily been on the decline since the 1.x days… my own biases against PHP (security, version hell, terrible international character set support, lack of proper OOP) aside. It's a shame, because WordPress still has by far the slickest user interface for posting, even if they did take a step backwards in 2.5. The new word count feature is nice though.

With my access to the internet as unreliable as it is, and without my audio recording equipment that enable me to put my life on the Rubenerd Show podcast / audio magazine / new time radio show / internet radio show instead of here (thank goodness Leo came to his senses about netcast) it seems the quality of posts on this blog are rapidly deteriorating as I use this site to discuss not trends in free and open source software, Mac software and open standards, but the goings on in my life instead. For your convenience I'm appending the term "musings" to the heading of each such post, so you may promptly ignore them.

ASIDE: Archaeological term?

It's a lazyish Sundee afternoon to use the archeological term, and I'm sitting once again at the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes. I know the owner on a first name basis now, and I figure it's only a matter of time before he starts seeing me mention Boatdeck Cafe enough to justify sponsoring me. I figure five Betty Blue Sea of Espressos per mention should suffice, though I am willing to negotiate higher, on my own part.

Here we all are sittin ‘in a rainbow,
Coh blimey ‘allo Mrs Jones, how’s your Berts lumbago?
I’ll sing you a song with no words and no tune!
I’ll sing at your party while you suss out the moon, oh yes!

Lazy sunday afternoon, I got no mind to worry,
Close my eyes and drift away, Close my eyes and drift away,
Close my eyes and drift awaaaaaaaay…

Aroo de de de do
Aroo de de de dido

One thing I desperately have to learn to stop doing is jinxing myself lest nothing I need to get done never gets done. Case in point (or blunt object if pointy things scare you), last week I claimed we'd have the telephone line connected in our house on Monday so we would be able to finally get home ADSL. It's Sunday and we just got a dial tone!

You could plug some onions into a phone socket, but if your phone line wasn't connected, I 100% guarantee you would not hear a dial tone out of them.
Photo by Fir0002 from Wikipedia

Given past experiences with the national Aussie telco Telstra, I opted to use Optus instead (ironically Optus is owned by Singapore Telecom!) but our house wasn't accessible for them for some reason which is beyond me. Something to do with either grilled cheese sandwiches or our local exchange I think, though I remember having an Optus phone in Mawson Lakes last time I was in Adelaide, strange.

After being transferred to four separate departments, twice and reciting the home number to be changed seven times, on a phone call that took over an hour and a half, I know how it feels to be a tennis ball… insert pun about not getting anywhere and being whacked hard back and forth here. As it turns out, the previous tenants in this rental property didn't cancel their account when they left, so not only did we need to register a new line with Telstra, but we needed Telstra to deactivate the previous tenant's account. This entailed faxing the tenancy agreement with my name to prove that in fact the previous tenants didn't live there anymore… and then faxing the same tenancy agreement again when they denied having received it.

ASIDE: I was so frustrated after being on the phone for so long, when they asked me to fax information, I promptly reminded them that you need a phone line to use a fax, and that asking me to use one was akin to asking the owner of a busted time machine to go into the future to get the required parts, or asking a car driver to drive to a repair shop when his or her car won’t start. For what it’s worth, the guy in the call centre thought my analogies were funny.

All in all, it's been two weeks but we can now finally use the home phone line, and complete the registration for ADSL. Having grown up on cable internet in Singapore since we moved off ISDN in the late 1990s, this is quite a new experience, and one which I can't truthfully say has been a fun one. Untruthfully I could say the experience has been like a cheesecake with a Betty Blue Sea of Espresso from the Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes.

You think I could get Keith Olbermann to declare Telstra the worst person in the world? That would be so much fun!

As for the weather, it's still pretty crazy down here. Our house has a metal roof, so any rain sounds are amplified in the order of a trillion to one, or whatever the mathematical ratio is. Unlike Singapore where it's not unusual for it to rain for several hours continuously, the rain here in Adelaide in the last week has been torrential (torrential?) but only in two or three minute bursts. Adelaide is supposed to be the driest state capital in Australia with the least amount of rainfall, but it sure hasn't felt like it these last few weeks. Now if only more of that rain was pouring down further upstate and in New South Wales so the Murray River disaster could be alleviated… did I just say further down upstate?

Aussie weather chart for today (low/high temps) from WeatherZone.com.au

The last thing I'll mention in this useless post is that there's an AFL game between the Adelaide Crows and Richmond on the television on the wall in the cafe, though fortunately the sound is turned off. It's funny how these fully grown men grope and wrestle with each other in tiny satin shorts, yet it's the computer and science nerds who's masculinity is constantly being questioned. Overcompensation do you think, or just a difference in brain size? Not that I'm insinuating anything, or incinerating anything, or combusting anything, or grilling anything.

Do you think phone company employees intentionally draw out support calls for as long as possible so they can bill you more?

Disqus is an external blog commenting system that seems to be all the rage thesedays, so much so that even veteran blogger Dave Winer has just started using it on Scripting News. While the concept seems like a great idea, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

Firstly, instead of relying on accessible web forms for users to submit their comments, Disqus uses a JavaScript hook which dynamically loads comments onto the page. I can't begin to describe what a bad idea this is, so perhaps some bullet points will help me out!

It makes page slower

Because you’re making two database calls, one to your own blogging system and another to the external Disqus servers, the resulting page takes far longer to load than what a regular commenting form would. It’s so bad on some blogs I read that I’ve simply given up posting comments on them.

It makes pages far less secure

The idea of running JavaScript from a third party on my own site scares the heck out of me, but in this case we’re not talking about a potential attack vector to display photos from a Flickr page or something similar, we’re talking about critical parts of your blog’s infrastructure being loaded by an external server each time a page is loaded. XSS exploits are exploding, as well as any exploit discovered for Disqus with its larger surface area will affect your site. It also means security conscious people like me who use NoScript can’t leave comments.

It makes pages less accessible

For people who use audible or visual aids to access content, this approach to comments is just as bad as Flash. It also means certain browsers wont be able to render the comment field at all, such as lower powered computers and mobile phones which increasingly have web browsing capabilities. Disqus provides a link to their website for such people, but it’s a lousy compromise when other comment systems can work inline while adhering to web standards and accessibility.

It’s a legal pickle

To quote Webby’s World in their article on 8 reasons you shouldn’t use Disqus: "surely it can’t be good to subject users to another privacy policy with servers in another jurisdiction. Who would be liable for any breaches in data protection?"

Comments are no longer associated with the page

This makes local and search engine per-site querying impossible because the comments are disconnected from the content they were regarding.

Comments are no longer in your database

For some people that may be fine, but I prefer having such critical parts of my blog running locally. If in the future a plugin comes along that can do something really fun or interesting with comments left by people, you’re also completely out of luck.

It locks your comments into a silo

The Disqus team seem like honest people, but their service is closed and proprietary, and as of now there’s no way to reliably and easily export comments out of it, then import them back into your blog if you change or mind. If they start charging for their services or start embedding ads in the future, you’re completely at their mercy.

It makes pages less predictable

Because it uses JavaScript to fetch data after the page has already appeared to finish loading, you may already have started scrolling to a part on the page before everything changes. This is really, REALLY irritating!

Ultimately, it’s unnecessary

Twitter integration, threaded comments, better spam blocking, they’re all available with existing plugins that don’t have any of these problems. In fact Dave Winer needs to use Disqus exactly because his Radio software doesn’t include commenting systems or plugins to do these things.

This is why, dear readers, for your benefit and mine (our collective sanity as it were!) I will not be putting Disqus on my own blog here. I suspect it's a fad anyway, and will start disappearing in a few years when the Next Big Thing comes along. Disqus is to comments what Adobe Flash is to web pages, a little extra convenience for the target audience at a grave expense.

That's not to say the existence of services like Disqus is a complete disaster. What developers at WordPress, Movable Type and so on should be taking away from this is that some people aren't happy with existing commenting systems in their blogs, and that they'll implement self destructive plugins like this to get the features they want! I hope this means we see more innovation in the comments space.

UPDATE, 2009: Some good news, it seems the tide is beginning to turn on Disqus and other such dynamically loading comment systems. Matt Mullenwag, the head developer of WordPress, has publicly stated they’re a bad idea in a post bluntly titled 6 Ways To Kill Your Community.

I hope this represents a wider trend (from the looks of it, it has) and will encourage others to leave the service for alternatives… though as I stated in the original post, for people who have got hooked to the service this might be impossible or extremely difficult.

The great thing about disjointed weblog posts is that they can contain lots of good, though unrelated and useless, material. So much so that I would never dream of creating one and uploading it, let alone dream of creating one and uploading it. Can't wait to get my microphone and mixer from Singapore back so I can start putting this material back on the Rubenerd Show and letting this blog get back to what it's supposed to be about!

Was just reading the Aussie ABC News. I have to make that distinction because there's also an American ABC. I wonder if there's an Argentinean ABC? Or a Dutch ABC? Okay that last one made no sense. According to the first mentioned ABC, the Beijing Olympics starts tomorrow. It's funny how my dad was in Beijing just last week on a business trip and was talking about how crazy everything is getting over there right about now, and how terrible the air really is!

ASIDE: Right about now. The funk soul brother. Check it out now. The funk soul brother. Right about now. The funk soul brother. Check it out now. The funk soul brother. Right about now… ’bout now… ’bout now… ’bout now.

I'd say I'm boycotting the 2008 Olympics by not posting anything else about it and not watching any of it, but it would be a shallow admission from me. I never watch any of the Olympic games anyway, even the one in Sydney! Other than MotoGP and Formula 1, sport to me holds as much fascination potential as sitting on the verandah watching paint grow, or standing next to a wall watching grass dry. Is it possible to grow paint? Get some computer game Olympic events together with nerds from around the world and then I might consider… nah, it would still be boring.

Am I the only person who thinks gymnastics barely qualifies as an Olympic sport?

You know what would make an interesting Olympic event? Merge all the sports together into one event. Imagine it: a rhythmic gymnist would need to throw a soccer ball to someone who has to kick it between two water polo nets in a pool being traversed by butterfly and freestyle swimmers but only after a person has high-jumped the long-jumper into a mat next to the pool that's being raised up by a weightlifter who's wearing a bulletproof vest being shot at from a distance by a target shooter as she's diving off a board above a rhythmic gymnist who would need to throw a soccer ball… the entire Olympics could be broadcast and got over with in 2 minutes. PATENT PENDING.

I'm sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe coffee shop in Mawson Lakes (Google Maps) watching the news on a very swish plasma TV mounted on the wall with what I assume is some sort of metallic bracket system, or lots and lots and lots of double sided tape. Can you get industrial strength double sided tape? The coffee here is fantastic.

Kevin Rudd, our PM. I couldn't bring myself to post a photo of Paris Hilton.

The current news headline reads "Is Obama Ready To Lead?". The first person they asked was Kevin Rudd, our PM who's a member of the Labor party which is broadly equivalent to the Democrats in the US, fair enough. The next person was… Paris Hilton. Suffice to say only 50% of the interviews were worth watching! It begs the question though, why do they think someone like her would be useful in providing political analysis? Are they using her as an example of what Average Joe or Jane is thinking at this point? If that's the case, what an insult to Joe and Jane!

Seven News Adelaide, from Wikipedia

Well look at that, the next news story is about winter in Australia, and how it's one of the coldest on record. It was snowing in Orange, NSW last night! And Jane Doyle now has platinum bleached blond hair? Oh dear.

Speaking of commercial airliners, got a suspiciously flattering comment from Jim Kloss yesterday on one of my posts over the last few weeks as he takes his much deserved holiday break next to a picturesque lake, which I'm sure he's convinced himself is better than some Mawson Lake thing… and probably for good reason! He made a comment about how he flew in a Boeing 757 to get there, and how cramped the seats were, and if there was anything I could do to improve the situation, presumably before his return flight.

I spent all night discussing the situation with some friends, contacts and grilled cheese sandwiches in the aviation industry and determined that the fastest and most effective way to improve the seating conditions in narrow body jet airliners would be to fake an emergency recall notice for all narrow-bodies. As such action would no doubt result in my own incarceration, I've instead chosen to include a picture of a person in a bear costume:

I wore a teddy bear costume once. It gave people the wrong idea though.

And to end this useless post, did you know Singapore Airlines is one of the only airlines that operates an entirely wide-body commercial airliner fleet? And that Singapore Airlines is not in fact from Portugal, as the name would imply. Singapore Airlines services Adelaide and Perth, but I'm not sure about Talkeetna, Anchorage, Fairbanks or Singapore though.

I've never been to Portugal. My dad has been to Lisbon on business many times. I can take comfort in knowing that his Spanish is quite strong, but not his Portuguese. It's not that I resent him as much as I just don't like the fact that he got to go somewhere I didn't, and that I resent him for that.

When you move overseas to another country, it's common to experience culture shock. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. If I see one more book talking about culture shock, I'm going to publish a book of my own called "You Really Expected People To Act The Same Here As They Did At Home?"

No, what I'm more interested in is infrastructure differences, specifically telecommunications infrastructure differences. I call it, "telecommunications infrastructure shock". I think it just might catch on.

ASIDE: I made a note of saying to another country alongside overseas because I’m sure it’s quite reasonable to assume in my professional capacity as an overly verbose weblog poster that there will be some people who move "over a sea" while still remaining in the same country. Like moving from South Australia to Tasmania. Or Vienna to Zurich (?). Or from one side of Mawson Lakes to the other side of Mawson Lakes.

Does a lake count as a sea? As in, is my Mawson Lakes analogy above sound? Does a solid central European landmass count as a sea? Is the Vienna analogy sound? Can you still call it a bowl of oats if you replace the milk with transmission fluid and the vegetable matter with licorice?

For example, this longwinded post was created just so I could share with you a small detail about getting our study home in Adelaide connected to the all the internets. In Singapore to get your home connected, you would go to the ISP and ask to be connected in the morning, and by that evening you'd be wasting time looking at Wikipedia pages on Japanese television programmes.

In Australia, the estimated connection time after a successful application from scratch is a little bit longer:

Four to six weeks. Please excuse me while I walk over to a concrete wall and bash someone's head on it. I'd like to bash my own head on it, but I have an important assignment due in a few days. This post coming to you from a coffee shop WiFi connection… as I think many more will be for a long time to come!

This is an open letter to one of my sister’s friends, typed from a net cafe, and is in fact not related to free and open source software, open standards or something fun and silly.

It’s often said that it’s during times of crisis that people’s true colours shine through, and you learn who your friends really are. When my mum passed on at the end of last year after her epic 12 year battle with cancer, every single one of my friends were supportive, warm, friendly and knew exactly what to say. It didn’t matter if they were in Singapore, posting through Facebook from Australia, or even if I had met them face to face in the US, the UK or the Netherlands. You all know who you are, and you’re all great people for putting up with me through those tough times.

Unfortunately, my sister wasn’t so fortunate. As I posted about a few months ago, instead of supporting her and cutting her some slack during the worst time of her life, many of her friends chose instead to attack her character, calling her in as many words an "attention seeking bitch". Well last night in true soap opera fashion one of her so called "friends" in particular was exposed for continuing to make such remarks, the earliest of which were made less than a month after the disaster happened. When my sister read about this last night, she burst into tears.

Given such circumstances, I thought it would be useful and constructive to post some comments here to voice my concerns and to address some of these cruel, unjust accusations being leveled against my sister.

The Boeing 737-200 is not a widebody commercial jet!

I’ll be the first person to admit I have no idea what would motivate someone to make such cruel, petty comments against a young women going through the toughest time of her life, but I suspect it could be partly explained through several factors including personality, upbringing and experience.

It is true that many of our thoughts and actions result from our own experiences; it’s the reason why we have cliche phrases such as "learning it the hard way". For most people being told that something is wrong, inappropriate or will result in harm to themselves or others is an inadequate, and ineffective, substitute for real life experience.

In the case of my sister’s so-called friend, she has never lost a significant person in her life before. It could be that she is just so confused or unable to imagine what that experience would feel like that she doesn’t know how to react. One would think though that even if such a person didn’t know, she would still have enough empathy, respect and intelligence to at least cut a person going through the experience some slack and provide emotional support rather than backstabbing her.

Upbringing would also no doubt affect a person’s ability to a certain degree to be empathetic and supportive towards someone who has just lost her mother before she turned 20. In this case of this friend, she was raised in a conservative Christian environment. I’ve made no effort to conceal my own Atheism and the reasons why I chose to be (logic, respect for women and the human condition, morals…) but I also know that much of Christian teaching (in its current contemporary interpretation) is about instilling the love of thy neighbour and he who is without sin casting the first stone. Why did this friend find it so difficult to adopt these doctrines towards her friend when she needed her the most? Does she not see the connection or is she unwittingly being a hypocrite?

A South Australian high road!

No, as much as I try to reconcile external influences and reasons for why someone would be so childish during such tough times, I keep coming back to personality. Even if she had been taught that her friend was the devil, even if she could not relate to the loss of a close loved one, I can’t help but think she could have at least tried to be supportive, or at the very least pretending to give a rat’s arse.

We can learn a lot about the reasons why she labelled my sister with such insults by looking at the words themselves. She referred to my sister firstly as an "attention seeker". Could this friend in fact be so childish that she became jealous at the attention my sister was getting from others – attention not bestowed upon herself – that she would accuse her of intentionally stealing her thunder? Could she be so shallow as to assume that my sister in fact didn’t care as much about her mother’s premature death as her social standing?

These are all possibilities. Perhaps though her reasons, personality and character can all be explained by the crude, tacky, uninspired final insult she slung at my sister: "Bitch". One would think that given the circumstances, she could have been a bit more original with her insults too.

So to my sister’s friend, and all those who agreed and sided with her over this abhorrent behaviour, please grow up and start acting your ages. You’re not little kiddies in a playground anymore, you’re in the real world now. Save yourselves.

Oh and by the way…

Before I go any further, I’d like to warn you that this post about using FreeBSD to assign an address to a Western Digital MyBook drive is unnecessarily verbose. See, I could have just as easily said "this post is long".

Writing about theoretical uses for software is one thing, but figuring out how to apply software to a problem practically, and actually getting it work, is one of the greatest feelings in the world alongside writing a fantastic piece of software yourself to solve a problem. It makes me feel useful and gives me a rush quite unlike anything else.

And he’s available ladies! Unbelievable though it may seem! Come on! He also makes a mean Earl Grey latte. Any bidders? Anyone?

Case in point, my sister and I had a problem in our new house in Adelaide. Before I left Singapore, I bought a gigabit ethernet Western Digital MyBook 1GB World Edition NAS drive and loaded it up with all our media: movies, shows, music, podcasts, BSD disk images, ebooks. By using a simple network drive, we spared ourselves having to bring a separate computer down with us.

Our makeshift home network consists of each of our laptops and the aformentioned network drive which are all connected through short Cat-6 ethernet cables to a 5 port gigabit Ethernet switch. To compensate for the lack of a router, I assigned my sister’s MacBook and my MacBook Pro static IP addresses and I knew the network drive could also be assigned one. Very cool.

Our very fancy new home network.

Now here’s the kicker: for some reason in their infinite wisdom Western Digital decided not to ship the MyBook with a default IP address. This means it requires a DHCP server (Wikipedia link) to initally provide it with an address. I realised that without a router with a built in DHCP server, this network drive wouldn’t get an address, and therefore there’d be no way for me to log into it to assign it a static IP! Catch 22, chicken and the egg, a Bruce Schneier fact, call it what you will.

So within a few minutes I had configured a home network with two laptops and an inaccessible, address-less network drive. It seemed not having a router with a built in DHCP server would make this setup impossible. A quick Perl script determined that indeed only the two laptops were in our subdomain range:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w

for ($i = 1; $i < 255; $i++) {
  system "ping -a -c 2 192.168.1.$i";
}

print "Western Digital engineers love DHCP it seemsn"

At this point I had to make a tough decision. To access our media network drive I could either be patient and wait a week until we got our new broadband modem with a built in router, or I could be impatient. Grilled cheese sandwich. Grilled cheese sandwich?

I decided to do the latter and give it what it wanted: a DHCP server! In place of a router, I would configure a one-time use FreeBSD virtual machine with a software DHCP server which would assign the address to the network drive, so I could log into it remotely and assign it a static IP.

My FreeBSD virtual machine showing the DHCP server coming online

After setting up a generic VMware Fusion virtual machine on my MacBook Pro, I mounted a FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE ISO I had on already had on my hard drive and installed it with all the default options. I skipped configuring everything in the system installer except than the network card. I declined to use DHCP when it asked, and assigned it a static IP.

After rebooting the VM, I logged in as root and installed the isc-dhcp3-server package from ports.

I didn’t bother adding anything fancy to the /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf other than defining the pool of addresses and required options:

option domain-name "chuckpeddle";
option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;

default-lease-time 3600;
max-lease-time 86400;
ddns-update-style none;

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.1.120 192.168.1.129;
}

Next, to check what addresses our makeshift DHCP server has assigned, I created the default dhcpd.leases file:

# touch /var/db/dhcpd.leases

Finally, I enabled the dhcpd daemon in /etc/rc.conf and told it what card I wanted FreeBSD to listen for DHCP requests on. On VMware Fusion 1.1.3, the network card in FreeBSD is le0, but you can always check to make sure by using ifconfig -a

dhcpd_enable="YES"
dhcpd_ifaces="le0"

The moment of truth had arrived! I turned off my Western Digital MyBook NAS drive, rebooted the FreeBSD virtual machine, then turned the network drive back on again. After a minute of waiting, sure enough the /var/db/dhcpd.leases file reported that it had assigned an address…

lease 192.168.1.129 {
  starts 6 2008/08/02 14:37:12;
  ends 6 2008/08/02 15:37:12;
  binding state active;
  next binding state free;
  […]
  client-hostname "RubenerdNAS";
}

… and automagically the Finder on my MacBook Pro reported it had found a new samba share (with it’s irreverent sense of humour)! My network drive had been resurrected from the dead!

My Western Digital MyBook in the Finder

Finally, after all of that I was able to go to my web browser and log into the damned network drive’s configuration page and change the IP address to a static one.

I still can’t help but wonder why Western Digital decided not to include a default address.

Western Digital NAS config screen, and the FreeBSD DHCP virtual machine

And now if you’d excuse me, I’m off to watch an episode of Cranky Geeks. From my network drive. PHEW!

Our phone line at our house in Adelaide is getting the phone line connected on Monday, and ADSL connected the day after, assuming all goes well. I won't have to live for the half an hour or so a day I can use the internet at WiFi hotspots. It's going to be tough getting used to slow, "capped" internet plans that cost a fortune again though, unlimited downloads in Singapore have really spoilt me.

And because I dislike dry posts that don't contain any images, for your convenience I have enclosed a photograph of an off-road wheel chair. I'm hoping IKEA starts stocking the office chair version of these soon, the canister wheels on my old office chair in my room were totaled when I drag-raced that Porsche 959 Turbo down Mt Lofty. For what it's worth, I did manage to come second despite not actually staying on the road for very long. The lack of a steering wheel on my chair gave the 959 an unfair advantage I think, I just used a broom handle with a rubber stopper on the end of it.

The Tank Chair, the solution to all the world's problems, and then some.

For a wheelchair that can go anywhere, look no further than the Tank Chair. This custom off-road chair “conquers streams, mud, snow, sand, gravel — allowing you to get back to nature — and can also climb up and down stairs”. It features motors built by NPC Robotics.

It is with a heavy heart and solemn, somewhat slower key strokes as I sit here using the public WiFi in the city that I inform all those who don't yet know that Starbucks is closing all their stores in South Australia. Stores are also closing in other states, but according to the Adelaide Advertiser paper I read yesterday you'll still be able to get your bucky goodness in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

My last haul from the Starbucks in Rundle Mall.

As I said in a previous pro-Starbucks, pro-Ikea post, I know it's definitely not politically correct to admit you like a transnational corporation, but for me they've always been more than just an overpriced foreign coffee shop with swish little brown paper cup holders.

The Starbucks in the Paragon Shopping Centre in Singapore was my late mum's and my refuge after she finished her chemotherapy every few days; we'd split a cheesecake and drink our Americanos in those giant soft lounge chairs and talk about the most esoteric, philosophical and downright silly things for hours. It was the few hours before the chemo and pain set back in, and she still had the energy to make playful jabs and zings. I'm not sure if I ever told her how much those outings meant to me before she passed on, but I do know that whenever I enter any one of their stores a wave of familiarity passes over me and I feel as though she could be there somewhere, somehow. Ridiculous I know, but there it is.

Back to Adelaide, I can remember when the Rundle Mall outlet of Starbucks first opened. It was 2006 and I had been studying here for a year already, and I was so excited. Starbucks was such a big part of my life in Singapore and Malaysia, and to be able to walk down possibly the greatest shopping street in Australia with a Caramel Macchiato prepared the same way I asked for it in those other aforementioned places was just fantastic. It's ironic that an American multinational actually reminds me of my homes in Asia and not the other way around!

Starbucks Australia website showing closing notice

My sister Elke and I went to the store today for their final day of trading, and all the Starbucks branded cups with "Adelaide" printed on them were understandably all gone. I'm glad I was able to buy and keep one back when they first opened! I got a Venti Caramel Macchiato, no skim milk this time. Also picked up a box of Tazo Green Tea, if you're in a place with a Starbucks (still!) try one out, they really make some fantastic cuppas. They were also handing out postcards thanking everyone here for their patronage over the last few years:

We would like to thank all of out customers for your commitment and dedication to all our stores over the past eight years and we are sad to say this store will be closing.

To top it off, Elke took a terribly unflattering photo of me standing outside the Rundle Mall outlet next to their sign, on their last day. Why she couldn't wait until I wasn't making a silly face I have no idea! Cheerio Starbucks, was nice to have you here while you were here. Guess I'll have to wait till my next trip to Melbourne again, just like I used to.