Rubenerd

Cranky Geeks is one of the best video podcasts I watch… probably because it's one of the only video podcasts I watch. No but seriously it's a fantastic show, I encourage you to check it out especially if you enjoy lighthearted and cranky discussion of tech trends and the well-deserved ridiculing of stupid news stories.

This was my review Episode 076 dated the 07th of August 2007.

A great show! Om added a lot of colour and Matt and Sebastian made some great points, especially about the ridiculous idea about the bloggers union. There's definitely chemistry between all these people!

The pictures for the stories with Om, Matt and John's heads superimposed were the best ones so far.

What I want to know is, why wasn't Cranky Geeks nominated on PodcastAwards.com? What a bunch of alleged frig-tards ;)

I am a real fan of KDE, the desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems such as FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, and I'm also a fan of the Qt Toolkit upon which it's built. Qt is developed of course by the Norwegian Trolltech company and is released under open source and proprietary licences depending on your circumstances. I firmly believe this is the software development business model of the future because it gives the tools to the open source community while at the same time allowing the company to generate revenue for proprietary uses. It's also why I'm a fan of MySQL, even if it's not as cool to be one ;).

Anyway Trolltech have expanded the permitted licences you can publish your work under! From what I can tell previously you could release your work under the GNU General Public Licence 2.0 and before version 4.0 their own Q Public Licence, but now amongst others you can now use it alongside the BSD licence (1999 vintage) and the MIT licence. As a predominantly FreeBSD and OS X user this is great news because I've generally released my work under the BSD licence, and now I can do so with my graphical Qt applications :).

I applaud Trolltech's move and thank them for supporting the whole open source community. I'd buy them each a coffee or a beer, but Norway is a long way away.

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47:00 – Son of a diddley, long times and whatnot, moving back to Singapore, Murphey's law, unpacking stuff, loving living in the tropics, Yakult, a heart attack inducing Singaporean taxi adventure, my two guilty signs of insanity, loud apartment security boom gates, going to Changi Airport at 0630 on a Sunday, the Commodore 64 Family Pack, borderline Twitter addiction, Twitting Felix Tanjono and Frank Nora, shoehorning Symbian, 3G wireless in Singapore, using m.twitter.com on a handphone, Keeping Up Appearances, Hyacinth Bucket, hand painted periwinkles, ratholes, review of Twitterrific and TwitWin, Chocolate Rain, awesome internet memes, time zones, some sort of Apple handphone, listening to podcasts and whatnot, neighbourhood insurance rates, Gold 90.5FM, Paul McCartney versus John Lennon, disowning, Starbucks, Dance Tonight on Memory Almost Full music review, singing for sheets, my Beatles realisation from Larry King Live, fortune telling on YouTube, having a brief booming voice, madams on a phone, voting for podcasts, J.D. Lasica and being a multitasking jaywalker.

There's a bit of voice distortion in parts of this show. I'm obviously out of practice, the next one will be much better!

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

I just got a tweet on Twitterrific from Frank Nora that today (11th August) is the last day to vote for your favourite podcasts on PodCastAwards.com, so don't forget to click on your favourite shows. If you're in my part of the world you have until late Sunday morning (12th August).

I've voted for The Overnightscape (obviously!) every time under General and alternated between MacBreak Weekly and Security Now (GRC link) under Computing. I couldn't decide between the two so I figured I'd vote for both.

I was disappointed Cranky Geeks wasn't nominated in the Video category, and neither On the Economy with Tom Keene nor Alan Kohler's Eureka Report were nominated under Business. Ah well, can't win them all.

Hello everyone, hope you're having a great Saturday afternoon!

So yesterday I was bored silly with my studies and work so for a bit of an extended lunch break I went two stops on the MRT to Marina Bay, a reclaimed patch of land across the bay from the Singapore CBD. There are grand plans for what's going to be built there, but for now it's just an eerie plot of grass dotted with a few trees which feels quite strange when the centre of the city is within eyeshot!

The tall, geometric building in the centre of the photo above was where my father used to work when we first moved to Singapore which seems an age ago. All the above buildings are in Raffles Place, the buildings below are to the left and are part of the Shenton Way-Tanjong Pagar financial district.

And on the other side of the MRT station one of the expressways appears. I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow from this photo you can tell Singapore has a British colonial past:

That's definitely one thing I always notice when I return to Singapore after being… somewhere else, all the gardens and flowers along the roads are so well maintained. There's no doubt in my mind I'm a city slicker but I love gardens.

You can view all the photos on my Marina Bay Zooomr page.

This is part two of my SingFest 2007 post.

I really wanted to take good photos, but given it was just a stage behind metal gates on Fort Canning Hill I was worried my prosumer might get damaged, so I bit the bullet and just took pictures with my camera phone. As you can expect from a camera the quality was horrendous, but it was still fun :)

By 2300 the crowd had died down and we stood there as the guys in black assembled the stage for the Pet Shop Boys! It looked really complicated, the lighting crew projected a grid onto the stage to help set up all the LEDs and fluorescent tubes… it took them well over half an hour.

To say the Pet Shop Boys put on an amazing show would be a criminally punishable understatement. When Neil Tennent and Chris Lowe walked onto the stage from opposite sides the crowd nearly exploded. It's bothering me that I can't remember what exactly he said, but when Neil came to the front and exclaimed we'd be having a visual and audio entertainment experience, he wasn't lying!

Each song had it's own background images projected onto the rear of the stage and their own carefully timed and precisely placed lighting which made each song seem almost like a "electronic musical", I really don't know how else to describe it.

The costumes for each song in the performance were amazing, though Nick did comment after the first set that "Singapore is pretty hot, isn't it?". With his signature long coat taled suit and long pants I really was surprised he didn't boil!

By the time they left the stage the crowd kept chanting for more, so the came out and did two more songs! They didn't have any more carefully decided animated backgrounds obviously, but they did the next best thing and arraged on the spot some of the light tubes in the shape of a cross and sang It's a Sin.

But the best song of all was at the end when everyone came on stage and sang Go West!. Everyone on the hill was waving their fists to their left, except for a couple of girls in ther front row who pointed in the wrong direction which I thought was pretty funny :). Neil introduced all the singers and his producer, then they disappeared behind the set.

I'm not sure whether to say it was the best music concert I ever saw because they didn't really put on a concert, it was again more of a musical or stage show set to music… I'm sure I'll never see anything quite the same again. Unless I see the Pet Shop Boys somewhere else ;).

All in all a great night, so much so that I used Twitter from my PDA phone the whole night. Hey, it was my first non-Jazz, non-Clasical concert, I need to transition ;).

I've got more photos on my Zooomr page if you're as obsessed with the Pet Shop Boys as I am ;)

Good evening Singapore, how are we?
We continue our musical journey… in Suburbia!

Lost in the high street, where the dogs run
Roaming suburban boys
Mother’s got a hairdo to be done
She says they’re too old for toys
Stood by the bus stop with a felt pen
In this suburban hell
And in the distance a police car
To break the suburban spell

Let’s take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia
You can’t hide, run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia

Break the window by the town hall
Listen, the siren screams
There in the distance, like a roll call
Of all the suburban dreams

Let’s take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia
You can’t hide, run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia

I only wanted something else to do but hang around
I only wanted something else to do but hang around
I only wanted something else to do but hang around
I only wanted something else to do but hang around

It’s on the front page of the papers
This is their hour of need
Where’s a policeman when you need one
To blame the colour TV?

Let’s take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia
You can’t hide, run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia

Take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia
You can’t hide, run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia

Run with the dogs tonight
In Suburbia
You can’t hide
In Suburbia… In Suburbia… In Suburbia… In Suburbia… In Suburbia

Singapore has reached the meaning of life, the universe and everything! Douglas Adams would be proud :).

So I broke away from my jazz and champagne concert comfort zone and went to day 1 of SingFest 2007 yesterday, and my ears are still ringing from it!

I really wanted to take good photos, but given it was just a stage behind metal gates on Fort Canning Hill I was worried my prosumer might get damaged, so I bit the bullet and just took pictures with my camera phone. As you can expect from a camera the quality was horrendous, but it was still fun :)

The lineup was amazing, firstly they had the Sasha Bach Band from MySpace which to tell the truth I had never heard of before and had never heard any of their music but they were very good. Not too loud, the melodies were interesting and the drummer really had it going on!

That clearly isn't the right picture.

Of course the real stars came after, first Shaggy came on and did all the hip busting moves to the songs we all know. I still can't get over his voice, I wish I could do that!

The band which really put everyone in their place were The Stranglers, I really thought they were going to all have aneurisms, they really got into it! I have to admit I'm not much of a fan of hard rock and metal, but when they played the ballads I really got into it. Nobody can do ballads like hard rock bands I've come to realise ;).

Cyndi Lauper is even smaller in person than I could have imagined! When she came on stage and had guitar problems she talked to the sound engineers from the stage and had a few false starts but took it all in her stride, and she was hilarious! A couple of the local Singaporean girls next to us in the front row kept saying "She's so cute!". She really got into it, even walked down amongst the crowd and even walked up to us on the right hand side. I couldn't reach her but we made eye contact… hehe.

At one point Shaggy even came up with her during Girls. I never would have thought they'd make a wicked singing duo! You can read more about their collaboration here.

I actually really enjoyed Sugar Ray which I'm sure if I talked to myself in the past I'd surprise me. I've got a few of their songs but I just thought of them more as another generic pop group but they were all natural entertainers. The lead singer (who my sister has the hots for!) really engaged with the audience and kept saying what an honour it was to be sharing the stage with all these other singers and to be celebrating Singapore national day here. The crowd loved that ;).

I've still got more photos to process (and by process I mean "make look half decent") and I want to give the Pet Shop Boys their own post, so stay tuned for part 2.

Wondering why I'm not using Zooomr for these images as I said I would be? Because I've tried uploading them more than four times with spotty success and in the process of creating "smart" galleries ended up creating nothing but error 404 pages. I don't have time to mess around with it, so I've just put them on my own server for now!

It happens everytime, when I feel as though I'm finally making progress in moving over to open source software and operating systems, Apple timely throws a curve ball and I'm left sitting wide-eyed looking at a new Mac and thinking about Leopard again! This is no good!

Yes so yesterday in the US Apple announced:

• Updated Mac minis with Core 2 duo processors (so much for all the rumours predicting they’d be dead soon!)
• A new Mac Pro RAID card
• Airport Extreme with Gigabit ethernet
• Storage and transfer updates to .Mac
• iLife 2008

But of the product updates announced, I was more excited about iWork and the new iMac. Finally iWork has a spreadsheet programme! You can download a trial gratis from the Apple website, though it's pretty slow right now probably from demand. Looking at the press release pictures the graph functions look especially stylish, what you would expect from a suite that has Keynote in it I guess. When I have time I'll post a review.

And of course the wicked new iMac made of anodized aluminum. I'm disappointed the graphics specs still haven't been upgraded and that they're still using open-source-unfriendly ATI cards, but they're just so swish:

Wait, that's a Commodore PET from 1978, what the hell's that doing there?

So with all my talk about being a FreeBSD KDE user on boxes I build myself, deep down inside I'm still a Mac fanboy, especially if this post can make it's way onto Buzztracker page!

It's just one of those things: when you start unpacking a after moving house you rediscover all this old crap you probably hadn't looked at for years. In this case I stumbled upon not one, but two pieces of old Ansett Australia memorabilia!

If you didn't know, Ansett was an Australian airline that went belly-up in 2001 due to financial mismanagement, rising costs and lower passenger numbers after the 11th of September attacks in the US. We'll blame Air New Zealand ;)

This was an older model I finished of a 747-300, you can tell it's not a -400 series because it doesn't have the winglets. The weird camera angle is the result of my trying to disguise the fact that during the move the starboard wing had snapped off. Yes, it has only one wing. You can't tell though… right? ;)

The second model was a kit for a Boeing 727-200 my dad picked up in Japan of all places, with all the original parts and little paint jars. Good times.

Being a business traveller my dad and us had flown with them extensively during the 90s before we moved to Singapore and SIA became my favourite airline ;). We always preferred them to QANTAS, the service was generally better even though the planes they flew were older.