Rubenerd

Ever wanted to see your name professionally printed on a cassette

Here's the official Rubenerd Show Cassette, now in white!

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The South Aussie state government and SA Great have lauched a new campaign and website to promote South Australian produced goods and services. So go grab yourself a South Australia sticker!

south australia, i'm south autalian, buy south australian, adelaide, australia, sa great, south australia great

Is there any end in site to the errors of which I recieve on a daily basis from eBay Australia, regardless of whether I'm on Mac OS X, FreeBSD or Windows 2000, using Camino, Firefox or Konqueror?

I've got something for your "feedback fourms"… your website has been proven to be as reliable as Enron's accounting.

ebay, ebay australia, error, stupid, unreliable, downtime

Just browsing on Google Earth a few minutes ago, I thought I'd check out Kuala Lumpur, the de facto capital of Malaysia, and where my expat family currently lives (and soon me too).

This is what the KLCC Petronoas Twin Towers look like from the ground (from my Flickr account):

And this is the same building complex from Google Earth:

Those two symmetrial curved rectangles on the roof there are the massive skylights for the Suria KLCC shopping complex where I grab coffee when I'm there.

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Sitting in Boatdeck Cafe in Mawson Lakes last night having pasta and coffee outside, I overheard what sounded like two Americans talking:

“And so I just pulled out my air guiter.
I looked like a dick, but man it felt good!”

Haha, good on 'em ;)

boatdeck cafe, boat deck cafe, quotes, mawson lakes, adelaide, south australia, australia

Oh boy I really want one of these!

The Bloomberg desktop features the award-winning Bloomberg Terminal, the new Bloomberg keyboard, BLOOMBERG-FON and more. Read about how you can enhance your desktop below.

Having that sitting on my desk, all the major stock marekts, biggest stock changes by volume and value, latest news, newly released government reports and statistics… who needs cable? :D

If anyone is interested in purchasing me a Bloomberg Desktop, send me an email and we can arrange shipping details.

bloomberg, economics, bloomberg desktop, bloomberg terminal, bloomberg keyboard, bloomberg-fon, terminals

So someone asked the question: do apple seeds have arsenic in them? Is it dangerous to process apples with the seeds still in the fruit?

“The good news: apple seeds do not contain arsenic. The bad news: apple seeds DO contain cyanide. As for processing the apples, what kind of processing are you interested in? Grinding apples and pressing them for cider doesn’t release enough cyanide to be a problem; neither does cooking apples and straining them to make a sauce. About the only way you can actually ruin into a problem with the toxicity of apple seeds is if you save the seeds from about a bushel of apples and eat them all at once.”

Dr. Richard E. Barrans Jr.

Well there you go!

Ask A Scientist: Apple Seeds and Arsenic

apples, fruit, cyanide, arsenic, health, food, toxins

Happy September everyone. For those of you in the Sothern Hemisphere, happy first day of Spring, and for those in the North, happy first day of Autumn.

Some fun September facts from Wikipedia that even I didn't know… and I know everything (haha):

• September begins on the same day of the week as December every year.
• September’s flower is the aster or morning glory.
• September’s birthstone is the sapphire.
• In the year 1752, in the British Empire, the Gregorian calendar was adopted and as a result September did not have days numbered 3–13.
• On Usenet, it is said that September 1993 never ended.
• On June 6th, 1995 John Baur and Mark Summers declared September 19th International Talk Like a Pirate Day.
• September in the Northern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent to March in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa.
• World War II began on September 1, 1939 following Hitler’s invasion of Poland and ended on the same month, September 2, 1945 with the Japanese surrender.
• Caligula (Roman Emperor 37-41 AD) attempted to rename September “Germanicus” after his father.
• Wake Me Up When September Ends is a song by Green Day. The lead vocalist, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote this song because his father died in September when Billie Joe was 10.
• September is also the name of a female Swedish singer, author of the dance hit song “Satellites”.
• American rock legend Bruce Springsteen was born on September 23, 1949, in Freehold, New Jersey.

Interesting post regarding my part of the world in response to this post on Slashdot:

South Australia seems to have an addiction to its EDS contract,
but there are more students studying IT, hopefully to take jobs
in SA Gov’t, to help position itself in an EDS-free place, “any
day now”… ;-)

A EDS-story has been cirulating in recent years:

The Adelaide Crows (Aussie Footy Team) needed a web site, &
EDS (reportedly) won the contract, after submitting a bid
which estimated it would take 4+ weeks and cost Au$ 32,000.

In fact, the project took just 2 weeks… Too bad a local
South Aussie web making business couldn’t have been the
winner, in this case.

(SA also has a “whole-of-gov’t” contract with Microsoft,
that calls for penalties whenever a non-Microsoft server
is added to the gov’t N/W in contract’s scope, ie, for
the first time (replacing an -old- UNIX server by the
same -old- version of UNIX may not lead to a penalty).)

How do such contracts get written or won?

There are very few palms to be greased & a company like
EDS has a lot of “grease” to offer, or so we suppose…

eds, csc, australia, south australia, adelaide, slashdot, web design, web development

I really feel for the people of Papua New Guinea. Upon independence from Australia they seemed to have such a bright future, but it seems corruption has once again reared its fat head to steal from the people who really need help. It pains me to think of places that are suffering from this; polititians in these places are just self-centred, self-serving cretins.

Interesting article from Monstors and Critics:

Australia is gearing up for what many see as the impending collapse of Papua New Guinea, the colony it gave independence to 31 years ago and the troubled South Pacific’s biggest country.

It’s been an amazing fall from grace.

At independence in 1975 PNG had a competent Australian-trained bureaucracy, was free from debt, had no external security threats and looked set to bring prosperity to its 1 million people from a marvelous array of natural resources that included gold, copper, silver, oil, gas, timber and abundant fisheries.

Despite around 10 billion Australian dollars (7.5 billion US dollars) of Australian aid since independence, PNG is now heavily in debt and unable to protect, let alone develop, its natural resources.

At the root of the problem is corruption on a mind-boggling scale.

Said Allan Patience, professor of political science at the University of Papua New Guinea: ‘Since independence, most politicians have regarded the national parliament as a means to amass personal fortunes. Most play the system for what they can get out of it personally. A few have been prosecuted. Even fewer have been imprisoned.’

Analysis: Papua New Guinea careens towards chaos

png, papua new guinea, australia, corruption, chaos