Rubenerd

Ready Steady Cook is an Aussie television programme on Channel 10, based on the BBC's show in the UK of the same name.

Anyway, I didn't know this, but did you know if you chop onion with a SHARP knife (as opposed to a dumb knife… har har) you won't get anywhere near the amount of stinging in your eyes? With a blunt knife you break a lot more cell walls which releases more of the vapour which, when mixed with the fluid in your eyes creates a mild acid… ouch!

And some tips for making great baked vegetables:

• When baking potato/onion etc, chop them up into similar sizes, so when they bake they all cook evenly
• Add light amount of oil and seasoning before putting them in
• Don't stack the veggies on top of each other, or they'll stew and go yucky

You learn something new each… week.

Okay, I've been in this lecture for a while now, and there are two girls in front are so damned immiture it's not funny. Seriously.

This is what she has laughed at during the last half hour:

• lecturer's phone buzzed
• name lecturer mentioned had "ooz" in it
• lecturer's microphone made a brief fart sound
• lecturer says to read "Larman" textbook
• lecturer says "I deleted the originals"
• lecturer says "theres a zip file… somewhere"
• lecturer says "go to the forum and post"
• lecturer says "I dont go to pieces if I dont answer something"
• lecturer says "for dice game you have a die"
• lecturer's phone rang

Quote on guy's book next to me: I'm not alone, I'm with myself – Jane Fonder

Well would you look at that, Mrs Mature has started doodling flowers, hearts, barbed wire, "this subject sux" words on her book, this is so cliche its painful. And laughing at little kiddy things. And taking about how she got drunk on Saturday night.

16 going on 20?

Well I'm sitting here for the start of the first lecture of the year for "Object Oriented System Development", looks absolutely riveting.

There are all these posters lining the sides of the hall, the slogans are pretty bad!

• UniSA Mathematics Programs – Be cool and calculating
• UniSA IT Programs – Control Alt Enter

This is going to be a long two hours!

Wait a tic, they've changed the name "Object Oriented System Development" to "Object Oriented Software Engineering". Sounds sexier.

Taken straight from the uni network… have you ever seen such a hideous timetable? Argh.

time	Mon(27/2)	Tue(28/2)	Wed(1/3)	Thu(2/3)	Fri(3/3)
9:00 AM					2405
9:30 AM					MLK-F1-25
10:00 AM				25188
10:30 AM				MLK-F1-17
11:00 AM			24464		25186
11:30 AM			MLK-GP1-09		MLK-J1-05
12:00 PM
12:30 PM
1:00 PM					22375
1:30 PM					MLK-GP1-09
2:00 PM
2:30 PM
3:00 PM	22375	24464
3:30 PM	MLK-GP1-09	MLK-GP1-09
4:00 PM
4:30 PM
5:00 PM

Key
Class Nbr	Room	Course	Section	Description	Instructor
22375	MLK-GP1-09	COMP2006	Lecture 01LL	Object-Oriented Software Eng	F. Fursenko
24464	MLK-GP1-09	COMP2012	Lecture 01LL	Objects and Algorithms in C++	TBA
25188	MLK-F1-17	INFS2004	Computer Practical 04CL	Data Model and Database Design	TBA
24054	MLK-F1-25	INFS2004	Lecture 01LL	Data Model and Database Design	J. Liu
25186	MLK-J1-05	INFS2004	Tutorial 01TL	Data Model and Database Design	TBA

Damn it.

To think I'm going to a tech university that uses Microsoft ASP.net and Microsoft IIS… it makes me sick to my stomach.

Especially in this case because I just tried to check my uni email account, and for the seventh time in a row got this greeting:

Where's the BAMP stack when you need it?! (BSD, Apache, MySQL and Perl, prefer to Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP… but both are much better than this crud they're serving up at my uni!!!)

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

32:00 – McDonalds, iPods, Beds, Tony Abbott, Kmart Sales, Signs you're on Internet Explorer, Carlsberg Bottle Cap, Vacations, The "WorldWideWeb" Browser, 400 posts on MakeItGreat, The Hunger Site, Crap & Stuff.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Some people drink beer like water with little regard for its taste, for the sake of getting smashed only to wake up on Sunday with no idea what they did. Ruben doesn't do this. So in this space Ruben celebrates Saturday night in his own style.

Today's brew: Carlsberg.

By Appointment to the Royal Danish Court
Carlsberg Beer
Copenhagen – Denmark

First, I have to say the new Carlsberg bottles look pretty swish. There's no indent between the two halves of the and the labels are transparent, it just makes it look so much more refined. One bottle contains approx 1.3 standard drinks, which for a VERY light drinker like me is ample for one day.

As for the taste, from the first sip you can tell this is a very full beer, the flavour is very pronounced. Its a bit more bitter compared to some others I've had which makes it much more interesting to drink. It's the opposite of watery; the flavour is fairly rich and smooth.

I used to live in Singapore, and Carlsberg there is almost the equivalent to VB here in South Australia… lots of people drink it despite being an 'import' (as opposed to Coopers).

Now I have fairly limited experience with beer, and disagree if you wish, but I give this 4 stars. I'm impressed.

Kevin (one of my roommates) likes it too. Then again, he's from Singapore!

I'm a uni student and can't afford a home; I'm not interested in low mortgages; I DON'T LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES!

Well another day has come and gone; it's exactly 03:30 and I really should be going to bed now. You might be wondering "wow Ruben stayed up on a Saturday night! He must have partied pretty hard there!"

If by party you're referring to finishing this blog, putting the finishing touches on The Rubenerd Show website (the parent site to this blog), talking to Chris about uni courses and laughing my ass off with Kevin while watching a delayed telecast of David Letterman (episode from Friday in the US) then, yeah.

Good stuff :).

Probably about 5 years ago if you entered my bedroom you would have seen a Windows 2000 machine with Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer on it. Then I moved to Mac and started using Microsoft Office .mac, Safari and iTunes.

Increasingly though I'm turning to Open Source software to use on a day to day basis. I enjoy programming, but having the source code is not really the key; the key to me is that the data generated with OSS is generally far more open than proprietary software. I use OpenOffice.org on X11 on my iBook for uni work, and I love the open document formats, and I use Camino now instead of Safari (I know Camino is Mac only, but it still uses the Mozilla core and the bookmark files etc are open).

This brings me to iTunes. Waaaay back when I got version 1 of iTunes to tinker around with on my old blueberry iMac I was very impressed with the user interface. Coming from the Windows world I was used to WinAmp, which is fine for a few songs but for mountains of tracks the interface is horrendus. Windows Media Player was equally bad, and iTunes seemed to just be so simple: playlists on one side, tracks on the other.

Over time I've grown quite a large iTunes library with subsequent releases (I haven't upgraded to version 6 yet, 5 works for me, and I don't have a video iPod), but recently I found another software product… OSS… that takes the zest of the iTunes interface, puts it in a blender and spits out something that looks awesome:

If you're in the know with music software you probaly know about this already, but looking at it now I think it holds a lot of promise. The interface uses the Firefox engine, so it will look almost the same on any platform, and so far it supports MPA, MP3, AAC, OGG, FLAC, WMA (yuk) and more… finally I can convert all my songs to Ogg Vorbis and have a player that supports them natively.

At the moment the software is only for Windows, and I have a restraining order against Windows, but Mac OS X and Linux versions will be out soon. Because it uses the Firefox rendering engine, does this mean I'll be able to run it on whatever WM I want? XFce with Songbird, Thunderbird, Flock and OpenOffice would be a very compelling stack. Of course it would be on DragonFlyBSD with Linux binary emulation ;).