Dedicated to my late brave, beautiful and silly mummy, Debra Ross. I love you mumster.

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Category archive for pre2006

Because archives are so much easier than having just hundreds of posts on the home page. I learned that the hard way.

I smell a ripoff

2005.12.03 – 00.38

Ruben's RapidWeaver Blog

Just saw the new 2006 Holden Barina.

… and the 2004 Hyundai Getz…

Hmm…

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in transport | Comments (0)

Painfully unreliable internet

2005.11.27 – 11.01

Ruben's RapidWeaver Blog

This DSL internet connection we have in this shared house is slowly destroying my hairline. It’s TPG 1.5mbit ADSL and the modem connects to it for roughly 20 to 30 minutes before it decides to disconnect. Sometimes its more like every 5 minutes. I any event I’m ready to throw it out the window!!!


Status shown on modem’s internal configuration page

And now I’ve clicked Connect and 10 minutes have past. So I thought I’d reconnect to the modem to see if it had worked:


Trying to connect to the modem’s internal configuration page!

Ha! That’s classic! Excuse me while I rip some more hair out. No wait, hitting refresh, I’m back at the modem setup again:


Status shown on modem’s internal configuration page… AGAIN

So the DSL is up, the downstream/upstream speeds have been established and I have DNS server references, but STILL no IP address and therefore vis a vis ergo wysiwyg its still not connected. Brilliant.

I would be more enthusiastic, however the fact that I do this dance with this internet connection about 3 times an hour… I want my Starhub MaxOnline 8mbit connection back! Hopefully if you’re reading this though, I’ve managed to upload it and therefore vis a vis ergo wysiwyg we have internet again. Here’s me hoping.

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in australia, internet | Comments (1)

Murphy Brown, Windows XP and cold gymnists

2005.11.26 – 22.29

Ruben's RapidWeaver Blog

This post was originally created using a very slick client side Mac application called RapidWeaver. It made creating my third weblog and posts very easy, but being client side meant I needed to upload every small change, and it wasn’t open source. I moved over to WordPress a year later: forth time’s the charm right? ;).

Just saw an ad for Boston Legal on Channel 7; I knew that William Shatner, sorry Captain Kirk, no wait I was right the first time. I’ll try again.

Just saw an ad for Boston Legal on Channel 7; I knew that William Shatner was in it but Murphy Brown appeared to! Awesome!

The team on Boston Legal

I remember one ad for her show we had on some cheesy Christmas recording on VHS. I think she was in a moard beeting, sorry board meeting, with little cookies or something on a tray for an office Christmas party; she was passing the tray around and one couple asked her if they were small. In her classic down-to-earth style she exclaimed that “no they were made that size by microscopic aliens with their miniturising rays! Of course they’re small, can we get on with it now!”

Amazing how much trivial, pointless stuff you remember. My grandad in Firefly calls it his “vast store of useless information”. Very apt!

And just saw an ad while typing this for Windows XP; it was centred around an artist discussing how the “wondrous world” of Windows helps her turn dreams into reality yada yada with all these swirling colours and cut out figures dancing around. Guess Redmond is trying to challenge the notion that their products are un-insipiring in the face of… oh I don’t know, what’s that creative, ‘hip’ computer company again? Has five letters and begins with A…

Microsoft’s last ditch attempt to make Windows look ‘hip’

As John C. Dvorak said about Microsoft on one of the more recent episodes of TWiT:

“I tell you, this company is dead in the water.”

And now a show is actually starting, some gymnastics competition in Melbourne apparently. Why do the guys get to wear pants and loose shirts and the girls have to wear those things that look like swimmers? I understand the need for clothes that wouldn’t catch or slow you down when you’re doing this stuff, but how would they be able to concentrate, I’d be shivering myself to death. Plus the guys can do all these complicated hurdles and stuff with loose fitting clothing on… is this another sign of the social position we’re in at the moment, or it just me?

Monette Russo and Joshua Jefferis (Aussie gymnast peoples)

Okay my one hour of designated television watching is over. Back to studying, damn it.

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in television | Comments (0)

Choosing a blogging tool

2005.11.26 – 14.40

Ruben's RapidWeaver Blog

Been looking for a while at blogging tools, still no entirely sure which one to go with. Movable Type is out of the question (mostly because I’m too lazy). I was giving some serious thought to Wordpress, a lot of its users seem pretty pleased with it. Of course, it used MySQL and I really want to avoid using a database.

And NO I don’t want to use Blogger, thank you very much ;)

I guess this brings me to a point on ‘data independence’. I’m highly critical of sites or software that take your data and lock it up so if in future you want to migrate to another platform or software package, it’s either painfully difficult or simply impossible. Call me paranoid, but that’s exactly why The Rubenerd Show site still uses Perl scripts that I write myself, because if at any time I want to change it’s much easier for me to do.

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in weblog | Comments (0)

The first RapidWeaver Post!

2005.11.26 – 01.19

Ruben's RapidWeaver Blog

This post was originally created using a very slick client side Mac application called RapidWeaver. It made creating my third weblog and posts very easy, but being client side meant I needed to upload every small change, and it wasn’t free or open source. I moved over to WordPress a year later: forth time’s the charm right?

Well I’ve caved in.

For about a year now I’ve been sending out my voice in this world through podcasting; I think it’s worked okay in some respects, but I’ve faced the fact that the audio medium is extremely clumsy for posting small snippets or ideas that come to me on an hourly basis through the day. I loved using del.icio.us and many a time I found myself posting links with detailed comments; then the idea dawned on me: how about a weblog instead? I mean, it’s pretty much what I was doing anyway, might as well go the next step!

With all the hype and talk that video and audio podcasts have been recieving lately I’m going back to basics with a simple, no frills weblog designed to supplement my podcast.

Ol’ Bert on GMA

What did Big Kev say on the Good Morning Australia show? Oh yeah: “I’m Excited!”

By Ruben Schade | Also posted in television, weblog | Comments (0)

Boxing Day & Palm Pilots

2004.12.26 – 23.34

Rubenerd.com

This post was originally published on Rubenerd.com, my second attempt at a weblog. It was fairly short lived because I had just got my first job in the gap between high school and university, and I had very little time. Forth time’s the charm right? ;).

Today was back to the usual hectic routine my life seems to be taking, walking around all over the place, doing errands etc. Ever since my full time summer job at Veritas started I’ve basically been on my feet every day, my nerdy body is not used to it! Cameron’s dad invited my to the Singapore Cricket Club for boxing day brunch which was fantastic! All in all we spent about 3 hours there!

Got my mum’s Zire 72 working that I bought her for Christmas yesterday (yesterday? already?), the screen quality is amazing! My old little Tungsten W smart phone has the same resolution but the colours on the Zire are so much better, the contrast has really been improved. Hoping to buy a Treo 650 to replace the W, then I can get Palm OS 5 too.

And in case you’re about to email me to say ‘buy a Pocket PC’ shoot yourself in the head. I don’t trust Windows on my PC, so why should I trust it on a phone??!! The mere prospect is frightening. Plus the battery life on Pocket PCs suck. And I want a device with a proper keyboard; I don’t care what Microsoft says the handwriting recognition on Pocket PC is terrible. With my Tungsten W you can just whip it out and punch in a message or SMS into the keypad and off it goes.

Also kept working on this site to try and get it up and working. As of yet, despite the fact I have been typing these blog entries none of them have been published! I got rid of the purple and replaced it with a darker blue; I thought the former might have been sending the wrong message! So at the moment I think this is the only page people can see!

Therefore if you see any links that don’t work, it means I haven’t finished that part of the page yet!

Oh but I got a shock: I was sitting at my mums computer in her art studio thingy with her sitting on the couch watching the ABC news when the report of the massive earthquake came in off Sumatra… 8.1 on the Richter scale, over 3000 people reported dead. Sorry just reading BBC, it was 8.9. Unbelievable. The biggest quake in 40 years. I cannot even begin to imagine what those people’s relatives must be feeling; houses have been swept away and buildings have collapsed.

Got a clip from the Wikipedia entry on the quake which came out a few hours ago:

” The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea earthquake of magnitude 8.9 that struck the Indian Ocean off the western coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia on December 26, 2004 00:58:50 UTC (or 07:58:50 local time in Jakarta and Bangkok). It was the strongest earthquake in the world since the Good Friday Earthquake which struck Alaska in 1964, and the fifth largest since 1900. More than three thousand deaths were caused by resulting tsunamis, which were as high as 10 metres (33 feet) in some locations.

The earthquake triggered massive tsunamis (popularly known as “tidal waves”), which struck the coasts of the Indian Ocean. However Pacific Ocean coasts were not affected. The death toll from the tsunamis and the resultant floods was reported to be more than 3300, with hundreds of persons reported missing.”

- English Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_Earthquake

And here was a map published for the article by Bogdangiusca:

- English Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Harta_Ocean_Indian_Quake.png

Unbelievable… I can’t think of anything else to say.

Mirrored version of BBC article released a few minutes ago, a few hours after the Tsumani struck; its absolutely unbelievable.

http://rubenerdshow.com/blog/wp-content/media/bbc_4125481.stm

By Ruben Schade | Comments (1)

And So This is Christmas

2004.12.25 – 10.34

Rubenerd.com

This post was originally published on Rubenerd.com, my second attempt at a weblog. It was fairly short lived because I had just got my first job in the gap between high school and university, and I had very little time. Forth time’s the charm right? ;).

Well Christmas is here again. I don’t know why, but this year it never really felt like Christmas was coming, and now its here it was a bit of an anti-climax. Maybe I’m just getting older.

This morning everyone was sleeping but as usual my body’s clock got me up at 7.00 ready for work! It really is freaky how accurate I can be, 9 times out of 10 I wake up and look at the time an its either 7.00 or one minute.

I watched another one of the latest episodes of Enterprise, season 4, the one where the United Earth Embassy on Vulcan gets bombed. Most of the storylines covers 2 or 3 episodes now, so they can get a lot more involved with events etc. I heard that was the main critisism towards seasons 1 and 2: not much cohesion. I thought they were okay, though Voyager is still my favourite, heh heh. Hey, it was the first Trek I saw… I was 2 when TNG came out!

So later on we went downstairs to the tree which hadn’t even had decorations on it 2 days ago and gave out all the stuff… Elke got an iPod Mini which was good, she didn’t go to the dark “Creative Zen” side. Don’t know why the company is called Creative if all they do in the small portable music market is rip off someone else! And they just look crap! Hey, this is good rant material, might hold off for now…

I got my mum a Zire 72, her old Palm m505 was fine for a while but the screen was really low res and she was finding it tough to read the screen. The new one also has RealMedia player on it so she can put MP3s on her SD card and shove it in there to listen to music. A 1.2mp camera too. Man my Tungsten W is looking cheaper every day!

Better still, I got my dad a 1GB Compact Flash card for his Canon digital camera which eats up memory like… something that eats really fast. But the cool thing was I was able to pay for it with my work pay not pocket money, so when he got it he didn’t have to think “I’m paying for this!”.

We put off having the turkey roast till tomorrow night. One of Elke’s friends was leaving Singapore for good so she left in the late afternoon to the airport. I think she went by cab: taking the MRT from Orchard or Newton Station down to City Hall and changing over to the East West line and going to Changi is cheap but takes well over an hour, a cab can make it in about 15 minutes! Yeah so instead the parentage and I watched Rocky & Bullwinkle DVDs, they were seriously funny! Modern cartoons suck.

Anything else worth mentioning? Think that’s it. Oh yes, I got an email from Mr Hopkins down in the Blue Mountains to say Merry Christmas which was a pleasent surprise :). Once I get my SMTP server working again I’ll send him a reply. Damned Linux, my FreeBSD and NetBSD machines all work fine, I think I’ll be moving it over next year.

By Ruben Schade | Comments (0)

D-Day: The HSC Results

2004.12.23 – 10.03

Rubenerd.com

This post was originally published on Rubenerd.com, my second attempt at a weblog. It was fairly short lived because I had just got my first job in the gap between high school and university, and I had very little time. Forth time’s the charm right? ;).

My second blog entry, and I have to talk about school. Hopefully for the last time.

“The moment I had been dreading for nearly 6 years has finally arrived.”

- Jean-Luc Picard: Star Trek First Contact
Copyright © 1996 Paramount Pictures

Yes, today I got my year 12 HSC results. You could check your results on the internet as of the 17th of December, but I was honestly had little desire to check them. I don’t know whether it was because I was scared of what I might have seen or maybe I was just not in the mood… you know how school stuff goes. Anyway I got 2 letters in the mail (letters in the mail? who would have known), one from the Board of Studies, one from the University Applications Centre or whatever UAC stands for.

Heh heh, what a crappy logo!

Opening those letters was really scary: I still find it really sad that they can sum up all your secondary education into a 4 digit number.

How did I go? Um, well a bit better than I thought. What was really cool though, the day I got the results in the mail I got a call from the nanster down in Sydney to say I was in the Sydney Morning Herald for honours in IT… I’m not sure whether she meant ‘IPT’ but in any case that was cool! I ran to my main computer and attempted to find the article on the SMH online site thing but it wasn’t there :(. My grandad down near Foster Tuncurry (Mr Burns voice: eeeexcelent!) saved a copy of the paper, I might take a look at it when I do my Australia trip. Cool stuff!

Well anyway here were my results, in all their glory. I did miserably in english, I thought the stuff I had written in the exam was some of the best work I’ve ever done. I guess things like English ARE subjective, not like maths or chemistry. They do say that 2 people mark the English papers to to be as objective as possible… err, well let’s just say I’m still sceptical. Grrr.

And I still defy the convention that if you’re good at maths you are good at IT and vica versa! It’s weird, if I have an algebra problem my mind turns to mush, but give me a computer programming problem that involves sorting and calcualtions and its no problem. Mystery of the universe.

My (gulp) HSC Results
Subject % Result Band (6 = best) Years Done
Information Processes & Tech 93 6 2003-2004
Software Design & Development 89 6 2002-2003
Economics 81 5 2003-2004
Advanced English 77 4 2003-2004
Chemistry 71 4 2003-2004
Mathematics 70 4 2003-2004
My Final UAI: 85.05
UAI After Appeal: 95.05

Because of my mum’s cancer condition, SATAC (South Australian Tertiary… er, Thing) has given me a bit of assistance with regard to my university applications because they see my performace might have been compromised, which is good. The Board of Studies in NSW saw my mum’s condition as ongoing so they didn’t give me any special consideration in the final exams… bastards. Sorry, but that just really angered me. Life ain’t fair, welcome to the real world!

Well I’m glad I got that out. Hope if you did the HSC too that your results were good :). See you later.

By Ruben Schade | Comments (2)