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

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They listened! DBS no longer supporting FOTF

DBS Bank Singapore Christmas 2008 promotion page accessed this morning

UPDATE: I may have spoken prematurely: they may still be supporting FOTF after all. Bummer. Will be keeping an eye on this.

After no doubt responding to a deluge of complaints from a lion’s share of the Singaporean blogging community, DBS Bank seems to have backtracked on their pledge to automatically donate funds to the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family organisation whenever customers use their DBS credit cards at selected shopping centres this holiday season. If you browse to the exact page I referenced in my first post on the subject, you’ll notice that any references to FOTF have been removed from their Christmas 2008 promotion.

I suspect DBS wanted to show some goodwill, but didn’t realise what dark motives the organisation they decided to support really has. At least that’s what I would like to think.

Regardless though, this is fantastic news and I suspect a real boon for the majority of DBS Bank’s customers. I graciously applaud DBS’s decision and have decided to keep my POSB and DBS accounts. I will advise my family and friends in Singapore that it is safe to use their DBS cards after all.

Xie xie! :)

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

Drive catastrophe, good thing I have solid backups

Rest in peace
Rest in peace.

This afternoon my sister accidently knocked one of my 1TB external hard drives onto the hard concrete floor of our temporary house here in Adelaide (the drive I talked about in a post back in August). The drive is making some very scary noises and none of the indicator lights are working. I’m ready to call this a write off. Absolute catastrophic disaster.

I have backups of all the data except for some raw audio files for some of the latest Rubenerd Shows, which means I can’t go back and recompress them at higher bitrates at a later date. For what it’s worth, if she had knocked any of my drives onto the floor, I am somewhat relieved that it was this one.

One of my concerns is how I’m going to afford to urgently buy a new one so I can have backups of my other drives again. Say if Murphy’s Law was to take effect and one of my other drives were to fail between now and when I get a replacement for this drive, I would lose months and months of work and study material. It would be catastrophic.

The other concern is that I do have backups of all this stuff, but the backups are in ultra compressed Rzip format to save space. The problem is, I don’t have enough drive space amongst my other external hard drives or internally in this laptop to decompress them, at least I don’t think I do. I have a long night ahead of me frantically rearranging files and deleting things in the hopes I can scrape up enough space to decompress these files.

I’m giving some serious consideration to buying a Blu Ray burner to backup static data, then using hard drives as regular backups. Blu Ray discs are far too clumsy and slow to use for day-to-day operations, but they might be invaluable for archival of material such as old Rubenerd Shows or camcorder videos. Having this data backed up on hard drives is a bit silly if I’m not changing them.

I’ll also be rearranging my stuff on this table and stringing the cables off hooks underneath so that this kind of accident can’t happen again.

So much for my really good mood I had less than a few hours ago. :’-(

Rare occasion when Ruben genuinely feels happy!

Boatdeck Cafe from August 2006
A shamelessly recycled photo I took at the Boatdeck Cafe where I am now

It is a stunningly gorgeous afternoon here in Mawson Lakes in Adelaide, Australia. I do admit sheepishly to liking overcast days but even I can appreciate the beauty of a blue sky with a few cirrus clouds and a warm but not hot 24 degrees (75 Fahrenheit) At the risk of sounding even more cheesy than I already have done here, I’ve been walking around the shops and the park just for the sake of being out in this weather. I’m sitting at the Boatdeck Cafe across from the lake now having a coffee and looking out the window, iPhone in hand of course.

While we’re on the subject, perhaps one of the things I like the most about Singapore is the weather; I know there are tons of horror stories about how stinking hot it is over there and how humid it is, but its the kind of place where you only need one wardrobe, where you don’t ever shivver (unless your in frigid air conditioning!), where you can hop out of bed and have a shower without being scared of leaving a warm bed for the cold, where you can comfortably go for evening and late night walks and still wear light clothes. I guess I was acclimatised to such weather having lived there my whole life, but there you go.

I started this post with the intention of talking about living problems, but as usual a digression on my part morphed into two gigantic paragraphs. And as usual, I’m thinking of leaving it at that because my digression was more interesting than what I was going to talk about anyway.

Singapore and Australia are two of the most beautiful places on Earth, and I’m so pleased I’m spending my life living there. Now I just need some sort of wormhole between Singapore and Perth and Adelaide built I’ll be happy.

A very high tech looking Star Trek wormhole
A very high tech looking Star Trek wormhole ;)

If you galactic construction workers are listening, my dad would also like some other wormholes connecting Singapore to Ubud (the art, food and cultural precinct of Bali) and Singapore to Canada as well. He loves Montreal and Toronto, but would also like a wormhole directly to one of their national parks.

This would work wonders for me of course because then I could get an exit aperture somewhere along the said wormhole from Singapore to Canada that drops me off in Seoul/Incheon, then Kyoto, and further along to Talkeetna and to Denali. My dad wouldn’t be able to exit the last two apertures because he’s flagged on a US warning list now for his business trips to Iran, but that’s the beauty of the wormhole system: he wouldn’t need to! Not too hard to implement right? Genius!

I’m in a good mood today and thinking positively about the world, only happens when I wake up around 5% of the time, so I’m going to take advantage of it! That’s right I’m getting up from this table to order an éclair. Sometimes I’m so wild and unpredictable I scare even myself!

Sent from my iPhone

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

OPML feed for Great Australian Firewall resources

No Filter, No Censorship, No Clean Feed, No Great Firewall of Australia

I’ve been blogging about Senator Conroy’s daft plan to filter and censor the Australian intertubes for a while now, and with every post I create I find several more great resources on the matter that I just have to let people know about. The laundry list of links was getting quite long for each post though, so I figured I’d create a separate entry listing everything I’ve found so far.

If you’d like to subscribe to all these links in your feed reader to keep your own, I’ve created an OPML feed you can import.

Sites with RSS feeds

Sites without RSS feeds

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

Coldplay snubs Adelaide on their Aussie tour

Coldplay photo by Wonker Wonker
Coldplay photo by Wonker Wonker

As much of a popular music snob I am (even when I was 13 couldn’t stand 95% of the music I was hearing on the youth Top 40 radio stations!), I do admit to being a huge fan of Coldplay. They’re unconventional, their lyrics are lucid and thought provoking, and the style is such a breath of fresh air.

For fans of the English Chris Martin and Co. in Adelaide though, we’ve been excluded from their scheduled tour of Australia. According to Adelaide Now, they’ll only be performing in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Despite my general apathy towards online petitions given they generally do little to zilch, I’ve signed the Adelaide Now and Sunday Mail’s petition to bring Coldplay to Adelaide; if you’re a South Aussie you might want to as well. So far they’ve collected over 1,000 signatures.

As a followup to this post, one sentence from the Adelaide Now article stood out:

A schedule clash with High School Musical Live, on at the Entertainment Centre from February 28 to March 8, means the band could only play in Adelaide after its final Australian concert in Sydney on March 12.

I’ve always thought the entire High School Musical franchise is extremely fake and downright creepy, but I never thought it could end up being partly responsible for messing up a Coldplay concert timetable. Darn you Disney!

On an unrelated note, any idea when they’ll be in Singapore next?

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

Warm feedback for my DBS FOTH post

Despite approaching the 1000 post mark here and having blogged for several years, I still feel tickled pink whenever I read a positive review of something I’ve written here, or talked about on the Rubenerd Show. It’s a natural high :-).

Less than 24 hours after posting my grave concerns over the DBS Bank in Singapore supporting Focus on the Family automatically whenever one of their card holders spend a designated amount of money during the current festive season, I had my post linked to and commented on with some very warm and generous adjectives by Ovidia at the Writing-Yoga-Living blog in Singapore:

I found such a beautiful (rational, intelligent, calm) response to the DBS/FOTF mess up here that I almost feel bad for freaking out at DBS the way I did.

Her latest post about the DBS Focus on the Family is definitely worth looking into not only for the words above (ha!) but also because she takes a far more rational and probably more realistic view than I did in mine. As I wrote in my reply which I’ve posted below, I generally prefer to assume good intentions when such companies do things like this. As I said on my Google Reader profile page, I’m still young and naive enough to think there is a little good in everyone… well, almost everyone.

My overly verbose rambling reply I could probably have condensed down into a few short lines if I had the ability not to ramble for long periods of time without achieving anything of real value such as the case in this sentence you’re reading right now:

I’ve got to be honest with you, this is only one of a handful of times any of my blog posts have been referred to as, beautiful, rational, intelligent and/or calm without the words “definitely not” before them! :)

To be serious though, I really am worried about this turn of events at DBS. When my family first moved to Singapore from Australia when I was still in primary school I got my first POSB account, and since then I’ve remained a loyal customer, even though I now live half the year in Adelaide. As you rightly say, if I had known that this was the attitude DBS wished to advertise with regards to social issues I would have jumped ship a while ago too.

As a spiritual atheist coming from a family of agnostics, I just don’t feel comfortable having any of our money sent to such an organisation because as I said, they do not represent our moral values in the slightest.

I try my best whenever writing complaint letters to always assume good intentions on the recipients part, perhaps even if deep down I fear they don’t have good intentions. I’m not sure whether or not this results in any more helpful responses than if I had the guts to send a more passionate message such as you did, but I guess I tend to be a soft touch when dealing with people in the real world!

Here’s hoping DBS will give us a happy Yule for us non-Christians, and a happy Christmas for more moderate Christians who are upset that FOTF’s more radical views do not represent their own, by stopping their support for the FOTF organisation. I’m not holding my breath though unfortunately.

Cheers,
Ruben

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

Catpuccino

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!

iPhone 2.2 makes MobileSafari usable again!


The only downside to the new MobileSafari is the permanent Google search box stealing space from the main web address bar. It’s not so bad in landscape mode.

The iPhone 2.2 update really has made this device I’m typing on now even more of a pleasure to use. Aside from the downright bizarre new layout for MobileSafari’s toolbar, all the new features such as Google Street View (amazing), the podcast downloader (even if you are limited to 10MiB on a phone network connection) and a few helpful tweaks to the home button and to enable/disable auto correction are right on the money. You can listen to Rubenerd Show 257 to hear more about my experiences with the 2.2 update.

None of the features though are what I was most excited about, I was exited about what this update fixed.

At the risk of invoking Murphy’s Law and forever jinxing this device, I can say that one of the primary advertised fixes bundled in the iPhone 2.2 update has worked. Since updating I’ve been able to use MobileSafari to browse all sorts of pages without it crashing at all. It has done wonders for my sanity.

As I mentioned in a previous post (Only problem so far with the iPhone: MobileSafari) before the iPhone 2.2 update MobileSafari would incessantly crash without warning, and it seemed to be getting worse. While it seemed to crash for no apparent reason sometimes, more often it would struggle with rendering larger pages or pages that used HTML forms or Ajax. Curiously it was the only iPhone application that ever crashed on me, and that includes all the third party apps I downloaded from the app store!

As I relegate more duties from my mammoth MacBook Pro to my iPhone, I’m finding myself using more tabs (or whatever they’re called in this case) in MobileSafari to multitask. The relief I feel now that I can be confident MobileSafari won’t crap out on me is overwhelming.

Thank you Apple for fixing this, it’s a fantastic Yule present! Now if you folks could just allow another browser access to this device… say, oh I don’t know… Opera then you’ve got my birthday covered too.

Sent from my iPhone

Countdown to 1000 posts, thank you everyone!