Search results now with my face! (and a panda)

Tuesday, 30 October 2012 Posted in: Internet stories

You may have seen them already, the Google search results that lead to articles or blog posts by other people which include a little profile pic.

For example, that guy

At first I didn't think they altered how I selected which pages to click on from Google's results, but I soon noticed that they drew my attention for a split second in which I evaluated whether or not I would trust information from someone who looked like that. I guess it's a bit of a double-edged sword in that now I'm judging a person based on their looks, rather than the quality of their information (although I haven't yet seen a profile pic in a search result that has turned me away from clicking through to their website).

It doesn't make me more inclined to click through to that result, but if the goal of all of this was to somehow make that result seem more authentic or personal, for me it's succeeded: when I do click through to a page which has a photo of the author, I find that the voice in my head changes based on that photo: things like the gender, age, or accent of the voice can change, just like they would when I read a book and assign such attributes to the narrator. A side-effect of this is that I can concentrate more easily when I have that sort of voice reading back to me, it helps me to remember things for longer (probably because there are now visual and audio connections between what I'm reading and other brain cells), and I find I enjoy that kind of reading a little bit more too.

So, in hopes that others feel the same pros that I do when there's an author pic to go with the search result, I did some work towards having my picture appear next to my search results too.

Funnily enough, the search results that showed me various methods for how to get a profile pic to show, all had profile pics next to their results. The method I ended-up settling on was was the one mentioned in a blog post by Joost de Valk titled, Pushing rel="author" through your <head>, where you put an extra something into the <head> element of your HTML:

<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/116553997722464346422/"/>

The example above is what you'll find in the HTML source of this site. It links to my Google+ profile (huh, Google+ has a use after all) - change it accordingly for your own site. Then on my Google+ profile I updated the 'Contributor to' section, adding a link back to this site. Then you wait for the Googlebot to reindex your pages and take care of the rest.

Google's only indexed the front page so far, but I hope to see my face (and that of a red panda) start appearing next to other search results that lead to this site in the future.

Why ads?

Saturday, 29 September 2012 Posted in: Birthdays, Internet stories, Programming

Firstly, just wanted to say that my Thymeleaf Layout Dialect has been updated to version 1.0.4 which fixes one reported bug (a small one for me, but could be a big one depending on your own use cases) and a few niggling Maven issues. Download bundles are already up on that page (and on GitHub), whereas the artefacts on Maven Central should show up in a few hours.

Secondly, I've been getting quite a few propositions to display ads on my website recently. I don't know if anything's happened in the last 2 months (my analytics seem to show relatively flat visitor numbers for that period), but I've been getting my fair share of queries, asking if there is room on this site (or on specific URLs) for some ads, and a helluva lot more of the e-mails asking me to join link exchange networks which I've trained my junk mail filter to send straight to the spam folder.

I've been an avid user of Adblock ever since I started using Firefox years and years ago, and I usually have an ad-free browsing experience from my home/work computers or mobile phone (mobile Firefox, w00t!). I wish I could say the same for Safari on the iPad... all that has done is remind me that internet ads are still as annoying in 2012 as they were pre-2005.

So some ads do sneak by, and I still hate the ones which are flashy attempt-to-distract-me ads that seem to have no relevance whatsoever to the website I'm currently viewing - 7 years of hiding those ads from me has not made me miss them one iota. However, I've started to notice that the ones that don't try to pull at my eyeballs with strong colours or animations and actually go out of their way to blend with the current content, I've started to appreciate. It might be the owners of the websites to thank for that, going out of their way to screen what kind of advertising they're showing, but in the last 3 months I've actually clicked on a few such relevant-for-the-site ads, resulting in some online purchases that became really cool birthday presents for friends and family.

Ads for funny t-shirts on comedy sites like Cracked or The Onion? I'm down with that. But sensationalist ads that attempt to get me to find out how a 50-year-old woman can look 20 years younger on Cracked or The Onion? WTF?!? (I thought advertisers were supposed to employ sneaky browser cookies to understand their audience? If they did, then they'd know that looking younger isn't exactly something I'm looking to do.)

So some ads do work. If I were to consider what kind of ads might be relevant on a site like this, my answer would be: none.

The way I see it, this is a personal website of several unrelated ideas. I have no brand, and I have nothing to sell except my opinions and experiences (both of which people are happy to give away for free - just look at the success of social media), some amateur images, a few short stories, a mod for a game released over a decade ago, and some very small open source programming libraries.

The theme here seems to be everything and anything. And with criteria like that, there's no ad that I can see that could ever be relevant here.

So I'll continue saying 'no' to ad propositions for the foreseeable future - especially the persistent ones who insist it'll help offset the running costs of this site! The money required to run this place is low enough that I don't mind it, and the time required to run this place is something I'm willing to spend, and have enjoyed spending these last 10+ years.

Smartphones: the gateway to my demise

Thursday, 6 September 2012 Posted in: Internet stories, New toys, Real life

There have been a wealth (by my standards) of new things in my life these last 2 weeks: a new pair of glasses, a new role at work, a new phone, and if I'm really struggling for new things, a new haircut (well, it's the same haircut I keep getting, but it makes my hair look different... yeah, I did say I was struggling).

The glasses have been a long time coming. My last lenses and frames I had been on for several years, and it wasn't until I visited my new optometrist (oh, there's something new! Add that to the list!) that I learned I had been on the same lenses for almost 8 years. The frames I'd been on for even longer, probably since the start of my university days when a friend of mine, who I fondly dubbed my pseudo sister, helped me pick out those frames oh so long ago. I got the whole package: eye exam, frames, lenses, the first of which led me to learn that my eyesight has slowly been improving over the years - now they're only half as bad as they were when I first started wearing glasses (if all those Dioptres are spaced in a linear fashion).

As for the new role at work, there's not too much to say about it actually since I haven't really been doing anything yet. I thought there'd be a bunch of stuff to do since they were so eager to pull me off my last project and send me into something that promised to be placate more of my interests - web design and mobile app/web development - both things I had to take into my own hands when I redesigned this site earlier this year. If this keeps up, in a few weeks, 'new role' might soon turn into 'new job'. Stay tuned.

And the phone... it's extremely awesome and, if I'm not careful, the gateway to my demise.

My last phone wasn't that old - only 3 years come December. That might be old by mobile phone technology standards, but it sure didn't match my old glasses for staying power. It probably would have lasted another year too if it weren't for me trying to do more with my phone and hitting brick walls every time I tried to emulate something I'd seen on someone else's smartphone.

It was a dumbphone for all intents and purposes (although I had learned this year that the web design euphemism for such devices is "feature phone"), so I shouldn't have expected too much out of it. As one who stays up-to-date with all the latest gadgetry, it was all too easy to become envious of phones that basically allowed you to carry the internet in your pocket. It probably didn't help when I got that iPad either, giving me a glimpse into just what could be done with technology these days.

So last week, when I started a new role, surrounded by people who had all made the smartphone plunge (the number of iPhones floating around the new office floor is ridiculous), and with my telco having a deal on smartphones that expired at the end of last month, I went and got myself this:

(There are a bunch of these phones on this new floor too, so I wasn't pioneering anything by getting it. Sure it was a new frontier for myself, but I've always been consistently late when it comes to technology.)

Some of the first things I did included loading it up with all the apps I was familiar with (eg: see all those social media icons at the bottom of the page of this site? Yeah, I basically got an app for each of those), watch a Matt Mulholland video, play Nyan Cat on it at a recent gathering, and stream my Spotify library to it as I walked to/from work. It does have its faults, but it's easily the most convenient device I have ever owned, and it's that convenience that worries me.

Before my smartphone purchase I was at a table in a bar and 9 out of 10 of the people there had their phone out looking through Facebook or concentrating on texts, rather than talking with everybody else, and just last week at the same event I played that Nyan Cat video, one of us posted a photo of what we were doing (playing that old board game Space Crusade) and in the comments and 'likes' that ensued, we basically had an entire conversation, through our phones, through Facebook...

In that first instance, being the 1 out of 10 who didn't have his face hidden behind an Android or iPhone backplate, I felt quite annoyed at everybody else and a tad left out. In that second instance, when I could actually be a part of that crowd, the moment I put down my phone and realized what had transpired, I just felt sad.

Every now and then I come across a picture or article that points out the irony of this social media age: that despite having so many ways to connect with one another, we're the most disconnected with those immediately around us. We bury our heads in these tiny little screens to text people who aren't here or to see what people who are elsewhere are doing, yet how many of us can confidently name our neighbours, or the people living in the apartment down the hall?

It's a sad little truth, and it's just one of the things that comes to mind when I touch the Facebook app on my phone. It's a huge convenience, a window to the world where I can get through to my friends, but a virtual wall between myself and those physically around me. This phone is just another tool to perpetuate the social equivalent of tunnel vision, and what troubles me is that I sought it out.

Information diet

Sunday, 22 July 2012 Posted in: Internet stories, Real life

Have any of you heard of the Information Diet?

Healthy information consumption habits are about more than productivity and efficiency. They're about your personal health, and the health of society. Just as junk food can lead to obesity, junk information can lead to new forms of ignorance. The Information Diet provides a framework for consuming information in a healthy way, by showing you what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective.

OK, so the website is really a big ad for a book about improving the quality of the information you expose yourself to, but the concept isn't too difficult to grasp. Much like a food diet, an information diet is about being selective about what you consume/read/watch. I've found it waaay too easy to find things on the internet to eat-up all my spare time, and it's gotten to the point where it's made me stay up later at night and wake up much later in the morning.

My work may not be too fussed about what times of the day I come in and go home, but I sure am. I like the idea of waking-up at 7, making it to work at around 8:30, eating lunch around the same time as most other office workers, and leaving it all to go home at about 5. However, this basic schedule started going to hell a few months back because of how I spent my spare time: visiting a horde of websites to keep up with the news, drowning myself in cute kitten YouTube videos, and playing more games of Words With Friends and Draw Something than I can count. The simple side-effect of having my sleep cycle moved is that I find it harder to go to sleep when I need to, thus waking-up not as rested as I would like, meaning I get to work bleary-eyed and as oblivious to my surroundings as that awkward flailing-arms kid in gym classes (back in the day, that flailing kid was me).

It's become too much, so I finally decided it was time to go through every RSS feed or YouTube channel I subscribe to, every Twitter account I follow, every Facebook page I like, and just cut that shit out.

The things that received the biggest cut were the number of RSS feeds I was subscribed to (started with 67, down to 55) and the number of YouTube channels I subscribe to (started with 96, down to 75). Twitter was relatively clean to begin with so that only resulted in a handful of unfollows, and I'm not going to go through all my Facebook pages; instead I'll see if a page posts to my news feed, and then be a bit more aggressive with the 'hide all from this page' button.

This was only the first round of culling where I unsubscribed/hid the things that, at first glance, brought me pretty much zero value, or was something that was updated so rarely to the point of being dead, so the information reduction isn't exactly proportional. Maybe all of the stuff that I removed was just 5-10% of what used to hold my attention.

2 weeks without that 5-10%, I've been able to slowly reclaim my sleep cycle and even start knocking more things off my todo list. Those DVDs of The Inbetweeners that my friend Claire let me borrow at New Year's: finished watching 1 of the 2 seasons she gave me. That programming library of mine that I use for this website which I wanted to release to GitHub so that others could use it to: done, and receiving some attention from the relevant community too!

Unfortunately, those 3 little 'success stories' are all I have to boast about so far. It's something I'd like to continue (I still think I consume way too much crap from the internet), so I see another information cull in my near future; I may have started catching-up with my todo list, but I think I can do better.

Just like those DVDs that have been sitting at my place for over 6 months, I've got piles of books to get through (maybe 4 novels-worth) that are reaching their '1-year-without-even-being-looked-at' milestone. And it doesn't help that, when I went to the library earlier this week to return a DVD, I went and borrowed another novel-length book to read...

Maybe it's not just an information diet that I need to go on, but some sort of stop-borrowing-books-you-retard self-improvement too.

Spotify and my YouTube music journey

Monday, 18 June 2012 Posted in: Internet stories, Music

Have you ever gone to YouTube to watch just one video, but then end-up clicking the related videos, then watch some of those videos related videos, and so on and before you know it it's early in the morning and you should've gone to bed hours ago? I've done this several times, particularly on cute animal videos; burying my browser in tabs of panda/kitten/chinchilla vids until I realize the activity is adding nothing of real value to my life and I break-away from the computer screen in an ambivalent haze of squeeing and depression.

Around the time of my last blog post (in which I rant against the annoyances of buying music in my little corner of the world where not all the musicians I like actually sell their music to), I managed to bury myself once again in YouTube videos, not of cute animals doing cute things, but of small-time musicians making wonderful music.

It started with a cover of Moon River which I've sent to others before as my favourite rendition of the song. I was at work that day and had several other songs I liked in tabs to play in the background when one finished, but with the 5 or so songs that were there, listening to them over and over just wasn't cutting it any more. So, I took a chance on one of the related videos (one with a very strong 'like' percentage which I could see thanks to the YTshowRating extension), and thus started my YouTube music journey into what commenters had dubbed, 'the beautiful side of YouTube'.

Gateway to the beautiful side of YouTube

I was enthralled by the song almost as soon as it began, getting close to zero work done in the process, and when it finished I clicked on maybe another 2 related videos, with similar results. Knowing I'd get no work done if I continued at this pace, I stopped clicking related videos but saved the links so I could continue my journey of this side of YouTube when I got home.

It's been a long time since I actually put some soft of effort into artist discovery - searching for new music that I like and then following-up with the bands to see what they're up to. The last time I did anything of the sort was in 2005 when I was still in university, doing an A-to-Z of PureVolume for the genres that I liked. It was that run that caused me to discover bands like 30 Seconds to Mars and Paramore, and a whole lot of lesser-known names/bands , most of which unfortunately didn't last many more years after I found them.

I was enjoying the whole YouTube artist discovery that night after work, but it was quite slow going: switching between tabs and starting a new song was a manual process, and not all related videos were as related as I'd like. Often I'd find a branch that led to different genres, mostly electronic music for some reason.

So it was slow going until 2 days later when Spotify became available in New Zealand.

I joined immediately and was surprised that most of the bands I had found in my YouTube music journey were on Spotify. I threw them all into a playlist appropriately titled YouTube music journey, clicked the playlist radio button (starts an endless playlist of songs from artists in my playlist, and who are similar to those in my playlist), and I was set: automatic artist discovery, songs I like before I even know I like them, it was bliss.

I've pretty much replaced the mp3 player I bring to work with Spotify, and I even signed-up for the free month of premium membership. That freebie expires soon, and I'm kinda torn about continuing it. I really like what it's added to my music collection and the bands that it has introduced me to - it's even helped me find what's become of the bands that split-up since the PureVolume days, and one time it threw in a Katy Perry song that I never heard of but ended-up liking anyway (Spotify knows my music tastes better than I do). Most of the price of the premium membership goes towards being able to play your songs on-the-go or to keep them on all your mobile devices. With me still stuck on a dumbphone though, the price of continuing doesn't seem to be worth it.

If anything it's just invigorated my search for a smartphone :D

iTunes without borders

Wednesday, 23 May 2012 Posted in: Internet stories, Music

Earlier this year I was trying to buy a covers album by Birdy, a 15 year old singer / piano player from the UK. I'd been watching her YouTube videos since I heard about her through Gavin Mikhail's cover of her cover of Bon Iver's Skinny Love (lol, seriously?), and quickly became an fan of her versions of other songs: Phoenix's '1901' and Cherry Ghost's 'People Help the People'.

When I learned that all of the above were going to be released as an album, I waited for the release date to roll over, got out my credit card and hit the iTunes links to give Birdy (and I imagine the myriad of middle men/services between her and myself) my money. That's when I hit my first problem:

This content is not available in your region

So I sighed and tried again in a week, hoping it would be in the Australia / New Zealand iTunes store by then. Still no luck. I tried the Amazon UK links in the hopes that they didn't have region locks, but they did too. You know what avenue was available to me though? Buying a physical copy of her album and having it shipped to New Zealand.

In the age of the internet, when one can know about happenings on the other side of the world the moment it happens, I hate the idea of things that can already be easily transmitted over the internet being released region-by-region. Why is it that a medium we have managed to digitize (music), cannot be sold to me because I'm in another country? We've got the infrastructure (NZ might not have the fastest network, and we might have the lowest of data caps on the planet), so why can't the record company push those bits and bytes my way?

I'm reminded of this study where they looked at movie releases and looked for a correlation between release strategies and piracy. They found that movies with staggered releases (that is, released in one region/country at some date, then another region/country at a later date, and so on) were more pirated than movies that had a single global release, causing international box office losses of at least 7% (for movies that were released first in the US).

Region controls are annoying in the internet era because a musician's/movie's potential audience knows about new content the moment it's released, but those outside the region in which the content is initially released are left to miss out until the content comes out in their region, if it ever does. Of those music fans who know about, say, the latest album from one of their favourite bands, they will range from: those who can handle the wait, those who hope the tracks are available to stream online region-free and use that to give them their fix, those who will try to obtain the music from outside their region legally (eg: ship album from overseas) and those (I'm guessing somewhere around that at-least-7% mark) who will try to obtain the music from outside their region illegally.

If a company is doing the region-locking thing, suddenly they're trying the patience of their customers, and the less patience a person has, the faster along that range I gave above a person will traverse.

My own experience with Birdy's album, after hitting the region-locking in iTunes, was to bookmark the YouTube videos of her songs and play them over and over for about a week (stream online region-free), then buying a physical copy of her album from Amazon UK (obtain music from outside my region) and having them ship it to me in New Zealand (another week's wait where I reverted to playing her YouTube videos in the interim). The only reason I didn't go straight to the 'obtain from outside my region illegally' step is a combination of: having an expendable income, a willingness to pay for the album, and a conscience that didn't want to steal from a 15 year old girl (who was still wearing braces at the time! I would hate myself for stealing from a kid!).

As The Oatmeal noted around the time this all happened to me, it's hard to stay legit when the companies who represent the music / books / TV shows / movies that you want to buy, put obstacles like this in your way. And they wonder why people resort to piracy? Here's a hint: it's not about price - paragraph 2: I had my credit card out already - it's about availability.

Pride and Prejudice and not a single zombie in sight

Sunday, 6 May 2012 Posted in: Books, Internet stories

2 years ago I complained that the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was basically Pride and Prejudice, but with zombies thrown into the more boring plot points of the book:

[...] while the twist of having the story set during some zombie plague is definitely interesting, the impression I'm getting so far is that the zombies feel less like a clever plot device and more like a small recurring joke weaved into the boring bits of the story.

I mean, zombies are mostly encountered during what I imagine in the original novel as uneventful trips between towns/estates, and/or are only given a few paragraphs in which they appear. Within those paragraphs the zombies quickly get dispatched by our heroine Miss Bennett, and then the story continues as if nothing happened.

I then came to the conclusion that I was tricked into reading a sugar-coated Pride and Prejudice, proceeded to curse the publishers for their ploy, and then held the notion ever since those days that I now know the plot of the actual Pride and Prejudice.

Well, this week I found some proof to support my conclusion.

The Lizzie Bennet diaries (dot Tumblr dot com...) is the home for the vlog of one Elizabeth Bennet, chronicling the days of her life with her best friend Charlotte, younger sister Lydia, older sister Jane, a mother whose sole goal in life is to get her daughers wed, and her encounters with a guy called 'Darcy'.

Sound familiar? Yeah, that's because it's Pride and Prejudice for 2012.

The vlog and Tumblr started just a month ago so it didn't take long for me to watch all the videos posted thus far. After each video I came away with the thought of, Huh, this is surprisingly accurate. You know why I know it's accurate? Because I read the damn zombie version of the book that does nothing to the original story.

(Yeah, you can tell I'm still bitter about having bought that book.)

If you really want to know what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is like but don't want to submit yourself to the pain of having to actually read the thing, then just watch The Lizzie Bennet diaries and imagine that after each video, every character you're introduced to fights off a horde of zombies, then dusts themselves off (and cleans up any and all evidence of the mayhem that occurred) just in time for the next video.

Does watching that next video seem like nothing zombie-related happened at all? Perfect! That's exactly how the book feels.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains..." whoops, wrong story.

Panda An Hour

Monday, 10 October 2011 1 comment Posted in: Birthdays, Internet stories

My guitar buddy introduced me to this concept of 'love languages'. While the main Google hit is a page about 'the 5 love languages' what it basically comes down to is the idea that each of us has a certain way in which our affections can be won over and which we show affection ourselves. ie: some of us really like giving gifts as a way to show we care, and those same people might really respond to receiving gifts more than, say, complimenting them.

It's not a new idea - I'm sure we've all observed that some things will really get through to people and other things won't - and it goes a bit of a way to explain why some people can get along and others don't.

Personally, I'm a 'quality time' person (if you hit the Google link above and go to the first link which categorizes said languages) which I think a bit odd considering I have so much free time to myself (or maybe that actually explains why I look so forward to seeing my friends and going to whatever events they have). For another 'Octoberite' though, whose birthday was just last week, they seem to be especially fond of something that isn't really pigeonholed by any of the standard categories on that site: they really like receiving links to sites on the internet of cute animals doing cute things.

Coupled with my Spidey-sense like ability to know when someone's birthday is (my friend didn't have their birthday listed on Facebook), I sat down at lunch one day and came up with ideas for their birthday present. Mid-way through my open chicken sandwich w/ fries, I invented "Panda An hour".

Panda An Hour was the name I gave to the initial idea of posting to their Facebook wall a link to a photo/video of a red panda (I really like red pandas, as my About pic should leave no doubts about) every hour of their birthday, for as long as I was awake. The idea went to include other animals because I don't really have that much red panda material.

(Actually, yes I do have that much red panda material, but most of it comes from the red panda encounter I did last year.)

So I did my homework, and the day before her birthday I began compiling a list of photos and videos to use, starting with those in my own 'collection' of cute animal pics/videos, and slowly branched-out from there. I kept this up for several hours until I was up to my eyeballs (ie: 20+ tabs in Firefox) in cute animal material. I could feel my testosterone levels dropping as I brought up and bookmarked video after video, and picture after picture, compiling enough material to see me through the 16 or so hours I would be spamming her wall.

After finalizing the list of links, I went to sleep with doubts. Wall spamming isn't exactly the best thing you can do to someone, and with the internet just so full of stuff, we've even got videos and songs not-so-kindly asking people to lay-off the forwarding of stuff.

But when I get an idea in my head, I stubbornly follow it through, and this was one of those ideas. It's worked-out in the past... maybe 66% of the time. The other 33% have had me actually fall out of favour with people because of it because it can be read as very forthcoming, and in a very recent case I've somewhat frightened someone to the point of not talking with me for several months.

So I slept restlessly that night, only to be awoken by the alarm on both my cellphone and clock radio after what felt like mere minutes of sleep. After turning off both alarms, and even before eating breakfast, I turned on my computer and began the panda attack.

Exhibit C

It was very likely to have been my least productive working day in a long time. I kept such a close eye on the lower-right corner of my computer screen, eyes glued to the minutes as they passed by, signalling the end of an hour and the beginning of a new one. When a new hour rolled-around, I double-checked my next choice of photo/video, even trawling for new ones if I second-guessed my initial choice. By the time I posted the next photo/video, I was maybe 30 minutes away until the next hour.

I also had a very brief lunch hour that day.

In short, it went down really well: I got a lot of good comments and I wasn't defriended before the day was over :) My own wall had the unfortunate side-effect of showing nothing but 'Emanuel Rabina posted a link on someone's wall...' activity, but I felt really good at the end of it.

Giving gifts has always made me feel good, and I've never really tried giving URLs as gifts before. In an age when we play-down the value of things like e-cards and generic e-mails, I wasn't really sure links would have a very high value, but it felt like I gave a little bit of me with every link I posted, much like how I'd feel when I give a real-life gift. Maybe it was the effort of spending my evening and half my working day tailoring those links for a specific person, and now that I wrote that, I feel like I've tread this ground before.

So maybe when that love languages site says 'quality time' is my love language, it doesn't just mean spending time is what speaks to me, but also that putting time into something can really grab my attention. It's certainly worked before :)

Reconnected

Thursday, 8 September 2011 1 comment Posted in: Internet stories, Real life

FINALLY! >:|

Now it seems as if every piece of software on my PC wants to update itself or download something over the internet (my calendar suddenly has all the appointments I loaded at work, iTunes wants to download all my podcast subscriptions 10 times over, and my firewall/antivirus is already getting a tonne of updates), so I'll let them all fight for bandwidth while I catch-up on my 'watch later' YouTube backlog.

15 days though... FFS! Last night when it all got resolved, it's as if Orcon finally got my message: I got a Tweet from them saying they think the problem is fixed now and could I please check (I was at work at the time, so couldn't check), I got a call on my mobile soon afterwards asking the same thing, and then a few hours later I got the same guy ringing up to make sure that it's OK now I was at home (it was, although it did cut out for about 10 minutes until I restarted the router), before another call from someone who was ringing to credit my account for the days I was without internet + extra for the inconvenience.

Where were all these people 10-15 days ago? :(

I'm glad it's over, but I think it'll take a while until the suppressed anger subsides. I'm still wary of the internet connection falling apart and find myself checking the internet light on the router whenever I pass it by. You know, just in case.

Black Forest Gateau 1.1, Cake Box 1.0

Wednesday, 7 September 2011 Posted in: Birthdays, Food, Internet stories, Real life

Day 15 without the internet...

---
Shortly after the trial cake, I was able to create a much-improved version of it for my friend's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it for show, so just imagine the same cake as before, but with fluffier base layers and a diamond of dark chocolate sitting atop a cream swirl in the centre.

So I had the cake down, but the birthday girl lived on the other side of the city, some 30 minute walk from where I live, and I thought to myself, I can't just walk through the city with an exposed cake. I need to protect it from prying eyes, car exhausts, cigarette smoke, and emos. What I needed was a cake box.

I never thought to ask around at the local bakeries or supermarkets to see if I could take one of their many cake boxes (they have tonnes of them just sitting in the back, surely they could part with just 1). All that came to mind was that I had, at the corner of my desk, a horde of packaging material collected from deliveries ranging from NZ-based online stores like Mighty Ape, to overseas giants like Amazon and the resellers behind eBay.

It's like I had been preparing for this moment my entire professional programming career...

So, in the lead-up to cake-making day, I carried as many boxes as I could back home from work, then spent my Friday evening making a cake box out of various-sized packaging material. 2 hours, the cannibalism of 3 smaller boxes, and several metres of sellotape later, this was the result:

It's a very crude-looking thing, but it did its job well: the box was large enough to contain the cake, the lid closed properly over the box to protect it from the elements, and there's even this slide-out 'tray' to take the cake out of the box if lifting it out will prove too messy.

The next day, cake complete and ready to serve, I carried the cake in the box through the harsh city environment*.

The birthday girl was very pleased with her cake, and I was pleased she was pleased with the cake. But even with the lovely cake before the both of us, I spent most of the time talking about the box! I mean, I'd made the cake before and blogged about it - I was done talking about the cake before I had even given it to her. The box however: it was new, I created it from scratch with other boxes, scissors, sellotape, and my crafting know-how. I almost drew comparisons between it and Frankenstein's monster: stitched together from other similar pieces, and... OK, that's where the comparison actually ends - I never breathed new life into the box since it was inanimate to start with and inanimate to finish.

Luckily for me, the birthday girl was nice enough to humour my OMG-I-made-a-cake-box obsession, and we talked about ways to improve the box for a good chunk of the afternoon. By the time I left, I had plenty of ideas swirling through my head for Cake Box 1.1.

---
* harsh for a cake anyway

Masterchef'd to death

Tuesday, 6 September 2011 2 comments Posted in: Food, Internet stories, Real life, Father's Day

Continuing from my last post, I'm still without internet :( 14 days without internet, bringing the total number of days I've been with internet in this last month since switching to Orcon to 9. That's right: 9 out of 28 days. So a warning to people thinking of switching to the Orcon Genius plan: don't. Not yet anyway - give them a few months to sort out all the initial problems, and then decide.

(The first time I join the 'early-adopter' boat, and it sinks the moment I set foot in it. *sigh* Just my luck eh?)

Anyway, I've been keeping myself relatively busy without the internet, and to survive the last weekend without it I went to my parents' house to leech their bandwidth :P

That's wasn't the only reason though: Sunday was Father's Day for New Zealand, and for Father's Day I thought I'd cook him (and the rest of the family) a pork roast that I saw on My Kitchen Rules.

As well as distracting me from my internet-less life for 1 hour a day, 3 nights a week, My Kitchen Rules is just another in a series of TV cooking competitions that I've been watching for no real reason except that I find myself channel surfing on a quiet night, and then come across the cooking show such that I keep coming back to it the next time it's on until the season/competition is done. Much like with the last Masterchef Australia - I just happened to see an episode half-way through the competition, and before I know it I'm watching the final and rooting for some guy who I didn't know just a few weeks before.

When I was starting on the pork roast, a voice started replaying in my head: it was Dylan Moran from his comedy show I saw just 2 weeks before when he was saying that we've all been "Masterchef'd to death", and it's unfortunate I can't even remember the context in which that line was used.

But he was right: the original pork roast recipe when taken straight from the My Kitchen Rules website was so 'chef-y'/restaurant-ish that I had to dumb it down for my mediocre cooking skills and middle-class tastes:

Duck fat? WTF, I don't even know where I can buy that! Replaced with butter and oil.
Fennel seeds? Couldn't find it at the local supermarket. Removed from the recipe.
Jerusalem artichokes? Out of season, so not currently on store shelves. Removed.
Prosciutto? Whoa, I'm not on that kind of salary. Replaced with bacon (which we didn't use in the end).

So what started as "Pork Cutlets With Caramelised Apple Sauce, Peas, Jerusalem Artichoke & Apple Puree" became "Pork shoulder roast with apple sauce, mashed potatoes, peas, baby carrots, and crackling". Regardless, the family was impressed, dad included. Although he was probably happier about not having to have to cook for the first time in... forever.

Disconnect

Wednesday, 31 August 2011 Posted in: Dreams, Internet stories, Real life

In the last couple of weeks I initiated a switch in ISP from a landline + DSL plan, to a naked DSL + VOIP plan from Orcon to remove the cost of having a landline that I barely ever use. Let's just say that it hasn't been the smoothest transition I've ever experienced; in the 3 weeks since I was switched, I've been without internet for 2 of them.

The first time, the new router (supplied by the Orcon - you can't use your own) simply broke and started emitting a clicking noise that reminded me of an electronic heartbeat, a dying one at that, which in turn evoked imagery from The Tell-Tale Heart. I was sent a replacement router soon afterwards, and that incident left me without internet for 4 days.

The second time, which is happening right now, the router is fine, but the problem I think lies at Orcon's end in that I can't get an internet connection because I believe I actually don't exist in their system anymore (my account information has all gone missing from their customer account pages). This incident so far has left me without internet for 8 days.

In the interim, I've been doing most of my browsing at work (hell I'm blogging from work right now) and just adding videos to my 'Watch Later' playlist which is backing-up pretty significantly - I'll need a good afternoon to myself just to get through them all. When I'm not at work, Facebook and Gmail are done through apps designed for my dumbphone.

8 days so far without internet, and I'm not actually missing it as much as I thought I would.

For one, I've had some sort of activity on every day/night - work (obviously), birthday dinners, comedy shows, out-of-town-friend lunches, watching My Kitchen Rules, and catching-up on all my TV shows. So I've been keeping pretty busy.

Secondly, I've noticed a beneficial side-effect: my vivid dreams have returned.

Looking through my site, I've only mentioned my dreams in one post, and in one story e-mail. To summarize, my dreams consist of several of the things I've come across in previous days, and are very heavily influenced by visual media like TV, movies, and video games. For example, I remember telling someone about a dream I had where I had to track-down some intergalactic criminal in a spaceship shaped like a pyramid (Stargate). And just last night, I had a dream involving dragons (Game of Thrones) and large-scale battles viewed from a top-down/isometric angle (Warcraft 3, Command & Conquer 4).

No matter what the setting, there is a recurring theme in my dreams in that they're always as action-packed as a Transformers movie (with a plot that's probably on-par with Transformers) and involve me trying to save the day or save the world for reasons I don't question except that there are bad people out there screwing things over for people who don't deserve it.

When I was younger, I remember trying to get some interpretations, any interpretations, about my dreams. There were so many "answers" from sources about falling dreams, drowning dreams, being-chased dreams, and so on, but never anything about performing ridiculous heroics. I've tried formulating my own ideas, but what the heck am I supposed to make out of fighting vampires/gargoyles with my friends while the village they attack is being evacuated, or rescuing another friend from a mist-filled ghost dimension with the help of 50-cent and the G-Unit?

I would like the internet back though - I feel very disconnected from the world right now and the narrow view of it that my phone provides just isn't enough. But can I keep my dreams too? Pretty please?

C is for cute, coeliac, comments

Wednesday, 4 May 2011 4 comments Posted in: Internet stories, Site updates

I normally Like or Favourite at least 1 YouTube video a day, sometimes even promote some comments that stick out, and it all ends up on my Facebook wall for people to peruse at their leisure or totally ignore. The stuff I usually like are music videos, particularly versions/covers done by others, and the occasional red panda video.

One time I came across this video of a guy singing "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, with his 6-year-old daughter (it was Jorge and Alexa, who you may have seen or heard of since this particular video has over 10 million views and it got them on Ellen). That video promptly ended-up on my wall. Around the same time an overseas friend of mine, bored at work and with nothing in particular to do for that week, found a video of a little girl named Rowan singing "Own Side" by Caitlin Rose. That video promptly ended-up on her wall.

When I spotted my friend with her own 'little cute girl singing some song' video on her wall, I thought, Bitch stole my idea! I then directed an evil stare at my computer screen and imagined the photons of hatred emitting from my eyes, entering the screen and travelling along the series of tubes that make up the internet to where it would meet her electronically-condensed evil stare and our combined malice would meet and duke it out on some virtual plain (likely some stretch of fibre-optic cable in the territory of Indonesia). Our little battle also played-out over some e-mails during work hours, each of us trying to convince the other that our own little cute girl was waaay better than their little cute girl.

Then maybe a week later, when the dust from our first virtual scuffle had settled in the waters of the Pacific, Jorge and Alexa made another video of equal or greater cuteness, and I thought, Yes! Time to tip this battle in my favour! So I posted it on my friend's wall and gloated: "My chosen cute girl continues to beat your chosen cute girl:"

2:42: "I pray every single day, for levorution!"

In the time between me posting that to her wall and her inevitable reply, I felt smug for the remainder of the day, letting the timezone difference between us create this 4-hour barrier where I basked in victory because she was probably still at work and couldn't fight back. When the little notification e-mail came that she had replied, I was preparing myself to accept her words of defeat. Overconfidently, I opened the e-mail.

And she cheated.

She went and found some other girl, also singing the Caitlin Rose song, but unlike little Rowan or Alexa, this was some much older girl who can play guitar, play piano, plays Diablo, makes pizzas, and has an accent that managed to grab my attention from the other side of the world.

The e-mail conversation between us flared-up:

Me: The reason you’ve resorted to posting videos of guitar-playing pizza-making Scottish-sounding Norwegian girls is because I won the cute girl battle amirite? Admit it! Admit defeat and stop trying to distract me with the girl of my dreams!
Her: You're welcome :P

Sensing my resolve crumble, my friend then followed-up with this video from the same girl, entitled "Carpet, Cookie and Coeliac" (she was participating in some Alphabet Vlog challenge, and this video was for the letter C) in which she describes a condition she has: Coeliac disease.

---
I had known about gluten allergies for a long time, but never knew that it was called coeliac disease until very recently. I learned about that name when I was eating lunch with my parents at a local burger joint called Burger Fuel. At the tables, Burger Fuel was promoting their new gluten free buns using this little piece of advertising:

The ad made no sense to me. All I saw was a black-and-white picture of 2 guys with what looked like some weird song lyrics over the top. WTF? But you know who did get it? My mum. So she broke it down for my dad and I, using that teacher's voice normally reserve for preschoolers, or for those moments of smugness when you're feeling intellectually superior:

the 2 guys are Simon and Garfunkel
one of their songs is called "Cecelia", so the lyrics are to the tune of Cecilia, replacing 'Cecelia' with 'CeCoeliac'
and a coeliac is someone who is allergic to gluten; the extra 'ce' was just there to fit it with the song

O_o

"Ohhh!" my dad I and I said as the five-thousand-piece puzzle that was Burger Fuel's flyer suddenly came together in our minds. I complained that this had to be the least effective advertising campaign in the history of advertising campaigns because of the background knowledge and prerequisite age one needed to even begin to understand what the hell it was all about.

Way to go Burger Fuel; an ad targeted at smart 50+ year olds.

And that my friends, is how I learned the word coeliac.

---
Anyway, after watching Ena's video as she goes through the grocery to buy things for herself because there's not a whole lot of selection for those allergic to gluten, I kinda started to feel a bit bad for her and for coeliacs in general. She also makes some pizzas in the video using gluten-free flour, and later that week I made a pizza using standard flour. As I put the final toppings on my pizza and admired my creation, Ena came to mind and I thought, Oh man, this pizza would probably kill her... I then put the pizza in the oven with a lot less enthusiasm than I had just moments before.

And the last few times I went to the supermarket and passed by the bakery section or the cookies/chips isle, all I hear is Ena's voice from the video when she says, "...all the lovely cakes I cannot have... all the cookies I can't have..." I then I step off the rear axle of the trolley that I was riding and continue to push the trolley like a normal person instead.

My friend and I seem to have come to some unspoken cease fire in our little war, probably because she's now found something else to occupy her time at work (I hope it's actual work) and probably because with one of the guys at my work on leave as my current project at work nears the finish line, my own workload has amazingly tripled. For some reason when there's a task to be assigned that isn't really anybody's forte, they randomly pick someone to give it to, and that random person is always me.

Random number — It seems I Am Number Four

*sigh*

Oh yeah, I got the comments going over the Easter weekend and have been testing them ever since; finding little problems with there here and there and fixing them when they arise. I'll be relying on you guys to tell me what you like/dislike about how I've implemented the comments here, and you can leave a comment to do just that :) But, if comments are still broken, tell me on Facebook, Twitter, or hell send me an e-mail.

Google knows all

Wednesday, 6 April 2011 Posted in: Internet stories, Site updates

It's been well over a month since I complained that this site had the stability of a house on stilts, because it's been well over a month since this site has imploded of its own accord, ie: it's fixed! :D

Well, it's been fixed for well over a month, meaning that for a while now my logs are no longer artificially inflated by program exceptions caused by annoying errors, and my visitor counts are no longer artificially inflated by my own make-sure-it's-all-OK visits either.

It's that latter one that I was particularly interested in getting some clean numbers about, because when I ran this site using web hosting provided by other companies, they gave me a whole bunch of tools to track visitor numbers and stats. They were OK for what they did, but they didn't really paint a very good picture of the sorts of things I was interested in, like how they got to my site in the first place. So when I moved to DIY web hosting earlier this year, I went looking for a visitor tracking package that would do what I wanted.

Cue Google Analytics.

Like many other visitor tracking tools out there, Google Analytics can tell me about the browser you're using to read this, the resolution of your monitor, even what city you're in (provided you haven't done sneaky things to your connection to mask that information). That last one in particular helps me gauge what percentage of my visitors are my friends, family, and combined with other tell-tale signs can let me know if that last visitor was my mother. (Hi mom!)

One thing that I really like which previous visitor tracking tools I've used hadn't offered, was the ability to let me know what search terms are used to bring people to my site. It makes me visit my Google Analytics dashboard quite often as I watch with interest the search terms used to bring people here. And the results... well they had me scratching my head.

The #3 search term used to bring people to my site is campaignultraq20b which is related to the Red Alert campaign I put together and released years ago as a bit of fun in modifying a game.

That one makes sense I thought, and so did search term #2: emanuel rabina My name. A search for that in Google gives you this site as the second result (the first being my Facebook page). It made me wonder though, who the hell is putting my name into Google? It's not me, even though I've blogged about doing just that in the past.

The answer was revealed to me when I visited my dad at work one day and, standing at his desk, I told him about something I posted. I watched as he opened his browser to look for that something I wrote, but to my surprise he didn't open a bookmark or type my site URL into the address bar. Instead, he typed my name into Google and clicked the link in the search results.

It's not the first I've heard of such behaviour though - I've read many articles about your ordinary citizen using Google as the gateway to everything; putting site names, even site URLs, into Google search and clicking on the results. So while I had heard of it, I never expected it of my tech-savvy family: me a Java programmer and web developer, my dad a computer programmer of a language whose acronym I now associate with Rocket Propelled Grenade or Role-Playing Game (What? RPG is a programming language? Get outta here!), my brother who has an iPhone and is more connected to the internet than a cloud service, and my mum who is the proud owner of an Amazon Kindle e-Reader and often sends the rest of the family e-mails about what's hot in tech (or YouTube).

That was the day I introduced my dad to bookmarks. I'll get around to telling him about RSS feeds (like mine) as a method of keeping-up with news from his favourite sites instead of having to do the rounds of visiting them every day and hoping there's an update, but I'm afraid that too much tech all at once might just make his head asplode.

Now brace yourselves, because the #1 search term used to bring people to my site is: chocolate chip cookies

I kid you not - the most visited page on my website is my blog post, Giving-up on giving-up on baking, which I wrote about how I back-tracked on a previous post where I was so frustrated that I was surrounded by so many skilled bakers that I just gave-up on baking altogether!

I don't even know how that could have happened. I've tried putting "chocolate chip cookies" into Google, and I'm not even in the first 10 pages of results! How desperate for a cookie recipe must one be to end-up here!??!

So if you found my site by accident because you were looking for actual content about baking but instead landed here and had to put up with me whining about baking, could you please send me an e-mail (link in the 'Email Me' part of the top navigation bar). I'd really like to know how you got here.

Hidden costs

Monday, 14 February 2011 Posted in: Internet stories, Music, Real life

In the past I've talked about how I show my age by sticking to buying CDs instead of buying digitally via iTunes or Amazon. I've even fallen out of grace with some friends by admitting what I've bought. The more egotistical side of me even goes on to think I'm one of the reasons the brick-and-mortar CD retail store is still around.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, that all changed. I installed iTunes.

Sunnovabitch

This isn't the first time I've tried to install iTunes. I've tried maybe 2 other times in the past year, but each time, for unknown reasons, the iTunes installer would just die on me. The instant I OK'ed the install location (which was just the default), the installer would give me its equivalent of the fail whale, before giving me 1 choice: Quit. (It's not really a choice if there are no other options now is it?)

I didn't really want to delve any deeper: there was likely something screwed-up with my Win7 64-bit install, but I didn't care; I didn't really need iTunes to help me with any part of my life that wasn't already covered by some other program or process on my computer. I was installing iTunes to pique my curiosity and trial a different media player.

But this all changed where, in the last few months, I started following a lot more independent or lesser-known musicians on YouTube. Now I love YouTube, but every rose has it's thorns. I've already ranted about how crude YouTube comments have been. I mean, where else can you find an abundance of lines like:

Uhhh...? no one forced you watch it. Please murder yourself.
- (source)

Anyway, one of those musicians posted a cover of Avril Lavigne's new single, What the Hell, that was so different from the original and gave it so much meaning that I probably added another 100 to the video's view count. Eventually, I was compelled to buy it to show my appreciation towards the artist, so I downloaded the iTunes installer again, ran it, prepared myself for it to fall over and... whoa, it installed properly.

I told my brother about it installing successfully, and he asked me, "You didn't install iTunes 10 did you?" Turns out I did, which is the version he hates with every fiber of his being for a whole lot of what he considers "UI fails". This being my first ever iTunes installation (and probably the only reason it installed properly on my computer), I kept it. When a new version comes out, I'll just be impressed by it a whole lot more (or unimpressed by it a whole lot less) since what is the 'norm' for me is already a lot lower than those who were able to have previous versions of iTunes to remember.

So I bought the song, tweeted about it, and now I'm hooked. A whole new world of music is now available to me and they just make it so damn easy to lose my money in it. Even though I keep a budget spreadsheet to track my own expenditures, there are just some things that I don't track, namely small ticket items like gum or the coins that I give to some charities on their street collection day. iTunes songs are less than what I give those charities, hell they're even less than a pack of gum! So they never really make it into there and I don't feel I've spent anything until Apple e-mails me a receipt for my past week's worth of purchases and I look at them all and think, Oh damn...

The year in lists

Friday, 31 December 2010 Posted in: Internet stories

Everywhere I go (on the internet) people are posting their takes on the year gone by; the highs, the lows, the bests, the worsts, etc. Much of what I'm reading online now is just lists of what stuck-out for them in 2010.

I don't follow too many rules for what or what not to post on this site - it's mostly whatever comes to mind at the time and compels me to write, provided I have the time to write it - but one thing which I've tried not to do with my posts is to 'dial it in'. The definition of lazy posting is pretty broad, but to me that basically means: no lists.

Oh you see them everywhere you go: 5 Firefox extensions that every web developer needs, Top 10 beautiful websites, The 7 reasons why JSF blows goats... OK, those are very programmer-oriented, but even the mainstream lists are getting tiring: The 8 GI Joes most frequently left in the box, 6 heroic movie deaths that could have easily been avoided, 5 horrible life lessons learned from teen movies... (yes, those are Cracked articles, so Cracked, I'm blaming you for my list fatigue).

A sample of the recent things to come out of Cracked.com

For some reason, lists like those just scream lazy to me, like the person behind them enumerated their brain fart and attempted to legitimize it by putting it in some arbitrary order that only makes sense to themselves and their 15 cats. When I see it on a website, particularly one of those sites whose objective is to be a hub of like-minded people where the articles are supposed to impart actual knowledge and experiences, my mind starts imagining that I have direct access to the author and I ask them questions like, "Really, you couldn't think of anything better to write to get your paycheck?" before beating them over the head with the letter N book from a set of encyclopaedias.

It irks me because when I see lists masquerading as articles, all I see is a copy-and-paste page that adds zero value to the collective knowledge of the internet. It's like the author thought, "Hey, I found a bunch of awesome related topics elsewhere so I'm going to duplicate those things right here to save you a couple of clicks and keystrokes."

What that list then becomes is a page that acts as an index to other pages. You know what? We already have a site that does that for us: Google.

This isn't a battle I can win though: everyone loves lists, especially the internet. I mean, if someone else can be bothered bringing the information to you, then why not? (Lazy SOBs, the lot of us.) Some of the most popular sites out there, while not creating lists themselves, are those whose sole purpose is to give you the news from other sources (eg: Digg, Slashdot). And one of the most subscribed YouTube channels is just a guy who tells you about other popular YouTube videos.

Even I like lists, but seriously content authors: please please please write articles that make me feel smarter for having read them; give me some knowledge that I can use in my own job or life; and share your experiences in those fields so I can maybe apply them to my own. Don't just entertain me - if I wanted to do that, I can just shoot over to YouTube and watch the latest [adjective/pop-culture-noun] cat - but give me something that will help me, as a person, grow.

I'll let it slide for now because everyone and their mothers is doing the 2010 retrospective in bullet-point format, but the next time somebody tells me what 5 extensions I must install on Firefox, I'm shutting-off the computer and going to go outside or read a book. You know, something healthy.

Happy New Year everyone.

Heard it through the grapevine

Tuesday, 21 December 2010 Posted in: Internet stories

I don't think I keep up with the news as often as I should. Well, that's how my dad makes me feel about that subject: always telling me to read the paper or watch the 6 o'clock news. I haven't had him nag me about that for years now that I don't have to live with him ( :P ) so I have to remind myself to keep up with the latest.

Without having a newspaper delivered to my doorstep, my #1 news source is (quite obviously for anybody of my generation or younger) the internet, and has been that way since maybe 2002 when our family got what passed for broadband back in those days. My RSS feed is filled with technology and developer news, I subscribe to several podcasts that I listen to or watch while doing chores or eating dinner in-front of the TV, blogs give me more personal stories from around the world, I'm on Twitter, and the fan pages I've 'Like'd on Facebook (and haven't filtered-out of my news feed) keep me up-to-date with all sorts of things.

This way, I can make sure the news that reaches me is relevant to me, and news that I care about.

I even remember a few years ago I was playing Counter-Strike on some Australian servers (back when I had the free time to enjoy lots of multiplayer gaming) and the server chat and strong Aussie accents from those with headphones started going on about how London had just been bombed by terrorists. I stopped playing and turned on the TV to find-out more.

That's what I was doing during the London bombings of 2005.

Newspaper — Sorry old friend, but I'm moving on

With all the news sources I have on the internet, there was one place that I never imagined would tell me anything useful, let alone anything I wanted to know: YouTube comments.

Yup, the place where common sense sheds a tear and humanity comes to die, YouTube comments have historically been the place for all sorts of people to vent any kind of bullshit, relevant or not, to the video being played: racism, sexism, rape, paedophilia, how they went down on your mum, et cetera et cetera. Yet, just the other day I was watching a Paramore music video on YouTube (my brother and I are big fans) and on the comments I read people posting over and over again about how Josh and Zac Farro, members of Paramore, should come back.

"What the hell?" I thought, so I followed it up with a few searches, and lo and behold, I learned that those 2 guys had just left Paramore and that the announcement was made official the day before. I shared it with my brother, and he wasn't very happy about it either.

It was news that was relevant to me, news that I cared about, and I didn't learn of it over Twitter or Facebook or any of my RSS feeds; I learned about it on some YouTube comments.

Stuff white people like

Friday, 4 December 2009 Posted in: Internet stories, Work stories

I've been with my new HP laptop for work for a while now, and thanks to it's huge increase in processing power, memory, and hard drive platters' rotation rate over my old Dell laptop which is not only slow by today's standards, but has also accumulated 3-years-worth of software detritus and e-barnacles, the turnaround time between finding an error, fixing it, and then testing the fix, is significantly faster. In fact, it's made the excuse of 'compiling' a (unfortunate) thing of the past:

XKCD - Compiling — This was possible when 'compiling' was a 10 minute wait

One thing I used to do between compiles (besides jousting and sword play on office chairs) was to browse websites like any other non-programmer would. No I wouldn't go to Facebook - I don't have enough active FB friends to create a long list of activity on the Live News Feed so I like to let it build-up over the work day so I have something to go through when I get home - but rather joke sites (eg: Cracked, Digg - yes Digg is just one big joke), comic sites (eg: XKCD, Cyanide and Happiness), or blogs (waaay too many to list). One blog which I've been directed to recently thanks to a referral from my brother, is the site Stuff White People Like - http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

You don't have to be non-white to appreciate the humour that went into the site - although, like myself, being some sort of ethnic minority in a white-dominated society really helps (lol, who would've thought that could ever be an advantage) - but just going through the list, I've found so much that is funny, because it is all true.

With almost every link I could find at least 1 person I knew who would fit the stereotype presented in each blog post, and I would proceed to post the link on their Facebook wall.

I'm only half-way through the list right now (no thanks to the faster work laptop for reducing the amount of time I have to slack off... damn double-edged sword of having a faster work computer!), and I must've posted way too many links because my friends (read: white friends, the 'white' is assumed as I'm often the token ethnic for their group) have noticed my pattern and are starting to retaliate.

The comments on each post are sometimes lol-worthy, but most of the time it's either someone admitting how white they are (regardless of the colour of their skin) or someone saying just how racist the site is. Odd that last one, because each post is written by a twenty-something white male who admits that he's selling-out his race and writing all of those posts in jest. I guess those 'OMG-this-is-racist' people are just pissed that they're now being subject to stereotypes, and to those people I advise they develop a sense of humour and get over it, but only after I point and laugh at them while rhetorically asking how it feels to be on the receiving end for once.

A website through the ages

Wednesday, 30 September 2009 Posted in: Internet stories, Thoughts

I was doing a Google search at work last week - looking-up "AGM", making sure that it meant Annual General Meaning, which it does, before I used it in a sentence in an e-mail - and in doing so I came across a blog entry from a local blogger where they described attending their apartment's AGM and how it felt like such a grown-up thing to do at the time. I say 'at the time' because it was written in 2004.

Browsing through to the blog's homepage, I saw that it is still actively updated. OMG! I thought, another blogger from NZ who writes about their day-to-day life, who started the site off years ago, AND IS STILL AROUND! OK, so 5 years isn't forever, but my own website only has entries dating all the way back to 2005, despite having had this site up since 2001, and that was before I even called these updates 'blog posts' or that the word 'blog' was common in the English language.

I was excited! Ecstatic! Glad to find someone out there who perseveres with a personal website for years, even with the knowledge that their readership consists mainly of friends and family, with the odd stranger/passer-by. I became even more excited/ecstatic/glad when, after reading through a few of their posts, I could identify them as somebody who might be a workmate of amazing baking girl. (2-degrees of separation FTW! (NZ joke))

OK, so my excitement probably makes no sense to anybody else. Here's some background for where I'm coming from with all this:

The day before I ran into OrangeBlog (yep, that's their blog's name), I was reading another blog entry from one of the authors I read and follow, John Scalzi, who had just written about how his website has been around for 11 years. That's one helluva milestone, I thought.

Not many personal sites on the internet stay around for 11 years. My own friends' attempts at websites or blogs are a testament to that: one guy hasn't added anything substantial to his site in several years, of 2 overseas/travelling blogs, 1 stopped theirs just a few months in while the other hasn't been updated in over a year, and the 1 guy who went so far as to buy a domain name and host his own Content Management System (think website management program), when he stopped updating it it got bombarded by comment spam bots, before getting domain jacked.

And when the New York Times has a slow news day and decides to take a pot shot at bloggers for lacking discipline and staying power, I find myself alone in the fight back, using whatever skills I have on hand (writing, 'your mom' jokes) and whatever weapons I can find on my desk (unsharpened pencils and dead batteries... wait, that can't be turned into some sort of analogy for my life can it?).

I guess it takes certain kinds to continue something that has no real rewards, no tangible benefits; to throw thoughts, words, ideas, out into the digital ether and not worry about them coming back any better than they were when they left the gap between your brain and the keyboard. I haven't received so much as a cookie for what I'm doing with this website, but it's not an entirely selfless thing; every time I hear somebody I know say "Hey, I read your blog" or allude to something I've written, it becomes a real boost to the ego.

So yeah, I knew I wasn't alone in the whole 'maintain and keep updating a personal website' endeavour - the world's way too big for that - but I feel a lot less alone than I did before.

A shot of orange girl's desk — It's not called OrangeBlog for nothing

And hopeful too that there are more like me out there when it comes to keeping to things for the long term. Hope, for now it seems, is the colour orange.

Extended April Fools

Thursday, 2 April 2009 Posted in: Internet stories, Blog Every Day April

While today is technically the 2nd of April in my timezone, it's only just begun to be the 1st of April on the Internet.

Every year, I tell myself to be wary of news posted on the 1st, taking everything that comes my way with a questionable look and a raised eyebrow, so that I won't be so easily fooled by jokes that, when played to a much younger version of myself, would have had me emotionally crash in disappointment after the initial excitement when I was being fooled.

And it's not only the 1st, but when you're roughly 20 hours ahead of where the majority of the Internet lives, then you gotta prepare yourself for a 2-day onslaught of 'creative journalism'.

Bacon in a squeezable bottle from ThinkGeek — Too good to be true?

Why is it I can get fooled so easily by the Internet when it's already full of pranksters desensitizing my funny bones with their remarks that are ever so full of wit and sarcasm?
I guess it's because, for these 2 days on the calendar, the news finally tells me what I want to hear.

Yes I want to hear about Obama abandoning companies like of AIG, yes I think it's awesome that StarCraft 2 will have a gigantic transforming robot, yes I would love to get double the bandwidth on my internet connection, and yes I would like bacon sauce with my fries thank you very much.

So slowly, April Fools is becoming more and more a day for me to dream on how much more awesome life could be.

(alter) ego surfing

Thursday, 4 September 2008 Posted in: Internet stories, Work stories

Ego surfing; it's something we've all done before. Whether or not the results work in your favour, well, that's a different story.

A combined first and last name isn't as rare as it used to be. You'll likely meet someone during your school years with your first name. (I don't know what assumed statistic to throw at you for meeting something outside your family with your last name.) And as for finding someone with both? That's where the Internet can help fill-in the gaps; it's only a matter of time before Google spiders find your name-based doppelganger and make the results available to all.

So with a little spare time at work and a lot of curiousity, I started throwing, not only my name, but the names of several others into Google, and taking a look at what it gave me in return. Old friends, new friends, Facebook friends... everybody was fair game.

I'm still the only Emanuel Rabina on the Internet with Google giving me up to 2 pages of results on myself before going awry. Only a few others were just as unique, providing up to a page of accurate results before going on first-name/last-name tangents. As for the rest though, that's when the lols started.

Those with 2 first names gave the greatest variety of results, but a few honestly surprised me. For example, I found-out I have friends who share names with: a hand-crafted furniture maker, a canoeist, a doctor of medicine, a wrestler, a dentist, an illustrator, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a professional trainer, a scientologist, and a porn star.

Hwo to write!?!11

Friday, 28 March 2008 Posted in: Internet stories, Work stories, Writing

So it was a bit of a slow day at work: I had read and responded to all the e-mails specifically addressed to me, and I had finished all my assigned tasks. Then I looked at the clock and saw it was 9:30am :(

So what does a bored office-worker trying to kill time do? Hit the Internet.

No, I wasn't looking for anything like Hold The Button, but in my search for nothing in particular, I found my way back at the blog of John C. Wright. I've mentioned him before - something to do with one of his books about some guy named Phaethon and a wallpaper I made, and I liked his critique of Jumper - and after reading some of his posts, you start to get a distinct impression about him which I will just describe as 'weird' because adjectives fail me and I can't seem to get to thesaurus.com right now. I started to wonder if his style of blogging (which happens to be similar to what I've read on other writers' blogs/sites) is something indicative of a writer, some sort of writer's disease, or is some prerequisite to becoming a writer. Lo and behold, Mr Wright himself provided the link to answer my questions:

Maureen Johnson's blog - How To Be A Writer In Ten Easy Steps

Suddenly, it all made sense.

Power metal armageddon

Thursday, 8 November 2007 Posted in: Internet stories, Music

So Guitar Hero 3 is either out, or up-and-coming (depending on where you are in the world), and while I'm not a fan, I was directed to a YouTube video of someone attempting Dragonforce's Through The Fire And Flames. If you know that song, or know power metal in general, you'll know that it will be impossible to get 100% for that song on expert level.

Continuing on the YouTube trail, I went and watched the actual music video for that song, as well as another of their songs, Operation Ground And Pound. In that video I think the band is on some sort of post-apocalyptic Earth, surviving the onslaught of the alien race that has destroyed it. I don't know if my words can evoke the right kind of imagery, but damn it looked cool.

So I don't know what everyone else's version of armageddon looks like, but my one has been slightly altered to have the 4 horsemen riding in not to the sound of the screaming masses, but being greeted by a synth orchestra, double-kick drums, and humankind's most ridiculously over-the-top electric guitar solo ever.

It'll be our finest hour :D

Ultraq's Final MooCow

Bits and pieces by Emanuel Rabina