2025-06-25 09:24:48
Yesterday I posted from a Brisbane coffee shop. My recent Japan travel adventures were among the best received posts I’ve ever written, so I thought I’d do another silly one for this day trip :). I only had my camera phone on me and almost no time, so the pictures were mostly taken from the back seat of a car as we hurridly went from one place to the next.
Occasionally some of at the company fly interstate to catch up with clients, or to meet new ones. This trip was up to Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city and one with significantly nicer weather than what we’ve been having in Sydney of late. I brought several coats and a scarf, and not to get all Malcolm Gladwell on you, but turns out I didn’t need any of them.
But first though, this view! We flew out of Sydney at dawn, and we caught sight of the city waking up for the morning. My colleague did a handheld timelapse on his phone: you can just make out the Opera House and Harbour Bridge in the middle right:
We landed in Brisbane an hour or so later, then made our way to Wooloowin for our first meeting and some breakfast. I promply forgot to make a note of the name, and I also checked into the wrong place on Swarm, but the coffee was great! The décor felt more like a large loungeroom than a coffee shop; it was an experience sitting there at what felt like an heirloom dining table with our three laptops preparing for our first meeting. It also felt surreal sitting there as they played that Coldplay Parachutes album that came out after we’d moved to Singapore.
The first client was a post-production studio, not that far from the suburb of Brisbane where I grew up (albeit very briefly). Had time permitted, I’d have pestered my colleagues to make a detour over to check out the old school, and the building that sits where our rented house once stood. We all still remember the time my late mum insisted on holding our hands so we wouldn’t slip on the wet footpath, only to then fall and drag my sister down with her. It entered family folklore as a Brisbane Fall, used to describe well intentioned but embarrasing mishaps. “Now hold my hand, we don’t want anyone to have a fa……ah shit! I miss her sense of humour almost as much as her hugs.
The next stop on the tour was out to Springfield City, a new development due south west of Brisbane. We met a client and had lunch at the local country club, which made me feel undeservedly posh. I kid, but the large windows and views of the trees were beautiful, and a nice respite from being on the road and walking non-stop since 4 in the morning. And yes, I was disappointed we weren’t going to the data centre down the street in those cute golf carts.
We took a data centre tour of the Polaris facility with a client, and it was legimitely impressive (as opposed to other forms of impressive). Once you’ve seen one data centre you’ve seen them all to an extent, but Polaris was the most polished, clean facility I’d ever seen. I also got to wave at the cage where the blog you’re now reading is hosted! I know conceptually how everything works, but it’s still weird to see the server you’ve been flipping bits on thousands of kilometres away.
The next client meeting was at an outdoor bar at the Orion Hotel, where I had a fruity local brew of something that, once again, I forgot to write down. This was more of a sales-focused discussion, but it was still interesting hearing how people solve problems. I also kept getting distracted by the gigantic screens near the bar that were playing 1980s-era American baseball for some reason. It was oddly fascinating.
From there it was back to the city, and hanging out with one of my favourite clients we’ve been working with for years. They have an office right on the Brisbane River, and the only shot I was able to get in focus while we were driving there was this terrible one! Brisbane has become much more… vertical since I lived here in the 1990s. One of the apartment towers is the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere, if Wikipedia is to be believed.
We rushed back to the airport and boarded our flight back to Sydney. Fortunately our manager had lounge access so we were able to get another quick bite and a rare shot of evening coffee which I normally wouldn’t do (cough)!
I’m one of the few people left in the world who still uses Swarm when travelling, so it was fun finally seeing some pins around the place :). I’ll definitely be back.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-06-25.
2025-06-25 06:21:55
I haven’t shared much from our Minecraft world of our nearly five-year old Minecraft server of late, but this is what Clara did yesterday. He is the best Sanrio character after all :).
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-06-25.
2025-06-24 07:08:47
I’m having a coffee up north in Brisbane today! I’m only here for a packed work day trip unfortunately, but a break from the daily routine is always good.
Brisbane and I have a complicated relationship. My dad was a business traveller, so we lived here for 18 months or so when I was a kid before we moved semi-permanently to Singapore. I remember feeling very disconnected here, because it wasn’t enough time for an introverted kid to make meaningful friends. It was also where my mum got her first breast cancer diagnosis, which was the beginning of a lot of family issues.
I’ll admit, the painful memories lead me to never wanting to travel back up here. But being back, on my terms, feels oddly liberating. Brisbane!
I know a few of you who live here, so now I can’t wait to come up with Clara and spend a few days grabbing coffee/beer/etc next time we can make it.
By Ruben Schade in Brisbane, 2025-06-24.
2025-06-23 09:09:42
For all of Australia’s strong consumer and employee protections, rental rights have lagged severely behind. People who move here, especially from places like Germany, are surprised that no-fault evictions and regular inspections are still permitted in most Australian states and territories. This wasn’t as much of an issue when most families owned their own home, but several factors over the last two decades have sharply increased the number of people living long-term in rentals, and both sides of politics have paid naught but lip service to addressing it in any meaningful way.
And as Ben Sidran sang, lip service… makes me nervous.
Hey, we got a Music Monday out of this!
I’ve long argued that rental inspections are guff. It sounds superficially reasonable to check on your property, but the practice doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Hence, why they’re not permitted in many places.
I remember as a tenant being told that inspections were useful to “assess the state of the property” so “issues can be rectified quickly”. I accord this the same level of respect as sites claiming they “need” 918 tracking cookies to “improve my experience”.
RealEstate.com.au, unsurprisingly, is is even more blatent:
While rarely convenient, rental inspections are a necessary part of the residential property system in order to protect property owners.
I love that they throw that unsubstantiated claim out, as though the most obvious solution doesn’t exist: not to rent it out. And again, to underscore, other countries don’t have inspections, and operate perfectly servicable rental stock. Protecting property owners, what a crock!
Hmm, this is turning out a bit rantier than I expected. Let’s calm down and assess their reasons, feeble and self-serving as they are.
First, it’s worth pointing out there are already prescribed, legally-mandated times for assessing the state of a property, and those are at the beginning and end of a tenancy. Tenants complete a condition report where they detail any issues with the property, which is checked against upon terminating the lease. That’s why tenants pay bonds: they’re not just to add a punitive financial cost to discourage moving in lieu of accepting steep rent increases, it’s to cover issues that occur beyond general wear and tear. There are tribunals, small claims courts, and insurance for damage beyond this. Yes, insurance! Remember that, people who need protection?
You also don’t need inspections to identify issues. I know, right!? Tenants can already report them. If your argument as a landlord is that faults can get worse if not reported, I’d counter that the experience of most tenants in Australia is one of indifference to lodged reports. Besides, rental contracts stipulate the rights and responsibilities of all parties, including reporting and resolving faults. If you don’t trust these will be followed, it’s your fiduciary responsibility not to enter into a rental contract as a landlord in the first place. Yes, turns out rights always come with responsibilities, as inconvenient and icky as they may be.
Being a landlord carries risk. This is what makes property an investment, and why people buy property instead of placing money in bonds or savings accounts. If you can’t accept the risk to your property by having other people legally living in it, then you’re not entitled to the potential upside. It’s akin to buying securities, then complaining that company valuations went down through actions outside your control. Or buying NFTs, and demanding a bailout because they turned out to be worth nothing even though that rando kept saying “TO THE MOON!”
Oh wow, the AI bubble is going to eclipse all of that. I’m actually scared at how much the bottom is going to fall out, given how far along this irrational hype has progressed. But I digress.
Rental inspections aren’t just pointless though, they’re a uniquely degrading experience, especially for people who have no choice but to rent long-term. You have strangers coming into the home you’re paying for, taking photos, and evaluating whether your existence meets someone’s standards. I was lucky that Clara and I had decent landlords when we used to rent (well, all but one), but I’ve heard enough horror stories from friends and family to know this is increasingly the exception rather than the norm. Whenever I thought an estate agent was being slippery when we were talking with them about buying, all I had to do is think back to how much worse they were when we were tenants. Yikes.
My favourite experience was when an agent saw Clara’s and my anime fig shelf and said “I suppose you think those make you cool” while rolling her eyes. I was tempted to comment on her bravery wearing K-Mart heels with a business suit, but I took the high road.
I always approach such situations by assessing where the power imbalance is. Let’s not kid ourselves: performing inspections is something imposed on the tenant. Sure, the law may provide rules around when they can occur, their frequency, and what they can and can’t do while inspecting, but are you going to call the people out who could kick you to the kerb? I let things slide when we were renters precisely because I wasn’t in the mental or financial state for drawn-out litigation or a house move. Even after we left I remember grovelling lest we get a record on a screening database somewhere that says “these renters knew their rights and were difficult to deal with, avoid”.
If you still think inspections are necessary for some reason in this specific part of the world, either for your own peace of mind, or because the landed gentry must keep the unwashed masses in check, I’d suggest financial institutions should be allowed to inspect the collateral of their mortgage holders on a regular basis too. After all, banks have as much of a financial interest in the upkeep of your property as a landlord does for theirs! If you don’t like the sound of that, maybe you can use this to inform some empathy for those less fortunate in rentals.
I say this as a mortgage holder: if politicians don’t care about fixing housing and rent, the least they could do is give renters a bit of dignity.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-06-23.
2025-06-23 06:38:11
I think this is my first coin with the new king on it, and it already looks a bit worse for wear!
I talked with a few clients in Canada and New Zealand last week, and none of them have seen Charles on their coins yet. This was due in part to the fact none of them carry cash anymore. Maybe people in the UK have had more… luck? Is that the word I’m after?
It makes me wonder what some of our modern devices would look like if they were designed during peak monarchy. Would our digital wallets require a photo of the monarch somewhere, for $REASONS?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-06-23.
2025-06-22 07:40:18
I don’t watch Apple keynotes or news that often anymore; the company hasn’t done anything worth paying attention to for years. But Ernie Smith caught this nugget at the end of the Platforms State of the Union talk:
macOS Tahoe will be the final release for Intel Macs. So if you’ve not done so already, now is a great time to help your users migrate to the Apple silicon versions of your apps.
I still bristle a bit when I hear desktop software referred to as “apps”. It reads as though they’re trivialising their complexity and importance; though maybe I’m just old fashioned.
But back to this announcement! We knew it was coming—we’ve known for many years at this point—it was just a question of when. Those of us who lived through past transitions knew that our older hardware was living on borrowed time from the moment the new architecture was announced. It’s not all bad though; replacing Mac OS X on my iBook G3 was my gateway into NetBSD! But I digress.
Still though, it’s interesting to look back at Apple’s foray into Intel Macs: what a curiosity they were. It was weird to me at the time that they they leaned so heavily on Intel’s name recognition, rather than saying they were moving to x86. It limited their potential collaboration with AMD for example, though I suppose they were still in the proverbial silicon woods at the time.
I had the first Intel MacBook Pro, as I mentioned in passing in a blog post about Mozilla software in 2006. I used it for years, but boy was it a rough machine. It had a loud, shrill whine when the CPU was idle, to the point where the “fix” was to run a shell script that chewed up just enough battery power to shut it up. I remember being on a call with an Apple rep in Crows Nest at the time, and they were well aware of the issue, and… unconcerned. Maybe they’d been to too many concerts and couldn’t hear it when it was reproduced for them. The cooling system was never great either; I ended up repasting it a few years later and the results were embarrassingly better. The screen inverter died, the MagSave port was flaky, both fans eventually needed replacing. My first, and one of my only YouTube videos, was about this! Very strange for a laptop that was never dropped or manhandled.
Just like the first Intel iMac, this MacBook Pro was also among the only Macs released with Intel’s Core Duo CPU; no, not Core 2 Duo. The Core Duo was 32-bit silicon, meaning we were artificially limited by what we could run almost from the start. I believe it was a year later when Apple released a Core 2 Duo-based machine, and we lost support for Mac OS X a few years later. Even many Apple fans seem oblivious to this oddity in Apple’s lineup, given how people thought Apple moved permanently to 64-bit CPUs starting with the G5.
That said, is a phrase with two words. Mac OS X had its golden era on the Intel platform. The best versions of the OS were released during this time, which perhaps says more about modern macOS than anything else. The last great, serviceable desktop Mac—the original Mac Pro—also sported Intel CPUs.
We’re spoiled in many ways with how good Apple Silicon MacBook hardware is now. No PC laptops that I’m aware of can match their weight, 2× HiDPI screens, battery life, and performance. I had an 11-inch Intel MacBook Air I miss dearly, but it was a slouch compared to my desktops at the time. If only their software and services didn’t continue to slide from okayish, to mediocre, to baffling, to embarrassing.
Anyway! A bit of a shaggy dog story about a retired architecture for your Sunday morning. Just be thankful I didn’t wax lyrical about PowerPC.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-06-22.
