I was knocked out hard by something this week. It wasn’t a flu or COVID thankfully, but it turned my head to mush and my sinuses into fire ants, which among other things made sleep all but impossible. I did in fact do a bunch of work on the blog yesterday, but it was all backend plumbing stuff. It is interesting how different parts of the brain work, and how it recovers at different speeds? I tend to find my ability to write code (at least of the rote, boiler-plate kind) and tinker at a server console requires very different attention to writing. While I felt I was capable of doing the former yesterday (and even found it fun), I stared at the blinking cursor to write a post, and nothing happened. Brains! The highlight was getting confused when Vim inserted a tab into a YAML file, and an Ansible playbook wouldn’t fire. It’s trivial for me to spot now, but it genuinely stymied me on Wednesday. Anyway! My voice still sounds like Phoebe from that episode of Friends when she discovered she liked the timbre the illness gave her singing voice. That’s a 1990s reference! But I’ll take it :). Unrelated entirely to the reboot of which I only just discovered, but Clara and I are in a massive Bergerac obsession currently, which was also lovely to watch while recovering. It’s worth its own post, but who would have known a British TV series from 1980 would make us want to go to Jersey. We’ll tack it on after Warsaw, Riga, Lviv, and Cork! By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-04.

The Sound of Music and Tony Bennett might have been eager to sing about their favourite things. I’d like to start Monday by sharing with you two satisfying things. First, this long black coffee I’m drinking at a coffee shop now is lovely. It was a light roast with just the right amount of crema. I also love how the colour of the cup and saucer looks against the rustic woodgrain table at this coffee shop. On the theme of colour, I’d also like to share this satisfying stack of face towels we bought yesterday. They’re so perfectly interleaved, and both the colours and their ordering just tickle me. It almost seems a shame to use these; I almost want to keep them as they are. That concludes this post regarding a pair of satisfying things. Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-03-02.

I finally got around to watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech from January. Wow. This shouldn’t need to be said in the context of a politician, but I don’t agree with everything he said. For one, I thought his attempt to rebrand the curtailing of environmental protections as “improving interstate commerce” was a tad crass. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… I do agree with the broad thrust (heavens) of his comments. We are living in a post-US world, and those of us living outside America need to be honest and come to terms with it. It resonated especially in Australia and New Zealand, because we’ve yet to hear anything said with such clarity and candour from our leaders outside the small parties. And because, truthfully, we see a lot of ourselves when we look at Canada. Australia and Canada are both federal parliamentary democracies with British colonial history, governors general, prime ministers, state premiers, and territories. We share a monarch, mostly the same language, sensible temperature scales, universal(ish) healthcare, and even our exports and GDPs look similar. We’re big countries with similarly small populations that have become cosmopolitan melting pots, most of which are clustered around a few large cities. We even have rubbish intercity trains! We also, for better or worse, spent much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries hitching our economic and military security to that of the United States. We share intelligence, we host military bases, we buy their military equipment, and as Mark Carney pointed out, we’ve pretended it’s been a mutually-beneficial arrangement. If or where that was true, it no longer is. The US is now, once again, chaired by a dim orange gas bag who thinks (well, “thinks”) he’s above the law, and might equals right. I’ve watched and read the same media claiming he may have dementia, or some other mental health issue that explains why he can’t form cohesive sentences or keep his attention for more than a few minutes. While it might be interesting in an academic sense, the outcome is the same as someone malicious. This is compounded by the incompetent US institutions that are supposed to act as a check and balance against an overzealous executive. For the rest of us, there are two outcomes: Being allied with the US is now, nakedly, a political liability. It threatens to make us look, in the words of the former Malaysian prime minister, “America’s sheriff” in the Pacific, if it hasn’t already. Placation is a losing strategy. Bullies and arseholes understand one thing: dripping sarcasm. Wait no, I meant to say pushback. The Australian Government need to drink some stiff maple syrup, stand before a camera, and say Mark Carney had a point. Maybe if enough of us tell that dipstick, he and his cackling cadre of sycophants will get the message. The current Australian administration have already done a decent job repairing our standing among our Pacific neighbours, but far more needs to be done. We need to build alliances around the world, so we’re not fighting this individually. In other words, we need to do what the rest of the world have already been doing for years. Also, an EU-style Australia/New Zealand/Canada agreement, let’s make it happen. We could call it CAN! The names for the bills in our respective parliaments write themselves. Canada can teach us how to curl and play hockey, and we can teach them how to make coffee and pavlova. We all win! Corrections: An earlier version of this post referred to the current US executive as a bloated “gasbag”. Technically this should be two words. I apologise for this over sight. Wait. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-02-02.

Forgive the Betteridge headline, but it’s because this is a personal thought process I’m still going through myself. As opposed to a personal thought process I’m going through for someone else!? That doesn’t make sense. Welcome to 2026! The shop next door is playing a Carpenters album, which is awesome. Rest in peace Karen, you were a legend. Spreadsheets Last year was a bit of a wash for me when it came to personal productivity, but I flipped the narrative hard in December. Maybe it was the festive air, or the fewer distractions doing office shutdown, but I made (a) an admission about how I work, and (2) doubled down on something I started a few years ago. Back in May of 2023, I wrote about how I use spreadsheets as a knowledgebase and mental mapping tool. I showed a basic example of tracking parts for various old computer builds using basic project identifiers, AutoFilters, frozen rows, and a bit of colour in LibreOffice: This is awesome! It’s a wide-open matrix of unrestrained goodness that I can filter and use to track and find exactly what I need. Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… You should want to use something else Despite using this for tracking certain home projects, I had still convinced myself that important things should be in their own proper task management system. By “proper”, I mean one of the multitude of tools with icons containing a tick or checkbox of some sort that promise “enterprise” features on their home page. We use one of those “proper” tools at work for tracking tasks across teams, so I should use that at home too, right? But here’s the (unremarkable) thing: I don’t like them. You could say I detest them. Each of them come imbued with the philosophies and decisions of the designers that don’t ever align with how my mind works. It would make my life easier if I used the one tool for work and home, but in the words of Australian moral philosophers: yeah, nah. I went the plain text route for years which somewhat worked, and I’ve tried to shoehorn my personal life into one of these larger task tracking tools. Thunderbird with Reminders synced to my mail provider has come the closest to working, but it hasn’t been quite right. Namely, assigning tasks to certain categories (such as finance, home, or hobbies) is doable with a few different hacks, but they’re all a bit clunky. It’s too… 2D. Back to spreadsheets But then something clicked for me in a widely-used online spreadsheet: they have checkboxes. LibreOffice has boolean values, but an honest to goodness inline checkbox!? Right there in a column? I’m embarrassed to admit how much this changed my life. I’ve added them to an online spreadsheet, and overnight I feel like a changed person. I now have a huge workbook with spreadsheet tabs for all the things. Grocery lists, one-off tasks, larger projects, life goals, decisions, measurements, travel packing checklists, manga to read, stuff to fix, network notes, the list goes on. Just like that screenshot above in LibreOffice, I have tasks outlined in a sheet, only with a big, glorious checkbox at the start. Then I can filter out tasks that have been completed, or use conditional formatting to recolour them a pleasing green for that sweet, sweet dopamine. And best of all? It’s all in the one place. Using an online spreadsheet also solved the syncing issue, because turns out I like capturing information on the go as well. Or should I say, I need to. My brain will remember that I need to measure our wardrobe for a new shelf while I’m at the local Japanese supermarket getting bonito flakes, which makes absolutely no sense. Thanks brain, that’s the exact kind of actionable information I need right when I’m doing something else! This has even subsumed some of the stuff I had previously allocated to my local personal Postgres database too, which I’m perhaps more ashamed to admit. But maybe only temporarily? Next steps from here I was a very strange child. I learned how to write a BASIC program before I grokked tying shoelaces, and didn’t see an issue with it. I also enjoyed tinkering with personal database tools over games the majority of the time. Before Access took over and was left to rot on the vine there were dozens of them. FileMaker was awesome. Delphi! dBase! The old FoxPro! Fuck computers used to be so cool before we coalesced on the few massive providers who then enshittified everything. Remember Bento?! As I said in that earlier linked spreadsheet post, I think in matrices. These lend themselves effortlessly to spreadsheets, but I also think they could work in a proper database structure as well. Then my task management could benefit from all the goodies databases provide, like proper views and triggers. I thought I’d take a stab at writing my own little GUI program to do this, because while the databases themselves are robust and capable, the linchpin to a tool like this is rapid and easy entry. If it’s not easy and malleable, I’ll get frustrated and stop using it. I reached for Perl, but I’ve since decided to take a stab at it in Go given how enamoured I’ve become with it last year. Baby steps, but I’m hoping 2026 will be the year I get more organised with a tool that works exactly as my brain does :). Who knows, maybe someone else might like using it too. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-01-01.

There are certain books within technical communities where even an indirect reference (a pointer, you could say) will conjure wonderful memories of first learning to program in anyone who hears it (these are distinct from Clojure memories). The Pickaxe Book. K&R. Chunky Bacon. You don’t need to mention the title, the year of release, the full name of the writers, the publisher, or anything else about it for people to know exactly what you’re talking about. So integral are they to the success of a language (or framework, or operating system), that it’s impossible to think of their subject matter without thinking of the book itself. They may have helped to popularise it, or introduced an entire generation to it. Oftentimes they’re written by the people who designed the language (or had a say in its development), which offers additional insight and wisdom into why as much as how. Remembering your “first” programming book is a deeply personal experience. A pile of paper and ink was the way so many of us learned to program. At the risk of getting philosophical, they helped to demystify this metal and silicon that ran other people’s ideas, into ones that ran our own. I can’t speak for everyone, but computers took on a whole new life when they were doing things that I had programmed them to do. It still feels a bit like magic, even now. (This experience of personal growth and learning from an expert are more ideas upon which gen-“AI” takes a massive shit. If you disagree, I hope your own soul searching bears fruit one day. But I digress). I quoted Eskild Hustvedt in November talking about his joy rediscovering Perl, and shared his memory of the same book that transformed my life and way of thinking, emphasis added: It’s not the same language I learned from the llama many years ago. It has improved immensely, while never losing any of the things that made it great in the first place. A few of you emailed and direct messaged to correct Eskild and I, because the seminal tome for Perl 5 was The Camel Book, known to the rest of the world as Programming Perl. They’re right. The Camel Book is up there with The Pickaxe and K&R for introducing a generation of system administrators and developers to the then-nascent Perl language. The wood cut graphic of a camel (long a mainstay of O’Reilly books) has found its way into broader Perl lore, becoming a mascot of the language as a whole. Some graphics like the Programming Republic of Perl use that exact artwork. The Camel Book is arguably the book for Perl, but it wasn’t ours. Eskild and I learned from the Llama Book, or Learning Perl, another O’Reilly classic that’s held in equally high regard, if not reverence: I’d had programming books before, and had taught myself enough Pascal, BASIC, Java, and Delphi to be dangerous. But the Llama Book was “my” programming book. It was the first I read cover to cover, absorbed, and referred back to. It was written in an approachable style that clicked in a way no book has in the same way before, or even since if I’m being honest (always a dangerous thing to be online). It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I’m a lifelong Perl writer because of this book. Actually, I just remembered Perl in a Nutshell too, another O’Reilly classic that was my introduction to DBI and CGI programming. I remember that one being among the most practical books I’d ever read. The urge to find these online and buy them again is strong. So many great feelings are tied up in their pages. Anyway, that’s the story of Learning Perl. When we say we learned from The Llama Book, that’s the tome to which we refer. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-12-03.