I’m heading off for a long service leave trip. Tickets are booked, bags are packed, anxiety about whether we’ve missed anything is once again running rampant. We’ve had to postpone this four times owing to factors outside our control, so we can’t believe it’s finally happening. And yes, before you ask, three more things thing popped up, but we finally had the gumption to push back. I’m not sure what the dynamic will be over the next few weeks. Maybe I’ll continue blogging every day or so, or it might be a week in between posts while I dust off our hiking boots and explore Japan again. See you again soon :). By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-19.

I cannot overstate what a gem Stefano Marinelli is to the BSD operating system community. He’s kind, clear headed, and curious. He operates several Mastodon instances from the delightfully-named BSD.cafe server, from which I follow a significant number of people, and we’ve DM’d a few times on some heavy topics. If he and I are ever in the same city, I owe him several beverages, and likely a hug. I was so happy to see this new post in which he graciously mentioned my ramblings! I’ve decided to start writing on a personal blog again. Not just on IT Notes, where I’ll continue to publish technical content as I’ve been doing, but also on a more personal and general blog. And this for a number of reasons. He describes a few motivating points, but I think this one was key: Too many things I’ve written on social media have disappeared into nothingness after a few days. I’ve seen people comment on a few stories critical of Mastodon lately; concerns I don’t necessarily share, but that I’m sympathetic to. I’ve got a proper post about this brewing in the back of my mind, but I definitely see this struggle between social media and personal spaces you own and control. I’m reminded of the early days of Twitter, where we used it more like throwaway SMS. Blogs, on the other hand, were for the thoughts you wanted to survive. I’ve got another post coming up soon comparing a few different blogging tools for people who want to dip their toes into this wonderful form of self-expression (present writer notwithstanding), but in the meantime I’m so happy to add Stefano’s blog to Clara’s and my RSS reader. And yes, that was a not-so-thinly-veiled push for you to start one as well, dear reader, if you haven’t already. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-18.

I’ve been a massive John Grisham fan for years, but I never read his first book The Firm. I’ll save my review for a future post, but wow! I’m so glad I saw it in one of those Street Libraries and decided to give it a try. No spoilers, but in chapter 18 our protagonist Mitch is attempting to operate one of The Firm’s shiny new photocopiers. The entire passage is brilliant, and could map to so many frustrations with modern enterprise IT. A red warning lit up and flashed the message INSERT FILE NUMBER. He backed away and looked at the copier. Yes, it was a new one. Next to the PRINT button was another that read BYPASS. He stuck his thumb on it. A shrill siren erupted from within the machine, and the entire panel of buttons turned bright red. He looked around helplessly, saw no one, and frantically grabbed the instruction manual. “What’s going on here?” someone demanded over the wailing of the copier. “I don’t know!” Mitch yelled, waving the manual. Lela Pointer […] reached behind the machine and flipped a switch. The siren died. “What the hell?” Mitch said, panting. “Didn’t they tell you? she demanded, grabbing the manual and placing it back in its place. She drilled a hole in him with her tiny fierce eyes, as if she had caught him in her purse. “Obviously not. What’s the deal?” “We have a new copying system” she lectured downward through her nose. “It was installed the day after Christmas. You must code in the file number before the machine will copy. Your secretary was supposed to tell you.” “You mean this thing will not copy unless I punch a ten digit number?” “That’s correct.” “What about copies in general, with no particular file?” “Can’t be done.” By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-18.

The 2025 Australian Federal election will be taking place when Clara and I are outside our electorate, so we opted for a postal vote. This means no democracy sausage on polling day, but we’re still able to perform our civic duty. Well, that and the fact voting is comulspry in Australia (as it should be, you have a responsibility in a democracy), so we don’t want to cop a fine. We cut the timing a bit fine, but we both got an encouraging email yesterday: This is an automatically generated message from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), please DO NOT reply. Your postal vote pack is on its way to you by Australia Post or DHL international courier. You will receive a separate email from DHL with tracking information. Sure enough, it arrived that afternoon! Phew. I prefer postal voting because you can take your time to review the candidates, look them up, see that many of them are ghastly, and avoid them. Australia uses preferential voting, so you’re encouraged to rank your House of Representatives and Senate candidates in the order you’d like them to be elected. Hence why people who only get their news from American media are so many levels of wrong when they say you shouldn’t “waste” your vote on a third-party candidate. Australians among you though may have spotted something else in the photo above. Alongside the officially sanctioned Australian Electoral Commission envelopes is a postal vote application pamphlet. It’s not in the AEC’s official purple, nor does it have their logo anywhere, so my suspicions were raised. Sure enough, it was sent by the conservative opposition (because of course it was them) as a blatent data harvesting exercise. I returned their form in the postage paid envelope saying “YOU ARE NOT THE AEC, AND YOU LOST ME AS A VOTER”. I wasn’t voting for them anyway, but they don’t know that. The election is on the third of May. Fingers crossed, and all that. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-17.

I watched a lot of South Park as a kid growing up, because it’s what you did at the time. I think I’d cringe if I saw much of it today, but at the time it was side-splitting. For every dreadful episode, there was a Tugger and Russel Crowe. The stuff of legend. But they did get things wrong, such as their smoking episode. Portraying victims of second-hand smoke as entitled for forcing their views on others was peak comedy, though likely not in the way Trey and Matt intended. Health experts widely panned it after it first aired, to say nothing of those who grew up having to wash their clothing after every night out because it’d reek of the stuff. Projecting your own views on others is bad… but projecting your own smoke on others, that’s fine! Of all the South Park episodes that made an impact on me, it was their one about retail that first got my teenage self at the time to realise huh, maybe I shouldn’t be receiving social and economic lessons from a cartoon. The episode centered around a large retail chain opening in South Park. While the residents were initially captivated by the low prices, range of goods, and oooh shiny, they soon realised they were the victim of a Faustian bargain. Local businesses on Main Street closed under the pressure of The Store’s prices, taking away much of the character and charm from their small rural town. So far, a pretty spot on analysis of what happens. It had some great moments. In one scene, Kyle grew frustrated with Cartman playing his violin every time he worried out loud about The Store, so he grabbed it out of his hands and smashed it. Cartman laughed and said the violin was so cheap, he could go back to The Store and buy another one. This dig at poorly made, disposable crap—tat as my English readers would say—was on point. A secondary theme of the episode was Stan and Kyle’s dads slowly becoming more obsessed with The Store, to the point where they dreamed about it, visited it at all hours of the night, and eventually sought employment for even more savings. I’ve caught myself about to make an impulse purchase today from a shiny retailer and pausing to think “Am I Randy Marshing this? Is this something I need in my life? Would I buy this if another company, in another circumstance, was selling it?” 🌲 🌲 🌲 Alas, in a mirror of my later high school gymnastics performance, they didn’t stick the landing. The big reveal at the end of the episode involved the boys discovering the “heart” of the store, which consisted of a well-guarded mirror. Aka, the heart of the store was… us. South Park weren’t known for their subtly, but this reinforced what Trey and Matt had been saying through Stan and Kyle the whole episode: The Store is our fault. If we stop shopping there, it goes away! This may have been true in the cutout world of South Park, but the real world isn’t half a tidy. Firstly, as the characters in the episode freely admit, The Store drove the local retailers out of business. After taking down The Store, the implication was another local retailer could step in and take its place. Sure, it may be a bit more expensive, but it’ll have their small town charms. That’s all well and good, but… you know, what about in the interim? Stores don’t magically spring up out of nowhere, especially when the only viable concern prior to The Store opening was driven to bankruptcy!. As Not Just Bikes explained in his critique of big-box stores (Nebula version here), this exact scenario plays out across North America, all the time. These stores come into towns, destroy their local businesses, move out when profits start to dip, and the residents are left without a supermarket, grocer, or pharmacy. Another unexplored angle was how The Store opened in South Park in the first place. The episode begins with The Store being constructed, as though it materialised through sheer force of will by the townspeople (hence, why the ultimate solution was to “simply” not shop there). It’s the retail equivalent of blaming puddles for the rain. In the Not Just Bikes video, Jason describes the massive incentives local governments dish out to these stores. It’s wild to realise local residents have already paid the big-box store with their tax dollars before they’ve even given it a chance to bankrupt their Main Street. For self-described libertarians, it’s surprising that the South Park writers didn’t explore this collusion of government and big business; it’s hardly a “free market” when one side is granted an unfair advantage by the state (and why being against giving incentives to small businesses that contribute significantly more tax revenue is more than a little hypocritical). This is where the big lie about consumer choice comes into play. As Cory Doctorow described last year, voting with your wallet is a rigged ballot when the other person has a bigger wallet. People in that town—save for a few politicians who made out like bandits—had no say in the store opening, and the effect of these stores on choice is as open and fair as your options for residential broadband. Which is to say, not much at all. Even as a teenager though, what struck me was how distasteful and simplistic the idea was that the working class were to blame for the machinations of large business. I find it hard to fault struggling families buying something cheaper from this massive store, even if they may be struggling because the store drove out local businesses that would have paid higher wages. You’re not exactly in a position to make long-term decisions, or contribute more to your community, when you’re living paycheque to paycheque. The power imbalance alone is enough to dismiss the idea that the “market decides”, and that all people would have to do is not shop there. It was a tidy sound bite, but not one grounded in any form of reality. 🌲 🌲 🌲 We’re lucky in Australia that these big-box stores haven’t achieved the same level of dominance; or at least, not in the same way. We have our own supermarket duopolies, and large hardware stores that if anything have developed a cult following for other reasons. But many of these stores are largely confined to existing shopping centres where occupancy rates for small businesses remain high, and the Main Streets in city and town centres still have a buzz of activity. But there are rumblings that this could change. Much as the emotional support vehicles in the form of light trucks have started appearing on Australian roads, these larger bulk-discount chains have started opening their massive warehouses here. My hope is local legislation would prevent them from pumping and dumping their crappy buildings, and that maybe in this hostile political climate with the US right now, we wouldn’t put up with it. But I suspect the opposite may still happen. Singapore was another interesting case study into the viability of these sorts of stores. Like Europe, Singapore gravitated more towards the “hypermart” that Jason described, with the Malaysian Giant standing alongside the French Carrefour. It’s been a decade since I lived there, but interestingly Carrefour ended up closing shop, and Giant never achieved much market penetration… a term I can’t stand for a whole host of reasons, not least when described with the term Giant. I suppose when you have basically no land and sky-high property values, the business fundamentals of big-box stores simply don’t add up. Anyway, South Park! It was a cartoon. Sometimes they got things right, other times they blamed the victims of smoking for projecting their views, and poor people for the actions of big-box stores in their communities. Maybe one day the whole “punch up, not down” attitude may prevail. With thanks again to Jason from Not Just Bikes for giving me the vocabulary and facts to talk about these issues properly for the first time. This episode gnawed at me for years, as this meandering post clearly demonstrates. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-16.