dangermouse.net – Page 18 – David Morgan-Mar

Starting project marking; rampant e-bikes

This morning I finished off the Dinosaurs topic with my last three ethics classes. I had to move one class an hour earlier, filling in the gap between it and the previous class, because I had an appointment at lunch time with a doctor. Fortunately the students all said last week they could make it an hour earlier. Next week it’ll be back to the normal time.

After lunch I was walking with Scully and I came out of a narrow pedestrian path perpendicular to a main road, stepped out past the corner of the building, and nearly got hit by a food delivery e-bike speeding along the footpath. I had to step back to avoid being hit. And then I heard a screech as the driver put the brakes on hard, and when I turned to look, he’d only barely managed to stop in time to avoid hitting an old man, maybe late 60s. The old man gave the rider an earful!

These food delivery e-bikes have become a menace in many parts of Sydney. They’re not legally allowed to ride on pedestrian footpaths, but they all do it. Some are reasonably careful, but others are real cowboys and just try to go as fast as they can, dodging precariously between pedestrians. There have been several serious accidents in the past year or so. I wonder if police will crack down on them at some point – because at the moment there seems to be no enforcement of the law.

This afternoon I began marking the first student project reports from the current university image processing course. The first one I grabbed was a real treat – probably the best report I’ve read in my three years of teaching this course. Though it might be all downhill from here!

Later tonight I have the last lesson in my current Creative Thinking and Game Design course. It’ll be good to wrap another one of those up!

New content today:

My first 10k run

I ran 10k today! It’s my first time running 10k, probably in my life.

I set out planning to do 7.5k, and when I approached the end I felt pretty good still, so I decided to take a slight detour and tack on another lap of the 2.5k loop that I do to extend 5k into 7.5k. I wanted to see if I could complete the 10k in under an hour, and I managed to record a time of 57:23. So I’m pretty happy with that!

I felt a little tired during the rest of the day, but not too bad. No real aches or pains or anything. I think my body is getting used to running. Which a few years ago I would have said was crazy.

For lunch, my wife talked me into taking a long walk to the bakery at Naremburn, which I treated myself to a mushroom pie and a small lemon poppy seed cake as a reward.

This afternoon I worked on my lesson plan for the coming week of ethics classes, beginning on Tuesday. The topic is “Success and Failure” (for both age groups). I wanted to get this done today because from tomorrow I’ll need to spend a lot of time marking student assignments for the university image processing course. The first report was due on Friday, and I expect the professor will be sending them to the tutors to mark on Monday morning. We need to do a quick turnaround on these because it’s the planning report for the remainder of the project, so the students can get feedback before submitting their final reports.

New content today:

Referendum and D&D

A quick one tonight because I’m home late after running Dungeons & Dragons up at the local science toy shop this evening. I ran a one-shot adventure using a puzzle dungeon themed around eyesight, and had a total of four players, with a teenage brother and sister and their mother playing, along with the guy who was in the game last time I DMed there. They had a blast figuring out the clues and working out clever ways to defeat the monsters and avoid the dangers.

The other main thing today was gong to vote in the referendum on the proposal to amend the Australian Constitution to establish an indigenous committee to advise Parliament on matters of importance to indigenous Australians. Unfortunately the proposal has been soundly defeated. But at least voting was east – we walked up to the nearest polling station and there was literally no queue at all. We were in and out in about 3 minutes. But alas that polling station had no democracy sausage barbecue going, so I didn’t get my sausage for voting.

New content today:

These flies!

One thing about the early hot spring weather is that flies have multiplied and are already being a menace. Walking around outside, it has that summer feeling of constantly having to brush flies off your face. I don’t remember having this problem in the last few years with the La Niña weather, but now it’s an El Niño summer, here they are again.

I made a small batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips today, just 5 new ones to cover next week, because I won’t have time to make and buffer up a large batch in the next few days.

For dinner we went out to the local pizza place. I tried a pizza on their menu that I’ve never had before. I usually stick to a few of the options that I like, but today I tried to “Sydney” pizza. Several of the pizza menu options are named after places: Italian ones like Roma, Lipari, Salina, Filicudi. But then there are others such as Java (satay chicken, snow peas, cashews), Phuket (chicken, feta, cashews, mint yoghurt), and Sydney (chicken, bacon, mushroom, onion). I always choose to add a touch of chilli as well, to spice things up.

And after the pizzas my wife suggested we have some dessert. They do a Nutella pizza, topped with vanilla gelato. It’s normally a dessert serving for four people, but the owners do a special small version for two just for us.

Tonight is online games night. We’ve been playing a new game which a friend implemented on his Discord bot, a variant of a new word game on Board Game Arena called Perfect Words. And we’re doing more Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which is our new favourite.

New content today:

A Kickstarter windfall?

This afternoon I got an email from an Australian distributor, saying they have my copy of a Kickstarter game that I backed, and will be shipping it to me soon. I kind of expected this, because this campaign sent updates saying that they had sent a crate of games to their Australian distributor to ship – this arrangement saves on international shipping and makes it more feasible to back something from Australia. Kickstarters that don’t do this are often something like back the project for $50, and then pay $80 extra for shipping it to Australia.

And then I got three more emails in quick succession saying the exact same thing about three other games… game that I never backed and didn’t even know about. Obviously it’s some sort of notification error, but I’m quietly hoping I get all four games!

The most exciting thing I did today was make a trip to the liquor store to restock our supplies of wine and a few other random things. I needed a new bottle of vodka, which I use to preserve fresh ginger so that it lasts as long as I need to use it up without it rotting. I took Scully and was browsing around the shop with her (since they allow dogs inside), and a few people came up and said how cute she was.

It was a warm day, 33°C. But we had a cool change come through in the mid-evening, with thunder and heavy rain, and tomorrow should be cooler.

New content today:

Ethics of dinosaurs

I spent much of today writing my lesson plans for this week’s topics for my ethics classes: Dinosaurs for the younger kids and the closely related but more general Paleontology for the older kids. I get to overlap many of the questions by doing this, so it should have taken me less time than usual to prepare the lesson plans, but I was a bit lethargic today and ended up frittering away a good chunk of time.

I also need to revise my slides for the class on Colour and Human Vision, because I volunteered to give a guest lecture to the university students next week, during their project period. This isn’t part of the coursework, but the lecturer has liked to have someone do a bonus lecture on tangentially related material to the image processing course. Last year I did one on the Science and Engineering of Photography. I was hoping to revise the slides today, but didn’t get to it. Maybe tomorrow!

I made vegetable soup for dinner, so we can have the leftover converted into minestrone tomorrow. And after my three classes in a row this evening I’ve just made myself some sticky rice with banana and cinnamon for dessert, since the soup wasn’t super filling.

New content today:

Monday/Tuesday combined again

It’s tricky doing a Monday evening post now that I have an extra ethics class scheduled, and the current Creative Thinking class has moved an hour later due to daylight saving time. By the time I’m finished my classes it’s 10pm and I don’t feel like blogging anything. So, yesterday I didn’t do much of interest anyway, with three classes taught in the morning, taking Scully for a couple of walks, and failing to get much else done.

I was a bit distracted by a noisy miner chick, which is inhabiting a nest just outside my kitchen window. It was cheeping at a rate of about twice per second, non-stop, for hours. And it’s doing it again today. Ah, spring…

There are also channel-billed cuckoos around again, having returned from their winter migration north. They’re very loud, with a grating raucous call, but thankfully I haven’t heard them too much yet. And the brushturkeys are busy building nesting mounds, scraping huge piles of leaf litter and mulch together, and scattering material all over footpaths and other adjacent areas as well. There are several places where I walk that are covered in layers of leaf litter because of the messiness of these birds.

Today, Tuesday, I have tutoring for image processing at the university in the evening. Before then, I’m making some comics and revising the crystal ball game for the Creative Thinking class after workshopping it last night with the students.

Oh, there’s a weird thing happening at a place that I walk past regularly. It’s an old house which has looked abandoned and run-down for years, with no windows and small trees growing in the copious leaf litter on the roof. It looks like it should be torn down, and has looked that way for the past decade or so. But now there are workers there, and they seem to be building additional alls and rooms directly onto the old building without removing anything. They’re even leaving the mess on the roof. It almost defies belief that they are adding to the existing building rather than tearing it down. I guess we’ll see what happens to it.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

A second 7.5km run

I felt good this morning after yesterday’s run, and decided to press myself up to the 7.5km distance again – the second time I’ve tried this distance, after my first one last month. And this time it felt pretty comfortable the whole way. The weather helped, with a nice cool morning and not too much humidity. And I managed to run a time of 42:58, breaking 43 minutes. (My previous time was 43:16.) I’m feeling like one day soon I can push on to the goal of running 10km.

My wife went to do some shopping with her mother and sister in the middle of the day, and I took Scully out for a walk. It was a really nice spring day (unusually). And the jacaranda trees are just starting to get the first tinge of purple on them as the flower buds develop. In a week or so there will be masses of purple flowers all over Sydney – aways the best time of year in this city. We thought we might miss the peak flowering in November, when we’ll be overseas in Europe, but perhaps it’ll be a little early this year due to the warmer weather.

We also played another game of Root again. We’re still getting used to the strategies, but I think soon it might be good to try another faction.

New content today:

Fancy floral food

This morning I picked up the groceries and then did a 5k run. Today was cold again, with spring back into winter mode.

I printed out a copy of the board/card game that I’ve been working on designing with my class of three kids in my Creative Thinking class (which I mentioned a few days ago). I cut out the cards and Fame counters, and played a couple of games with my wife. The game plays very quickly, in 5-10 minutes. I actually at one stage grabbed a pen and scribbled new rules on one of the cards in my hand – which caused my wife to object about me changing the rules in the middle of the game! But of course this is just good playtesting practice!

Anyway, we came up with a few potential improvements, which I can use as discussion points in the next lesson on Monday night. Apart from those, the game seems to play pretty well! I think with a few simple tweaks we can make it a decent little game.

My wife went to the local farmer’s market this morning and came home with a bag of interesting vegetables, including a small container of edible flowers. So I decided to get fancy with dinner. I made risotto with asparagus and baby zucchinis, and used the zucchini flowers and edible flowers to decorate.

Looks amazing, and tasted pretty good too. There are plenty of the flowers left, so it looks like we’re going to be having fancy dinners all week.

Oh, and here’s a bonus photo of Scully at the park yesterday.

New content today:

Weird weather

Just three days ago we were sweltering in 35°C. Today was so cold that I had to pull out my woollen jumper again (“sweater” for US folks). It was very windy, which made the already cool temperature feel pretty cold.

A friend of mine has said on a few occasions that Sydney doesn’t have nice weather for spring. We have hot and cold days dithered together, early spring having more cold days and late spring having more hot days.

In between ethics classes I took Scully to the brand new park again. It’s a very nice place to sit and eat lunch. And there today I witnessed a Buridan’s Ass moment. A woman came into the park and was looking for a place to sit. She reached a point where there were two empty benches facing each other about 10 metres apart, and she was standing in the middle looking at first one, then the other, then back to the other one… She looked back and forth for maybe 30-40 seconds, before finally continuing to walk, and she eventually found another bench somewhere else.

This evening I had a nice Turkish dinner out with my wife. Hummus and flatbread, grilled haloumi, dolmades, and falafels.

And tonight we were supposed to have in-person board games night, but a few people are away travelling and we would have had three people at most, so we converted to online games and the travellers are joining in.

New content today: