dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

A low key day off

I had grand plans for my day off today. I was going to find some place to go with Scully and spend some time out. But the weather was a bit grim, with light showers giving way to strong winds and quite chilly temperatures.

I searched the net for some place that has good meat pies that I hadn’t tried before, but almost all of the ones filling those requirements were south of the Harbour and in inner city suburbs where parking is difficult. I didn’t fancy dealing with all that. I found a bakery called Berkelo in Manly, but again that is a bad place for parking. But then I saw they had a shop in Mosman, closer to home and easier to park.

So I just went there. They only had two types of pie: chicken or pumpkin. I chose the chicken pie, and a sausage roll. I reviewed the sausage roll (with photos) over on my sausage roll blog. The pie was okay, but nothing to write home about. But then I looked inside again for a sweet treat and they had… almond lamingtons. Like a lamington, but coated in almond crumbs, and filled with an almond cream. I took that away and ate on a nearby park bench. It was delicious.

After returning home, I spent some time making sourdough bread and pizza dough for dinner. And a comic. And… I really don’t know where the time went.

New content today:

Assessment marking day

Today I got up and went to collect the grocery shopping. I didn’t have time on Friday when I usually do this, due to the ISO meeting, and I forgot to order early enough to pick up on Saturday.

After getting home and having some breakfast I went for my 5k run. Today was the day of the charity 7 Bridges Walk around Sydney Harbour, and the walk route goes very close to my place. I had to choose a running route that wouldn’t intersect too much with the hordes of walkers. Interestingly, at various points along my run, I could see (in the distance) a total of 5 of the 7 bridges: Sydney Harbour Bridge, Pyrmont Bridge, Anzac Bridge, Iron Cove Bridge, and Gladesville Bridge. It was a good day for the charity walk event, as the weather was mild and partly cloudy.

For my run I was surprised to record an achievement on Strava, my fastest 2 mile time. I didn’t keep it up though, as my 5k time was good but not among my best times.

After I had a shower to freshen up I got stuck into marking the image processing assignments for the university course I’m tutoring. This was several hours of work, and I only finished just before dinner. I made a quiche with pumpkin and asparagus for dinner.

And now… tomorrow I have a full day off when I can relax and do nothing work-related! It’s usually my busiest day with online ethics classes, but since I cancelled a week of them to fit in my ISO meeting, I have none tomorrow, and will restart on Tuesday. The weather tomorrow looks decent, so I might spend a day out with Scully somewhere.

Oh! Also today we let Scully do another painting. This is a “dog painting” kit we got some time ago from my sister-in-law. We did the small canvas a while back, but finally decided it was time to do the larger one. You smear it with paint, seal the canvas in a plastic ziploc bag, the outside smeared with peanut butter, and then let Scully go to town licking it. Here’s what she painted:

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 4; D&D night; marking day

Friday was the last day of the IOS Photography Standards meeting. We had one technical session on camera image information capacity. The goal of this project is to come up with measures that can be calculated from the pixel statistic that reflect how well the image supports machine vision tasks such as object detection to be performed. This is a very different measure from image quality for humans. The use case is similar in fact to the machine vision standard I mentioned on Day 1, but here we’re using measures such as the Shannon information capacity.

After that we had the closing administrative sessions, going over action items, finalising plans for the next meeting, adopting resolutions, and paying thanks to the various organisers and hosts (which includes me this time!).

I came home about 2:30pm and got straight into housecleaning to prepare for the Dungeons & Dragons game in the evening. I vacuumed, cleaned the shower and bathroom, and had a shower to freshen up. Friends arrived at 6pm and we played the next session of our current adventure. Much fun was had, and we finished up around 10:30.

Today I got up, had breakfast, went for a 5k run. I didn’t do as fast as last weekend. It was warmer and more humid, so it was a bit tougher going. After a shower I made a new Darths & Droids strip for tomorrow.

Then I got stuck into marking student assignments for the university image processing course. I have seven groups to mark, and got through three this afternoon. Hopefully I can polish off the last four tomorrow.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 3

This morning I dropped Scully off at doggy daycare again. They were going to deliver her back at home in the evening after my wife got home from work. Then I hopped a train into the city. The weather was lovely today, mild and sunny.

The ISO Photography Standards meeting today went through a bunch of different technical topics, covering: camera readouts and controls for HDR photography, camera memory model, digital camera pixel specifications, ISO DNG file format, low light performance with hand-held camera shake, depth metrology, image flare, and image stabilisation. We also had some additional discussion on the HDR topics covered yesterday, because there had been a failure to reach consensus on some issues. This was a… lively session.

After the meeting I headed home, where Scully still had not been delivered by the doggy daycare place. Then my wife got a message saying that she’d been delivered to her work! They’d messed up the address, and then left her with some of my wife’s co-workers, rather than try to contact us. So she requested they pick her up and bring her back home, but she also left to walk all the way back to work in case they took too long, while I stayed home in case she arrived here. I called up to find out what was going on and they said the delivery driver was a few suburbs away and because of the major crash on the Bridge traffic was banked up everywhere and it would be at least an hour before they could get back to my wife’s work. So lucky she left to go back there.

She arrived and fortunately Scully was safe and sound with her co-workers. But she had no harness or lead, and so couldn’t walk home with Scully! So I had to drive down and pick them both up.

I had a call with the doggy daycare and they were very apologetic, saying they’d already spoken to the delivery driver about leaving a dog with someone who wasn’t the owner. That absolutely never should have happened, no matter what the co-workers said, without contacting and checking directly with us. So it was all a bit stressful because we didn’t know for sure that Scully was safe for half an hour.

To end on a more positive note, some photos I took the past few days while on break from the standards meeting. First, the view from our meeting room window, with a coveted Sydney Harbour water view:

Jacaranda trees beginning to flower at Circular Quay:

Some of Sydney’s old and new architecture:

The Opera House with ferries crossing in front:

And the Art Gallery:

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Sydney ISO meeting: Day 2

I got up this morning and after breakfast headed into the city for day 2 of the ISO Photography Standards meeting. The weather was better today, with a bit of sun poking through the clouds, though it go greyer in the middle of the day. Late in the day the sun came out again and it was a beautiful early evening.

The technical discussion today was all about high dynamic range (HDR) image representation, covering aspects of how to specify conversion to standard dynamic range (SDR) displays or print renderings, how to edit HDR files that contain metadata specifying the creator’s artistic intention on different display media, and so on. It was very technical and not my area of specialty, so a bit less interesting to me than tomorrow’s other technical topics.

One interesting point that came up about converting HDR images for SDR display: If your software/hardware can’t render the HDR content adequately then there is a potential privacy or security issue because users might then share an HDR image that contains visible data that they can’t see on their display, and so would be unaware of. This is the sort of consideration that we have to think about when devising standards to deal with this sort of stuff.

We broke early at 4:30pm because I’d organised a behind-the-scenes tour of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We met there at 5:30, allowing some delegates time to drop gear at their hotel rooms. We were met by a staff member who is also on the Australian photography standards committee, and she showed us around the gallery photo labs, demonstrating equipment used to digitise artworks and telling us about their program of photography and digitisation, the unique challenges they face, and so on.

After this we separated, with many of the international delegates taking the opportunity to explore the Art Gallery (which is open until 10pm on Wednesdays). But I headed home on the train, getting home a bit before 8pm.

My wife had already had some dinner, so I cooked up some mushrooms on toast for a simple dinner.

New content today:

Sydney ISO meeting: Day 1

Today was day 1 of the ISO Photography Standards meeting here in Sydney. I had a chore to do first thing in the morning, dropping Scully off at doggy daycare, since me and my wife would both be out all day. This would have been fine, except it was absolutely pouring rain, and the nearest parking to the daycare place is not very close. So I got pretty wet, and then had to dash back home and walk straight to the railway station in order to make it to the meeting in time. I got there with my trousers wet from the knees down.

I met the overseas delegates and made many apologies for the weather. There was a good turnout, and we got down to business with the opening administrative session. Then later we had technical sessions on vocabulary, for proposing and deliberating definitions of standard dynamic range (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) imaging environments. There are no standard definitions of these, so we debated the technical merits of several proposed wordings, and although we reached rough agreement there was still some dissatisfaction. But we will produce a draft document and it will go through rounds of commenting, so it can be further refined.

The other technical session was a new one on machine vision cameras, with a proposal from the European Machine Vision Association to submit one of their standards for characterising image sensor quality for ISO adoption. This is very different from our usual photographic use case, because for machine vision we don’t care about human aesthetics. For example: periodic noise patterns in images are extremely distracting to humans, but quantitatively are not different from random noise in a machine vision application. So the noise calculation formulae are very different.

We finished just a few minutes early and I headed home. I made enchiladas for dinner, and made a new Darths & Droids strip for Thursday, since I won’t have any time tomorrow.

New content today:

Late and busy Monday before ISO meeting

Phew. It’s late. I did my last six ethics classes today. In between I packaged up some more Magic cards to send off to a buyer. I had to go to the post office, but a big thunderstorm broke over Sydney mid-afternoon, the only time I had spare time. So I drove up to the post office with Scully instead of walking through the rain.

I made pizza dough, to be topped with stuff for dinner. And a new Darths & Droids comic for tomorrow night.

And I did some prep work for the ISO Photography Standards meeting which begins here in Sydney tomorrow. We’ll have about 30 delegates from around the world attending and I’m on hosting duties. We’ll be meeting 9-5 for the next few days. So I’ve cancelled ethics classes for the coming seven days to allow me to do this.

And on top of this, I have to start marking the first assessment task for the university image processing course! It’s going to be a super busy week.

New content today:

Lightning fast blog post

It’s late already and time to mention what I did today:

First thing in the morning I made a Darths & Droids strip, because I completely forget to do one yesterday!

5k run: I took it easier than yesterday, considering I’d managed a great time then. And I still ran under 27 minutes today! Maybe I’m getting better at this??

We went out to my mother-in-law’s place for lunch with her and my wife’s brother and sister. Just some chicken bread rolls and catching up with family.

I got home and made sourdough bread, which is now baking in the oven after rising through the evening.

Three ethics classes. Super interesting class tonight. 3 of 4 kids thought it was okay for someone else (not JK Rowling) to write a new Harry Potter book and sell it. One was in China, and she actually said there are lots of these books for sale there. 🙂

In between I made okonomiyaki for dinner.

New content today:

Games night and a fast run

Friday I picked up the weekly grocery shopping in the morning. I order online, a habit I began during COVID, and continue because it saves me time wandering up and down all the aisles of the supermarket. When you order online, you can select a checkbox for each item saying whether it’s okay for them to substitute an alternate brand or product if the one you selected is out of stock. After some early experimentation with this, I simply set it to “no substitutions” for everything. Because sometimes I’d get stuff I really didn’t want.

But when I pick up the order at the supermarket, often they have still substituted something. But at least they let me know about and give me the option to reject the substitution and get a refund for the missing item. Yesterday I ordered a particular brand and type of bread. They had the exact one I ordered, and another different type, and asked me which one I would prefer, as if they were substituting something. But one was the actual correct product I’d ordered, so I pointed to that and said, “That’s the one I ordered.” They questioned again, asking if I’d prefer the other one. I had to say, “No, that’s the one I ordered, I want that one.” 🙄

I had a bunch of ethics classes. One had a returning student – I knew he was returning as I’d made a personal note about him in the private teacher’s notes section, just recording the country he lived in. I said, “Welcome back, you’ve done my classes before, right?” And he looked surprised and said, “No…” I said, “I’m sure you have, maybe a while ago.” He said it must have been a couple of years or so ago, which may well have been true. I think maybe he was impressed at my memory!

My wife and I went out to our local pizzeria for dinner. And then when we got home I joined online games night with my friends. It was just three of us this week, as one was away and another was busy moving into his brand new house (where we played last week, but he finally had his furniture moved on Friday). I won two games of Jump Drive quite dramatically – I was very lucky with drawing into strong synergies in each game. Then we played Luxor, which I came second in. One guy went to bed early, and the two of us remaining played Root on Steam. He played cats and I played the Alliance, with AI Eyrie and Vagabond, and I managed to win.

Scully slept better overnight. On Friday I wrote a note and put copies under the doors of all our neighbours in the building, asking if anyone had any new electrical devices running overnight that could be causing some high-pitched noise or other humming or whatever that might be disturbing Scully. Our neighbour directly below us responded and said they’d started using an automatic cat feeder on the weekend, and offered to turn it off to see if Scully would sleep any better. She did, but still wanted to leave the bedroom once soon after we went to bed. After wandering around the house for a bit she came back and then slept through the night, which was a lot better than the past several nights.

I think the experiment is inconclusive. I’m sceptical that a cat feeder would make a constant sound that would disturb Scully, and her behaviour seems more consistent with whatever is bothering her still being present, but maybe she’s getting used to it. Anyway, I reported back to the neighbour and they agreed to keep the cat feeder off for another couple of days to see what happens, and then maybe we can test it by trying it switched on again. If that makes Scully more agitated again then we’ll have some strong evidence.

After breakfast I went for a 5k run. I pushed a bit and recorded 26:38, my best time since back in March. So that was pretty good. It didn’t feel too hard either, like I still could have gone a bit faster.

This afternoon when out walking Scully past the small group of local shops, where the fish & chip shop is, we were lamenting that nothing there was open for dinner on a Saturday evening. But we noticed a new sign at the cafe, saying that it was now open for dinner from Thursday to Saturday! They only started this this week. So maybe in a week or two we might try going up there for dinner.

New content today:

Another full day of teaching

So, two ethics classes this morning, on the Copying topic. Followed by dropping Scully with my wife for the afternoon and heading into the university to teach at the Image Processing tutorial, while students are working on their final project assessment tasks. The professor is away this week at a JPEG meeting in Berlin, so it was just us tutors handling the students today.

And then back home for two more online ethics classes. In this topic I got an interesting take on copyright questions from one of the kids. She said that whether it’s okay or not to copy someone’s work and make money from it depends on how famous the work/author is. In the sense that it’s more okay if the work is more famous, and less okay if the original is less well known. When I asked her why, she explained that if you copy something well-known, then everyone will know it’s not your own work, and any amount you make off it will be tiny compared to the original creator. Whereas if you copy something relatively unknown, people will be deceived that you made it, and you could make more money than the original creator.

It’s not the direction I thought anyone would go when answering that question, but her logic was sensible and she’d clearly thought about it to try to come up with some reasoning. So I consider this a success!

Scully had another somewhat restless night, but not as bad as the past few. She went in and out a bit, but eventually settled down to sleep for the remainder of the night in our room as usual. So… maybe she’s getting used to whatever the disturbance is? I guess we’ll see tonight. I had a talk to the nearest neighbour who I suspected might be the most likely cause of ay new noise, but they said they haven’t started using any new equipment of any sort recently. Depending how tonight goes, I might have to write and copy a note to stick under the doors of several other apartments to try to locate the source.

New content today: