Apartment for sale next door

Okay, I made an error two days ago when I said that new neighbours had moved in to the apartment next door. Yesterday I saw a woman in business dress come in with a man carrying a tripod and a big bag of gear. I wondered if it was actually a real estate agent photographing the place to produce a sale listing, and the furniture being moved in the day before was only temporary decoration for photography and to display the place to prospective buyers.

Today in our letter box was a flyer advertising exactly that. They had photos of the interior with the furniture I saw being moved in on Tuesday, and it was announcing that the apartment is now up for sale. There will be an open house inspection for prospective buyers this Saturday, and the place will go up for auction on 8 March. (I don’t know about other countries or cities, but here in Sydney almost all homes are sold by auction these days rather than a fixed price sale.)

When I last talked to the neighbours who just moved out, I was in their place as they were removing the last of their furniture. I mentioned that each time people moved out we were tempted to knock down the adjoining wall from our place and claim the second bedroom, and brick up the bedroom’s doorway into that apartment. And ta-da! We’d have another bedroom! And my neighbour was very encouraging and said we should totally do it. 😁

In other events today, I had my usual bunch of ethics classes. In the afternoon I drove wth Scully up to the liquor store to stock up on wine (since we have virtually none left) and also get some beer for Dungeons & Dragons tomorrow night. And around 5pm I took her for a walk up to the local shops, where I bought some eggs, since we were low, and the supermarket is perpetually empty of eggs these days so I can’t get them in the usual weekly grocery shop. Bird flu is affecting poultry farms here in Australia too, and we’ve had egg shortages in the supermarkets for months, although small independent grocers still have supplies from smaller farms that the supermarkets don’t use as suppliers.

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D&D prep and a Italian treat

Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?

So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.

It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.

At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.

This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳

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A beach break for lunch

Today I had to refuel the car, and decided to take Scully on a drive to Collaroy and Fisherman’s Beach, next to the golf club there. Of course I stopped for a couple of pies at The Upper Crust, one butter chicken, and one Mexican beef. Excellent as usual.

It was hot and sunny and I expected to sit on the grass under the shade of a huge Norfolk Island pine tree that grows there. You can see it on the left edge of this photo:

Fisherman's Beach

But when we got there, there was an older couple already sitting there, with their dog. The patch of shade is fairly small, and Scully didn’t like the look of their dog, so we had to move along the beach a bit to the other side of the golf clubhouse and find a shady bench for me to sit on.

At least this spot gave me a good view of some Australian pelicans who were sunning themselves and drying off their wings. Among a swarm of silver gulls.

Gulls and pelicans

I also saw Australian ravens, masked lapwings, noisy miners, common mynas, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, rainbow lorikeets, and one grey butcherbird, all of which I recorded in eBird.

Back home, I worked on my ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Prizes and Awards”. I have questions like:

  • Why do people or organisations give out prizes and awards?
  • Do prizes sometimes get given to the “wrong” person?
  • Why are some awards, like Nobel Prizes, Olympic Medals, Academy Awards, so famous?
  • Is it fair that something or somebody that wins an award will become more popular?
  • Should awards always go to the best performer, or should effort and improvement also count?

Oh, and new neighbours moved into the apartment across the hall from us today, after our old ones moved out just last week. This seems a very quick turnaround given that our old neighbours were told they had to leave because the owner was intending to sell the apartment. We never saw anybody come in to inspect the place or any prospective buyers or new renters. And then suddenly two young women showed up today with furniture. I’m wondering if these woman actually offered a big rental increase and the owner decided to just tell the previous ones that they had to vacate. 🤔

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Warming weather and secret subjects

The weather here is steadily warming up throughout this week. We had 30°C today, but it’s going to climb slowly as the week progresses. With little respite at night, as the minimums will be around 21-22°C each night. That’s the worst part, really, since it’s difficult to sleep without having the air conditioning on.

So far five people have submitted secret “expert subjects” for my planned trivia quiz night with my friends I still have two or three more to tell me if they want in. Some of them are very obscure from my point of view, so I’m going to have to do some significant research to come up with questions!

Not much else to report today. I had a lot of classes as usual for a Monday. University courses start in a few weeks and this year the Data Engineering course I help teach is on Monday afternoons, 1-4pm. Which clashes with two of my ethics classes, so I’m going to have to reschedule or cancel them. I’ll have to get that sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

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Preparing a trivial competition

Today I slept in quite a bit. I had a good solid sleep and probably caught up a bit on less sleep on Friday night. After breakfast my wife requested a lift down to Kirribilli Markets with Scully, so I dropped her off before going on my 5k run. These things combined meant I went for my run significantly later than usual, and it was already 26°C by the time I started. Nevertheless, I went faster than yesterday since the humidity was a bit lower and that made it feel not so bad.

I worked on some comics, and I also spent some time thinking about a revived old project. Some years ago a friend ran a trivia quiz during one of our online games nights. I had the idea to run a quiz myself and wrote some questions, but ran out of momentum. But I ran across the half-written quiz the other day and was inspired to work on it again. I mentioned it to the guys and they were all keen. I’ve asked them all to think of and submit their individual “expert subjects”, for which I will research and craft specific questions related to that subject for each of them.

I think I’ll run it as a team event, with pairs or triplets of people, depending how many players we have. Hopefully it’s not a prime number!

I also came up with a couple of new topics for future ethics classes, which I jotted down some preliminary questions for: “Danger!” and “Always Connected”. The latter is about the modern phenomenon of everyone being constantly plugged in to communications networks, no matter where they are, in contrast to a generation or two ago when people could easily get off the grid and in fact were forced to much of the time.

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Finding Paths, and a new Indian restaurant

On Friday I had a busy day. I was chairing the latest meeting of the Standards Australia (SA) committee on photography, held over videoconference. We normally have three meetings a year, but the last one (supposed to be after the New York ISO meeting in June) was delayed so long because of staff turnover at SA (resulting in us not having a project manager for several weeks) that we finally decided to leave it until the next date, after the Sydney October meeting. And then it was tough to organise it in December like I wanted, so it was pushed to January.

It was a fairly routine meeting, except for a new attendee. One of our current committee members decided it’s time to cull his numerous committee roles and went to the effort to find a replacement to take over his representation of their university. The new guy I had a Zoom meeting with on Tuesday (which, looking back, I see I didn’t mention that day) to brief him on what our committee does and what sort of work he’d be expected to do. That didn’t scare hi off, so he attended on Friday as a guest, before they go through the motions of replacing the retiring member.

Otherwise I went through the discussions and progress from both the New York and Sydney meetings. Unfortunately our member from the Art Gallery of NSW couldn’t make the meeting because I especially wanted to thank her for the behind-the-scenes tour she organised for us at the Sydney meeting.

This meeting yesterday overlapped with one of my ethics classes, so last week I rescheduled it to be a day later and told the kids. But without that rescheduled one I still had three more to teach after the standards meeting, which with a break for a late lunch took me up to 6pm.

And then from 6pm we had online games night with my friends. One of them had organised for us to do some roleplaying this time, using Pathfinder 2e rules and a virtual tabletop (VTT). And by 6pm everyone else was ready to play and all waiting for me! So I pretty much had to dive straight in.

It was nice to be a player for once instead of running the game. This was a one-shot test run of the VTT, before the GM starts a proper campaign. There were five of us in the party; I was a halfling rogue who I named Quillby Bramblefoot. We were given a mission to check out a watchtower which had lit its distress fire signal, and told to recover a magical artefact from the tower, although the guy giving us the mission was a bit cryptic about it and wouldn’t tell us what it looked like or what it did. Which in hindsight may have been a hint, because when we got there and after fighting a couple of battles against wild boars and some semi-undead things, we found a cloaked woman who led us to the item and told us a different story about it. We didn’t get much further as it got late and we finished up there.

Today I got up and did a 5k run. It was very tough going because it was 24°C and 75% humidity. I can really see it in my times when the weather is warm and humid; it can make me a minute or two slower than a good time in cool, dry weather. Back home I showered to freshen up and then it was time for the make-up class that I’d moved from yesterday. Three of the four kids showed up, which was a good turnout for moving the class to a different day.

This afternoon I looked at organising more details for our trip to Tokyo in a few weeks. It was time to think about the dinner options and book some restaurants. I went through the vegetarian-friendly restaurants that my Japanese contact recommended for us to meet for dinner. One sounded truly awesome – mid-range fully vegetarian versions of traditional Japanese cuisine, conveniently located, great reviews. I tried to book it for 27 February… but it’s booked out for the whole month! This is another issue with vegetarian places in Japan – tourists book them out well in advance, because there are so few options for all the vegetarian visitors.

So I did some research and found a nice looking izakaya with an extensive vegetarian menu, in a good location. I emailed our contacts there and suggested this. I also booked dinner for me, my wife, and her mother and sister at Sakura-tei, an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku. It’s interesting using a Japanese restaurant booking site. They want to know so much about you! There was a drop-down asking what occasion it is, with about 50 options: Birthday (self), Birthday (spouse), Birthday (friend), Birthday (family), Friends, Women’s group, Welcome, Farewell, Holiday party, Reunion, Tourism, Business meeting, Team drinks, Family celebration, Kids event, Wedding reception, Anniversary, Engagement celebration, Date, Group Date, Proposal(!), Seminar, Music recital, Exhibition, Other. Those are all in the list, and I skipped some other entries. And another asking how many times you’ve been to the restaurant before.

Speaking of restaurants, we tried a brand new Indian place tonight. It’s the new one that opened up where Turka used to be. I checked the Google reviews and… it was very mixed. A lot of 5-star reviews, and a lot of 1-star reviews. People can be very opinionated, so we decided to try it ourselves. Unfortunately our experience was more 1-star than 5-star. The samosas were cold in the middle, as though frozen and not fried enough to warm through. The dosa had a good spicy potato filling, but the pancake around it was a bit tough, not nice and crispy. The malai kofta curry had decent paneer dumplings, but the sauce was fairly bland. So, we decided not to come back. There are a few much better Indian options in the area.

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Leftovers and vegetarian Tokyo planning

Not much else to talk about today, so I thought I’d pick a food theme. Because I have ethics classes from 6-8pm, it’s difficult organising dinner for me and my wife to eat together. I need to eat around 5:30, which is too early for her. So we often end up eating individually on Thursdays (and Wednesdays). Sometimes I cook something that will withstand sitting on the stove staying warm for an hour. Last night I made a single pot of lentils ( a mix of red lentils and French lentils), with broccoli and potato. There was some left over, which I kept in the fridge until my dinner tonight, while my wife made herself some eggs later on.

The other leftover was the last few slices of sourdough from the loaf I made a few days back. I made a new loaf today, but it just came out of the oven this evening.

And the other food-related task of the day was going through options for vegetarian dining in Tokyo, to pick places to try and book for our upcoming trip. A contact on the Japanese ISO photography standards delegation sent me some recommendations, and this one looks really good: Saido. I think we’ll suggest this one for dinner with my contact and his wife (we had dinner with them last time we were in Tokyo as well).

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Walking while the weather is okay

Scully didn’t get much walking time yesterday because of the heatwave weather conditions, followed by the evening hailstorm. So given today was a lot cooler, I made sure to take her out for a couple of good long walks. First thing in the morning I took her up to Moon Phase, the patisserie, and got myself one of their delectable char siu buns. Barbecue pork inside a delicately laminated pastry shell, with a super crisp sweet glaze on the outside. It’s an astonishing flavour combination and works really well.

I spent some time today assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips, and also writing and making a new Darths & Droids strip. For lunch I just had some sandwiches with my home made sourdough, cheese, tomato, and lettuce.

After lunch I took Scully one a longer walk, around Waverton and down past the harbour shore. I also did an eBird count and tallied 12 different species. About average for a walk down there. The weather was mild and grey, and there were a few brief showers passing over during the day, with rumbling thunder, but nothing heavy.

Not much else to say about today.

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Dealing with tech issues

I had a couple of annoying tech issues today.

A few days ago I logged into my University of Technology Sydney account to check my email there. I found, to my surprise, an automated transcript of a phone message, left by the project manager of the Standards Australia photography committee. This confused me, because I never gave Standards Australia any contact details related to the university. They have my direct mobile phone number, and should be calling that. I don’t even know if there is a UTS phone number that is supposed to be able to reach me – I don’t have an office there, and as far as I know I haven’t been assigned a number there. SO this was a big mystery.

Today I emailed the project manager about something else, and mentioned that I was surprised to find a phone message from him at UTS. I asked him what number he called. He replied and confirmed that he’d tried my mobile number (though didn’t quote the number). And he just tried again, but it diverted to a message bank. My phone had not rung at all.

Now I was worried. I couldn’t even imagine how this was happening. How had someone calling my mobile been diverted to a UTS message bank without my phone even ringing? Was this happening to everyone who tried calling me?? HOW??

I got a friend to try calling my phone to see what would happen. He got through – my phone rang and I answered it. No diversion to a message bank at UTS. I went back to the project manager and asked him again specifically to give me the phone number he had called, and to check SA’s records to see if any other number was listed by them on their systems.

A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was the project manager! He was confused too. I stepped through the sequence of events with him, asking him to state what number he was calling. He said they only had one phone number for me, my mobile number that he’d just called, and that he just used Microsoft Teams to place the call…

And that’s when the shoe dropped. He had MS Teams place the call, so he wasn’t actually entering a phone number. I use MS Teams routinely at UTS. I was describing all this to a friend in a chat window at the time, and I said the guy was using Teams to place the call, and he said, “Ohhhh…. Okay, it was all weird and inexplicable before, but now it suddenly makes sense. Yeah, Teams will screw up stuff like that all the time.” Presumably what was happening was he opened his contacts in Teams, hit the “phone call” button, and Teams decided that since I have an account at UTS, it should direct my call there, instead of, you know, to my actual phone number.

I mean, that explains what must have happened, but why would Teams do such a stupid thing? Who on Earth thought that use case was a good idea? And presumably this is going to keep happening unless the project manager actually picks up the handset and dials my number manually. Ugh.

Anyway, the second issue I had was with Numbers (the Apple spreadsheet). I had a bunch of cells with date values in them, which I wanted to format just to display as months. I had them formatted as “January 2025”, but wanted to change them to “Jan 2025” format to save some column space. So I selected the format drop-down list and was confronted with the following:

Date formats

As you can see, every option under the sun, except the one that I wanted! Fortunately this was not as serious an issue as the phone thing, because I created a custom format and got what I wanted.

The other main thing about today was the weather. Wow. It was really hot. We got up to 43.3°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was a few degrees cooler, but still around the 40°C mark. But then at 4pm a storm rolled in, dropping the temperature a good 15 degrees in just a few minutes, strong winds blew in, and the clouds unleashed heavy rain and hail. We got some hail at my place, but my wife reported that where she works, just half an hour’s walk away, there was a lot of hail, blanketing the ground in a white layer like snow.

A few hours later now and several storm cells have come through, dumping heavy rain and splitting the sky with lightning and thunder, separated by calmer periods. The temperature now is below 20°C, which is a nice respite from the heat.

Tonight I started this week’s new ethics class topic, on “Opinions vs Facts”. I spent the morning writing up the lesson plan. The class went well, with some very interesting and nuanced discussion from the kids on the differences and similarities between opinions and facts in various tricky contexts.

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Public holiday, but I’m working

Since Australia Day was on a Sunday yesterday, the Monday is a public holiday. My wife had the day off work and spent time at home doing her watercolour artwork. While I didn’t have a day off at all, and did my usual 6 ethics classes!

There wasn’t much time for me to do much else. There was some light housework, cleaning a few things, doing cooking for dinner, and so on. But basically not much else. Oh, I did put in a little work on Darths & Droids, making a comic and reformatting part of the website to move the fan art stuff to the new bonus material area.

Oh, because my wife was home all day I also spent an hour or so removing photos from her phone, backing them up on my computer. Some of them went back about three years!

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