September 2024 – dangermouse.net

Home made pizza and games night

This morning I went out to pick up the grocery shopping. I wasn unable to order any eggs in my online pick-up order, so while I grabbed fresh fruits and vegetables manually I also went to the egg section to get some there. But that section of the supermarket was completely bare – there wasn’t a single pack of eggs to be had. We’ve been having an egg shortage which I believe is because of a bird flu outbreak in Victoria. So I had to go home without.

But later in the day I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and there’s a small grocery store there, and they had some eggs, so I bought a dozen there.

I had four ethics classes today. I was a bit worried about how heavy this topic on Hate would be after the first one on Tuesday. But it’s become easier over the week and today’s classes were kind of fun actually, discussing various things that the kids hated and why.

For dinner I made a potato pizza, rather than us going out to a restaurant. And tonight is online board games night. We have slightly fewer people than usual since one of the gang is going to see Iron Maiden in concert tonight.

We played a new game for me, called Mountain Goats. It’s an interesting dice combination game sort of like Can’t Stop, but with some new twists. It’s quite enjoyable.

New content today:

Machine learning classifiers and image processing projects

Today’s university lecture was about machine learning as applied to the field of image recognition. I was there as a tutor assisting the lecturing professor, who went over various details of how machine learning works, different algorithms, and how to measure their various statistical types of performance so you can compare them. In the tutorial part of the session the students got to run various classification algorithms and play with the software tools that we provide.

Several teams also asked me about the end of semester project and reports that they have to do. They’re thinking about what topic they want to investigate and they need to get our approval before beginning, just in case they attempt anything unethical or questionable. (For example, using copyrighted data or taking photos of people without consent.) One group was thinking about using medical scans to detect cancerous tumours, another using automotive camera photos to classify objects on or near roads that cars might need to avoid, another just using a large database of photos of different objects to classify them, and another hoping to read photos of car number plates. These are all kind of standard ideas that many teams often have and are all fine.

Other activities today: Mailing more Magic cards to an eBay buyer. Walking Scully a couple of times. Making spaghetti pesto for dinner.

Oh, and we had some rain while I was coming home from university. It’s the first rain we’ve had since 24 August, 19 days ago, when we just had a trace 0.2 mm. The last time we had serious rain was 17 August. We’ve really been enjoying the lack of rain though, after the last 2.5 years of ridiculous amounts of rainfall.

New content today:

Mailing, sorting, pricing, inventorying

Today I spent several hours doing stuff to sell some more of my Magic: the Gathering cards. I listed a set of common cards for auction on eBay last week, and it sold yesterday, so I had to packaged them and then walk up to the post office to send them off.

Then to finalise a deal with someone online I had to make up a checklist, count all the cards I had from an old set (Fallen Empires), record the inventory numbers, then go through an online sale site to find latest sale prices for all of the cards, and enter them into a spreadsheet to calculate the total value. Despite being several hundred cards, most of them currently sell for less than a (US) dollar each, so the total only came to about $250. But! I have a buyer and hopefully he’ll go through with the purchase and I’ll be $250 better off and have gotten rid of a huge pile of cheap cards.

Then I did the pricing process for another old set (Homelands), which I’d inventoried a week or two ago. The total price for another several hundred cards came out almost the same. Although these are old sets from the 1990s, they didn’t have any really strong/desirable cards in them, and they were printed in large quantities so they aren’t particularly hard to find, thus the low resale prices.

And today another auction ended, for a lot of 285 cards on eBay, which ended up selling for just $26. I’m kind of happy to get anything for some of these cards! None of these are the few rare/expensive cards that I have.

I also took Scully for a couple of walks, and made a quiche for dinner before my three online classes in a row tonight, so my wife could eat when she got home from work, while I was busy doing classes.

The weather today was pleasant, mildly warm, but there was a whiff of smoke in the air from controlled burning of bushland around the city, to reduce fuel load before the summer. It wasn’t so bad where I live, but I could see across the harbour to the centre of the city and the air looked very smoky there. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get a cool change and back to winter-like weather for a few days.

New content today:

Dealing with Hate

This morning I wrote up my lesson outline for the new week’s ethics topic, which is Hate. And this evening I had the first class on this topic. There was a new girl in the class, a younger sister of another girl who’s been doing my classes for a couple of years now. She was nine years old, a bit under the recommended age range of 10-12. And it turned out to be a rather intense introduction, with lots of questions about hating things and the consequences of hatred. Hopefully she didn’t find it too heavy going and will return next week!

This afternoon I did more comics stuff. But in between I took Scully on a long walk, around the Waverton loop past the harbour shore. She did some tennis ball chasing on the grass down there to get some exercise. And when my wife got home from work we did two more walks! A short one before my class, and then a longer one afterwards to go to the grocery store and get some sour cream and a zucchini for dinner. I made vegetable fajitas, with the zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, carrot, and mushrooms.

Tomorrow I should have a bit more time to do some other things. Hopefully!!

Oh, I see announcements have been made about the new Apple iPhone 16, to be released soon. It’s about time I upgraded my old phone, as the battery life is getting quite short. I wanted to do it before our trip to Tokyo in February, so hopefully there’ll be plenty of supply of the new model before then.

New content today:

Full day of teaching and Lego

After four ethics classes this morning, I took Scully for a walk to the post office, where I had to mail a couple of things, and the to the fish & chip shop for some lunch. I ate at my usual favourite spot, in the small park on the hill overlooking the harbour. The day was sunny and mild, really nice.

They were very generous with the fish today. Normally it’s one fillet piece, but today the pieces were smaller, about half the usual size or a little more. But they didn’t just give me two pieces, they gave me three!

Back at home I spent the rest of the afternoon photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, that I’d written over the weekend. That took almost three hours of effort. By which time my wife was home from work. She took Scully out for a walk while I finished off photographing the last few strips.

Then I made pizza dough for dinner. While that was rising, I assembled a few strips and uploaded them to the server, ready for the first new update of the week tonight. And then it was time to make the pizza, rolling out the dough, topping it with tomato paste, herbs, cheese, and the regular diced pumpkin, walnuts, feta, and some chilli flakes. into a super hot oven and five minutes later it was ready to eat!

Then I had a shower, before two more classes in the evening. In between those I’m writing this. The first evening class has two kids in it who are very talkative. Either one of them I could probably ask one or two questions and they would be happy talking for the remainder of the lesson. But because there are two other kids in the class as well, I have to keep interrupting them to let those kids have a say too.

I’ve also just done my daily Japanese and Italian practice. I’m using Duolingo for Japanese now, and have moved to listening exercises on YouTube for Italian. I just watched a five-minute cake recipe video in Italian and made note of some new vocabulary words, like mescolare (to mix), versare (to pour), stampo (cake mould), impasto (dough), manciata (handful), dattero (date, as in the fruit), and my favourite new word of the day: sbizzarrire (to indulge) and the related sbizzarrirsi (to indulge oneself).

New content today:

Intense comic writing day

That pretty much sums up my day. I did a new Darths & Droids strip, and hunkered down to complete the batch of Irregular Webcomic! scrip writing that I began yesterday. I still have a handful to do, which I might do tonight, or tomorrow morning (between ethics classes) before photographing them in the afternoon.

Oh, I forgot last night after getting home from the pizza place we gave Scully a bath. Today she spent time out walking with my wife a couple of times while I concentrated on my comics stuff.

Last night I finished watching Apollo 13 Survival, a Netflix documentary on the ill-fated spaceflight. Apollo 13 is one of my favourite movies, and this documentary telling the same story with archival NASA footage and interviews was riveting in a very different way. I really enjoyed it.

I didn’t do much else today. oh, except a 5k run this morning. The weather was a lot cooler than yesterday, and should be milder the coming week after that burst of heat we had last week. The ginkgo trees outside our windows are starting to produce new green leaves, another sign of spring.

New content today:

Hot games night, and a cool change

Friday was board games night at a friend’s place. I picked up Thai food on the way at Faux Hun (previously explained).

There were five of us and we played games of Carcassonne, Ra, and For Sale. I came last in Carcassonne, but finished second or third in the other two – I forget exactly.

Friday was very warm, feeling more like summer than early spring. Today dawned warm after a warm night, and it was almost 25°C when I went for my 5k run at 9am. But a cool southerly change came through and by early afternoon it was down to 21°C, and then chilly in the evening when we walked out to get some dinner.

We went to a different pizza place, which does calzones and arancini, which we like.

But mostly today I worked on writing new Irregular Webcomic! strips. I want to get a batch of 30 written by tomorrow so I can photograph them no later than Monday afternoon, so the first one is ready by Monday evening.

I also learnt a whole bunch of Italian vocabulary words watching a YouTube video about English words that have been borrowed into Italian, but have different meanings. I learnt that golf has two different meanings in Italian: (1) golf, (2) a jumper (or sweater for Americans).

New content today:

Some photos, some image processing

I mentioned yesterday that the shops next to Maggio’s Italian Cafe in Cammeray were being demolished. I took some photos but didn’t have time to upload them yesterday, so I thought I’d show them today. Here’s a view of the rear of the properties:

This is close to where I sit on a bench while I eat the lunch that I’ve bought from Maggio’s Bakery. There’s a nice shady bench where I can sit and eat while Scully hangs out nearby. So I saw the demolition work in progress while I was eating yesterday. And then when we left, I walked out to the street at the front of the buildings:

Here you can see Maggio’s Cafe (not the Bakery, which is in a separate shop a couple of doors to the left). The yellow facade used to be a small grocery store, and the white one next to it is also being demolished – I forget what sort of shop used to be there. (Google Streetview just helped – up until mid-2022 at least it was a place that did casual art classes, where you learn to paint while sipping wine, and then in early 2024 it became a display suite for new apartments. Possibly apartments which are now about to be built on the site.) It looks like the old brick facade is being kept – you can see it is intact, but all of the building behind, seen through the windows, is gone.

I suspect the plan is to build shops at street level, with a few floors of new residential apartments above. There’s quite a bit of this sort of urban renewal going on around the local suburbs at the moment.

I also took a photo today, at the University of Technology Sydney.

I liked the building shapes here. The left and right buildings are part of the university. The greenery-covered building with the suspended solar reflector is so-called Central Park tower across the road. I don’t quite know how the reflector is supposed to work, since the mirrors are angled downwards.

Okay… I found a website with some engineering information about it! There are also heliostat mirrors on the lower roof level of the adjacent tower, which reflect sunlight up onto the suspended mirrors. Interesting! In fact I think you can see one of the roof-mounted heliostats at the lower right corner of the sky in my photo.

I was at the uni of course for this week’s image processing lecture. The professor talked about machine learning in an image recognition context.

In the evening I made lemon pepper pasta for dinner, using another of the free lemons I got last week.

New content today:

More signs of spring

Out walking with Scully at lunch today and the London plane trees are all starting to produce new spring leaves. And wisteria is blooming all over the place. And jasmine.

My wife and I both hate jasmine. We can’t stand the smell of the flowers. But as far as I can tell this doesn’t seem to be a very common thing. I don’t recall ever meeting anyone else, except my mother, who also hated the smell of jasmine. Whenever I tell people this, everyone looks at me like I’m crazy and declares that they love the smell of jasmine.

Anyway, we walked all the way to Cammeray to have lunch at Maggio’s Italian Bakery. I didn’t want to overload on sweets today, so I had two slices of the pizza, a mushroom and a capricciosa. And this afternoon I made a quiche for dinner, so my wife and I could eat our slices separately because I had classes online from 5-8pm.

At Cammeray they’re demolishing a couple of shops next to Maggio’s Cafe (which is a couple of doors down from Maggio’s Bakery, run by the same people). It looks like they might be keeping the old Victorian era front facade on the street and redoing the entire rest of the building behind it.

Oh, and I thought of a cool idea for a future ethics/critical thinking class. I’ll get the kids to do a Turing Test on me, but I won’t tell them if I’m answering as me, or copying their questions into ChatGPT and pasting the results. I’ll prime it first by telling it about the exercise and that it needs to impersonate a human response as best it can. I tried this today and it worked… moderately well, but not great. And then I’ll see if the kids can work out if I’m being human or an “AI”. It should be fairly easy with the right sort of questions. The exercise will be for them to think of the right questions to ask.

New content today:

Making a will

Yep, you heard that title right. Today my wife and I took the important step of starting to draw up wills. We’d been talking about it for a bit, but today we had an initial appointment with a solicitor to go through the details, legal formalities, and so on. We covered what we want to happen if either of us dies, or in the event we both die at the same time (or in quick succession). We also covered powers of attorney and other stuff. The solicitor will draw up drafts based on what we covered and pending any amendments or errors we’ll get to sign them in the next few weeks.

That appointment was in the afternoon. In the morning I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on the subject of “Hospitality”. I did a first class this evening, but it was abbreviated because the only student had to leave early. I’m hoping there are enough questions and subject matter to sustain a full length class. I think it should be okay.

Weather was chilly again today. But should be back up to 29°C in a couple of days. Spring here really isn’t a “warm” season, it’s more like cold and hot days randomly interspersed.

Also today I collated, photographed, and listed on eBay a big pile of Magic: the Gathering cards. All the common cards and basic lands from the 1994 Revised Edition of the game, 4 copies of each, for a total of 360 cards. If anyone reading this is interested, the eBay item is here.

New content today: