David Morgan-Mar – dangermouse.net

Last of the photo scanning

Today I worked on my next week’s critical thinking topic, which is Money. As in cash, and other media of exchange: gold, silver, shells, credit cards, cryptocurrency. I’ve done several classes before on simple economics like buying and selling things, so this is different, concentrating on the idea of money itself.

I also scanned the last of the photo albums, so we can save space by discarding or boxing old photos (depending on whether we want to keep the hard copies or not).

I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and then we went about 2/3 of the way to my wife’s work and met her as she was walking home.

Not much else.

Public holiday Monday. Kinda

Today was the Labour Day public holiday. My wife was home from work. But I had my usual 4 critical thinking classes to teach from 9am.

After those we went for a walk with Scully. The day was hot, reaching 32°C, but a cold front came through about 4pm, cooling things down a lot and bringing some light rain. Tomorrow should be a lot cooler.

I did a 5k run late in the afternoon, after the temperature cooled down, but managed to avoid the rain. I did some more photo scanning. A Darths & Droids comic. And that’s about it.

Cleaning, scanning, etc

Today was busy with cleaning up the house in preparation for the repainting. My wife is getting rid of old photo albums and I’m scanning the photos, to clear up space.

I pulled out everything from under the bed and there was a ton of dust on shoe boxes with old pairs of shoes in them I tossed a few and kept a few, which I’m refreshing so I can start wearing them in rotation with other pairs of shoes. I’m vowing not to just store them any more, but to actually wear them.

I also took a bunch of stuff out for the fortnightly council household waste collection. This is different from weekly garbage collection – it’s intended for items like furniture, furnishings, and so on, rather than kitchen waste and packaging. I threw out our old kitchen garbage bin, the fluorescent light that I removed from the wall when the new downlights went into the ceiling, the old laundry basket, and also a corkboard which has graced our kitchen wall for over 20 years, but we decided to get rid of.

So, basically a lot of cleaning and tossing stuff away.

An ex-PM, Scythe: Expeditions, and scanning photos

Friday I did my usual set of online critical thinking classes, picked up groceries, the usual stuff.

My wife left at one point to head into work, and she messaged me back that as she was leaving, she saw John Howard, the former Prime Minister, also leaving our apartment complex. He was with another younger man, chatting as they left the premises. My wife overheard the younger guy say to Howard, “I’ll find out for you.” I don’t have any idea what this is about, but my wife thinks that maybe Howard is planning to buy an apartment in our complex, perhaps to downsize from his house as he grows older. There’s any number of logical things he could be wanting to find out about the complex, if so.

It’s not that unusual to see Howard around here—his house is just around the corner and up the street a little from us. He often goes for walks around the neighbourhood. It seems reasonable that if he was thinking of downsizing, he’d choose a place nearby. There are a few apartments for sale in our block at the moment. Including the one directly next door to us. Wouldn’t it be freaky if the ex-PM moved into the apartment next door? There’s also a ground floor apartment in our building with a courtyard/garden currently for sale, which might perhaps be more his style. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

On Friday evening I had board games night with friends. We assembled at one guy’s home, and six of us began a new game: Expeditions, which is a thematic sequel to the very popular Scythe, set in the same world: a dieselpunk 1920s alternate history Europe.

It took a little bit of learning, but once we got going it was straightforward enough and we were enjoying it. The game is supposed to run up to 1.5 hours long, but we took longer as we were learning it. With a break for pizza, it ended up being the only game of the evening, and then we just chatted for a while before heading home.

Today I went for a 5k run, then after showering and changing I went for a walk with my wife and Scully. We picked up coffee for her at a cafe and went down to Bayview Park to sit and enjoy the view. I sketched part of the view:

I think I got the leftmost cormorant right, but the other two didn’t quite turn out! We also saw an illegal waterskier. Waterskiing is banned in Sydney Harbour, but apparently someone decided to give it a go.

In the afternoon I spent a couple of hours scanning old photos of my wife’s. She has a bunch of old photo albums, including lots of photos of her as a child and up to when we got married. She decided that in the spring clean before we repaint the place she wanted to scan the photos and get rid of the physical albums. She’s going to keep significant photos in boxes, but toss a bunch of others after they’re scanned, which will save a lot of space. We scanned three albums and made a significant dent, but there are still five more albums to go.

For dinner we drove over to Four Frogs, the French crêpe place. We like going there occasionally as the food is very good, but it’s not walking distance so we don’t go too often.

Jane Goodall

I woke to bad news today. My wife got up first and dashed in to tell me. Jane Goodall had passed away.

For those of you who have followed my Irregular Webcomic!, you’ll know that Jane inspired an alternate reality version of herself as a character in the comics. She first appeared in this strip, from 2003:

IWC #297

Jane Goodall served as a foil to the comic versions of Steve and Terry (no surname mentioned, but it’s obvious who they are). My Jane Goodall character was nothing like the real one. She was crass, egotistical, snarky, and duped the world into believing she knew a lot about “monkeys”. (Despite all this, she was still sensible enough to fight against Nazis, though.)

In 2006 I got to meet the real Jane Goodall. I attended a public lecture that she gave here in Sydney, and I stayed afterwards to get an autograph and talk to her. I’d printed out some of my comics featuring the Lego version of her, and showed her. Her response:

Oh yes, I’ve seen these. They’re funny.

I asked if she would mind posing for some photos for me to use in my comic. She was delighted to agree.

IWC #1290

My original idea was that she would punch me in the last panel. But she suggested a chimp-slap instead. Which of course worked beautifully.

Thanks Jane, for the inspiration, for appreciating my humorous version of you, for doing good in the world, and for contributing to this humble author’s webcomic.

Website crashing because of bots

This morning when I woke up I was greeted by several messages from readers of Irregular Webcomic! that my entire domain irregularwebcomic.net appeared to have been removed and replaced with a domain parking page. I also had an email from my webhost, explaining what had happened. They’d detected an unacceptably high server load from my site and acted by disabling it.

I’ve been having problems with the site for months now. The phpBB forums have a setting to disable the boards if the server load gets above a certain amount, which I’ve been tweaking to try to get them to be stable. But there’s enough stuff hitting my site that the forums have been offline more than online for some time now. Well, apparently overnight the webhost got sick of the server load and pulled the plug.

I checked the access logs and noticed that a handful of IP subnets were responsible for thousands of hits a day, whereas most IPs were only logging a few hits. So I banned the offending subnets in the site’s .htaccess file. I looked at the live server log updates to check the effectiveness and confirmed they were now being served HTTP 403 Forbidden responses. But I noticed that these subnets were hammering the server, with sudden spurts of 30 or 40 HTTP requests within a second, then stopping for a few seconds, then doing it again. And again, and again. It’s no wonder the server load was unusually high.

It seems these may be relatively new webcrawler bots that are trawling sites looking for text to use to train Large Language Model “AI”s. Lots of sites have been complaining about these recently, and they seem to be causing major headaches for many site owners.

Anyway, my IP blocks seem to be working, and the forums have been stable and online since I made the changes this morning. I may look at a more drastic solution as well, and investigate getting a free Cloudflare account and changing my DNS to route requests via Cloudflare, which can detect and block bot-like behaviour. I didn’t have time to do that today, but might check it out when I do have some time.

Because today I had to finish repping my science class lesson, which I managed just before the class at midday (after spending an hour or so in the morning with the web server issue). Then I took Scully out for a walk after lunch, and then had another class in the afternoon, and three more this evening. So it’s been a very full day.

In critical thinking we started a topic on bikeshedding, or thinking about the wrong thing. I think this is a good one for teaching the kids specific critical thinking tips. It seems to be going well so far.

In one class we had a sad moment as one of the students said goodbye to the classmates. She’d been participating for several weeks from the UK while on a trip there, but is now moving back home to Bermuda, and unfortunately the time zone there is really bad for the class – she would have to get up at 5am to continue. So she said goodbye, and hoped to be back in the UK and rejoin around Christmas time. I hope so!

A tooth grinding

This morning I had a dental appointment. The first of two to get a crown fitted to a molar with some issues. My dentist noted this at my last regular cleaning a few weeks ago, and recommended I get the crown fitted soon to avoid more major work on the tooth in the future.

After injecting some anaesthetic, the dentist took a cool 3D scan of my teeth with a new gadget that I haven’t seen before. Being an imaging professional, with experience in 3D reconstruction, this was actually fascinating. The scanner had a probe head that the dentist moved around the teeth from all angles, and I could see it building up the 3D model in real time on the display screen. It also had colour capture, so the model was realistically coloured, with my gums and teeth showing very realistically.

Then once my mouth was numb, he started grinding down the molar, shaping to fit into the concavity in the bottom of the new crown. Then he did another scan, to get the shape of the tooth stump for moulding the inside of the crown. Then he fitted a temporary plastic cap to protect the stump for the next two weeks, until my next appointment, when the newly produced custom crown will be fitted. The whole process took a bit under an hour.

I went to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and we walked home. I wanted to wait until the anaesthetic wore off before I ate lunch, to avoid accidentally biting the inside of my cheek while chewing. But it was still keeping my mouth numb by 1pm!

Eventually I walked with Scully up to the fish & chip shop. I ordered a chicken burger. Usually I’d get chips, but today I felt like potato scallops, so I got some of those instead.

As the anaesthetic wore off, my tooth started to ache a bit. Not too bad, but definitely noticeable. Hopefully that will wear off over the next day or so.

This afternoon I worked on a science class on basic astronomy, for my online science student’s next class tomorrow. It’s all about the solar system, Earth’s orbit, the moon, seasons, that sort of thing.

New restaurant for dinner

Not much to report today. I did four critical thinking classes in the morning, had some lunch, and prepared the new topic for the next week, on Bikeshedding, or really a simplified version involving “thinking about the wrong thing”.

Then late in the afternoon I took a train into the city for this evening’s Image Processing tutorial at the university. The students are into their project preparation work, and will be submitting the first of two reports this Friday, followed by three more weeks of working on the projects.

Before the class, I went to a new place for dinner, called A Bowl of Noodles. It’s Shanghainese food, with an extensive menu and very good online reviews. I tried the fried pork chop with rice cakes, which was pretty good, but I’m keen to go back and try some other things.

When I sat down at one of the outside tables (since it was a nice evening), there was a woman there already, with a bowl of noodles and a bottle of Asahi beer. She looked like a student. As I waited for my meal to arrive, a waitress brought her a plate of six steamed buns. And then a few minutes later another plate of eight fried dumplings. The waitress looked a bit confused, like there’d been some mix-up with the order, and was about to take the plate away again, but the woman said, “Yes, I ordered all of this. I’m hungry.” And she gave the waitress her empty beer bottle and ordered two more beers! She wasn’t overweight, either, so I guess she must just have a fast metabolism or something.

Not much happening Sunday

I worked on some comics, did a 5k run, ate lunch, planned out my calendar of classes for the next month around interruptions for an upcoming ISO Standards meeting and the repainting of my home, did a bit of random cleaning an reorganising, and thought about things I could eBay to get rid of them. And had a bunch of online classes to teach in the evening.

Not much else to say about today. I planned to run 7.5k, but it was hot and I gave up at 5k. The next few days should be a bit cooler.

Short games night, a new shelf, cleaning up

Friday evening was online board games night. However I went out with my wife for dinner first, to the local Greek restaurant. I tried their duck dish for the first time, in a traditional orange sauce, with vegetables, and it was pretty good.

Yesterday was very warm, and today was hotter, 28°C and 29°C. A blast of summer in early spring, well above the average temperatures for this time of year. In another sign of the advancing seasons, the channel-billed cuckoos have returned from their winter migration north. One has apparently laid an egg in a currawong nest just outside our bedroom window, and it’s hatched. This morning at daybreak I heard the raucous calls of the cuckoo chick and the more melodic calls of the currawongs feeding it. It’s probably going to be a loud morning every day for the next few weeks.

I didn’t plan on doing a run today, as my wife goes to the gym early and I wanted to stay with Scully, and it would be too hot to run by the time she got home. So instead i took Scully on an early walk before the day got hot, to the hardware store in search of that elusive offcut piece of wood for our planned laundry shelf. They had a bunch of offcuts, that were tantalisingly close to the size we wanted, but just a bit too small. So I left them.

I’m baking sourdough today, as we’ve run out of bread, which meant I had none for lunch. So we walked out to a nearby cafe for lunch. They had a special chipotle chicken burrito which I’ve had one before and liked, so I had that.

After we got home we looked at the laundry and discussed options for things. My wife suggested making the shelf a bit narrower than I was planning, and inly using it to store stuff like laundry powder and cleaning items, and putting a new laundry basket on top of the washing machine instead of up on the shelf, so it would be easier to access. This sounded goo, do I re-evaluated the size of the shelf… and realised that one of the pieces of offcut board I’d seen this morning would be big enough! I quickly dashed to the car and drove over to the hardware store, hoping the offcuts hadn’t been cleared out.

I found a piece the perfect size. Melamine coated particle board, about 600 mm long and 350 mm wide. I don’t even need to cut it to the right size – it’s basically perfect! I also grabbed two right angle brackets, and a new laundry basket, a foldable cloth one with bamboo frame that is wide and shallow, to replace our old wicker basket which is tall and narrow. I’ll attach the brackets to the wooden board with screws, and then after we get the place repainted next month I’ll drill holes in the laundry wall to mount the new shelf.

Th major spring clean proceeds. We cleared out some of the book cases today, which had shelves of old photo albums, from the pre-digital days. I’m going to scan the photos and then we’ll put them into storage boxes and store them away, freeing up a lot of shelf space. There’s a lot more cleaning and reorganising to do, and it’ll get more hectic as we approach the repainting.