David Morgan-Mar – dangermouse.net

A big storm

As I’m writing this tonight a severe thunderstorm is lashing the city outside. Two of my friends have lost power at their homes (and are chatting online from their phones). I had three ethics classes in a row this evening and told the kids in the last class that if my power went out and I disconnected from Zoom, then the class will be over for today, and least they’ll know what happened.

Until the storm hit, it was a hot and humid day. But the wind has picked up and the temperatures has dropped dramatically in the last hour, as the rain pounds down and the lightning flashes. I just checked the power outage website and there are over 100 separate outages across Sydney, with over 61,000 buildings affected at the moment. Wind gusts up to 100 km/h have been recorded too. And… wow… we had 30 mm of rain in just half an hour. And it’s still coming down.

The good news is tomorrow and the next few days will be cooler than the past few days, down to around 25°C, although rainy.

Today I had some totally free time in the morning since my wife took Scully to work. I thought about going out somewhere, but in the end I started tidying up my email inbox… and three hours later I realised I still hadn’t gone out. Then I spent some time in the afternoon pricing up some more Magic: the Gathering cards in preparation for selling them. And then did some thinking about planning story stuff for Episode IX in Darths & Droids.

New content today:

Ethics of peer pressure

Today I cycled my ethics class topic for the week, writing a new lesson plan for the topic of Peer Pressure. This is a recycled topic from a few years ago, but I rewrote the examples and added some new questions to keep it fresh. I included some new questions about online pressure, in contrast to pressure from friends.

I assembled a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch I did a couple of weeks ago. Puttered around at random.

Watched a couple of Italian YouTube videos to get some language listening practice. A 4 minute video can take me 20 minutes to watch as I pause it to look up Italian words I don’t know yet. It’s good for my vocabulary. Today I learnt words like filastrocca, meaning “fairy tale”. I knew fila meant “queue” or “row” or “line”, but I looked up strocca and discovered that it’s an adjective meaning “awful” or “sucky” or “crappy”. So a fairy tale is a “crappy row”? I checked an Italian dictionary etymology and it was unclear on the origins of the word, but suggested that it might instead have originated from strocco, which is a noun meaning a type of silk. Which is also a bit bizarre.

I also learnt the word abbozzo, which means a rough draft or sketch. As I was confirming the meaning online, I discovered to my surprise that abbozzo also has a Wiktionary entry for English, with the same meaning, stating the word is borrowed from Italian. The Cambridge Dictionary and Merrian-Webster also agree that abbozzo is used in English. I can only assume that it’s mostly a fine arts jargon word, like sfumato or chiaroscuro.

I also learnt: agrumo (citrus fruit), pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry), and the verb macinare (to grind, as in pepper). Oddly enough, it wasn’t a cooking video; it was a video about Befana, the Italian holiday that occurs on 6 January to mark the end of the Christmas season. There are a bunch of traditional Befana treats that are served on the day.

For dinner tonight I wanted to use up a bunch of sourdough starter discard which I’ve accumulated in the past few days while trying to freshen up my sourdough starter. I mixed it with some extra flour and baking powder and formed it into simple flatbread which I pan fried and served with some lentil dhal, as a sort of substitute naan. It worked pretty well!

The weather was hot today, forecast to be hotter tomorrow, with a late storm to cool things down before a few cool and rainy days filling the rest of the week.

Finally, there’s a hotel in Berlin that really doesn’t want my business. I’ve emailed twice about a conference rate (for the ISO Photography Standards meeting there in June, which I’m planning on attending) that I’ve been told they have, and they haven’t answered. The info from the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) is that you have to book by email to get the conference rate; you can’t just book on the web site. I may have to look at other hotels.

New content today:

A domain registration mystery

This morning I received a strange email message, from someone in Belgium named Piet, saying they were an artist, that they’d noticed I own the domain piet.be, and they wanted to buy it off me to use for their own professional web site. I had never registered such a domain and had no idea why this person thought it might belong to me.

I checked, and sure enough piet.be is currently set up as a redirect to my Piet esoteric programming language page. So that explained one mystery: Why this person thought the domain belonged to me. But raised two other mysteries: Who did own the domain, and why had they set it up to redirect to one of my web pages?

I did some online sleuthing and found that DNS Belgium had a record showing that the domain was registered way back in 2002, and belonged to a company named D Haeze Trading nv, with an address listed in Gavere in Belgium. I looked up D Haeze Trading and discovered that their primary business is listed as “Wholesale of dairy products and eggs”. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now I knew who had registered the domain, but why had a dairy and egg producer registered piet.be and why had they set it up to redirect to my esoteric programming page?

Digging further, I found this company record, which lists the company managers as Piet and Jan D’Haeze. Aha! So possibly the manager of the company decided it would be cool to have the Belgian domain corresponding to his personal name.

But that leaves the main question unanswered: why had he set the domain up to redirect to my website? I mean, obviously my site is relevant to the Piet name, but why would someone named Piet go to the bother of buying the domain name only to redirect it to someone else’s website, owned by a person they don’t know and have never contacted?

Anyway, I replied to the person who wanted to buy the domain off me, and told them this information and that they need to contact D Haeze Trading nv if they want to buy the domain. Later (this evening) they got back to me and thanked me for the information. So, good deed done for the day.

I had 6 ethics classes today, mostly during the day, and two late in the evening. That didn’t give me a lot of time to do much else, besides taking Scully on a couple of walks. I made mushroom pizza for dinner. It’s kind of become our Monday habit to have a home made pizza, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to make the dough.

New content today:

Planning for cherry blossoms

I slept in a bit this morning, but then got up, had breakfast, and embarked on a 5k run. The weather was far too warm and humid, and it was a real struggle today, with a slow time. But at least I have the virtue of doing some exercise regardless.

Last night while I was watching a movie on Netflix (The Dead Don’t Die), I discovered when I tried to turn the TV off that the batteries in the remote had died, apparently mid-movie. I couldn’t turn the TV off! And AFAIK there are no physical controls on the TV. I could have just pulled the plug out, but I was reluctant since it’s plugged into a power board with a bunch of other stuff and it would have been non-trivial to work out which was the correct cord. So I scavenged batteries from another device, and managed to turn the TV off.

Today I went out to the supermarket specifically to buy new batteries. When I got home I opened the remote to install brand new ones, and discovered that one of the emergency batteries Id installed last night had leaked! Urk! So I removed those batteries and stuck them in my battery recycling pile, and cleaned out the leaked chemicals carefully with cotton tips and isopropyl alcohol. before installing the new batteries.

I also spent time sewing up Scully favourite plush toy. Again. She’s ripped holes and extracted stuffing from it about 20 or 30 times, and I keep repairing it because it’s her oldest and most favourite dog toy.

In travel planning, my wife’s sister sent us this article about cherry blossoms in Japan, saying that we’ll be there around the right time to view the early February-blooming flowers in Kawazu, a day trip from Tokyo. I’m keen to go there and see them, because in all the times I’ve visited Japan I’ve never seen more than the odd single tree with blossoms on it—one time in Yokohama in February I was surprised to spot one blooming that early. But it appears the Kawazu variety always blooms so early. So now I want to try to plan our time to fit in a journey there to see them.

New content today:

Losing games and double pizza

Friday morning I did the grocery shopping. The old fashioned way, since I forgot to order online for pickup, so it took about half an hour longer than just going to the supermarket for the pickup. The day was rainy, and I had four ethics classes to teach.

Then it was heading out to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. We went to the place of the guy who recently moved into his newly built house (on the same property as his old house). He has a nice dining table and laid a felt mat on top for gaming on. We started with a game of Notre Dame, which I’ve played before but not for many years.

It’s a worker placement game, and your workers activate various powers, but you are restricted by first having to draft cards related to the placement areas, so you only have a limited choice of zones to place your workers each turn, rather than free choice. I scored a lot of points early on, but got stifled for resources in the late game and everyone else overtook me, so I ended up coming last of five players. A sixth friend arrived about halfway through the game, and we stopped to eat delivered pizzas for dinner. When we resumed we started a six-player game of Ticket to Ride: Asia, which plays as a team game with three teams of two.

In this variant of the classic game, each team has shared racks of tickets and train cards, and also a secret hand which you’re not allowed to share with your teammate. You have separate turns, but are working together to build your routes. It gave an interestingly different dynamic and was a lot of fun. My team leapt to an early lead… but you can guess what happened. We got overtaken and ended up coming last! Oh well, at least we all had fun.

Today was another partly rainy day, with unsettled weather set in here for the next few days. The sky is rapidly changing between sunny and grey clouds that threaten rain.

After a 5k run in the very humid conditions (82% humidity and 24°C) I cleaned the bathroom and then tried to write a Darths & Droids comic strip. I got stuck with writer’s block for a few hours – it was torturously slow going. I managed to finish it off in the afternoon.

For dinner we walked with Scully over the Naremburn, 2 km away, to have a simple meal at the pizzeria there. So I ended up having pizza two nights in a row. Not that I’m complaining.

Tonight we watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie on Netflix: Vengeance Most Fowl. I’ve always liked all the Wallace and Gromit films, and this one was brilliant as always.

New content today:

Finishing this Book

Today was a day busy with ethics classes: two in the morning, and three in the evening. In between I took Scully for a couple of walks and I worked a bit on some comics stuff.

At the moment I’ve started on a couple of books. One is an old one I’ve had for many years, which I’m rereading after a very long time: Comet, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I was inspired to reread this by recently realising that Halley’s Comet—whose 1986 appearance was the inspiration for the release of this book in 1985—passed aphelion last year and is now on its way back towards the inner solar system for its reappearance in 2061.

The other book I’m working on (not merely reading) is Finish This Book, by Keri Smith. I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time, after spotting it in the creativity section of a bookshop some years ago. It’s an interactive book, which encourages you to write and draw in its pages as you progress. I decided to finally start it, and am a few pages in. But…. it’s not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a simple thing where you turn the page and it says “Draw a monkey in this blank space”. And other such exercises to simply get you doing something creative. But no… it seems to be some sort of interactive story/puzzle thing that you work through. There’s a lot of extraneous fictional fluff about how the author “found” some weird manuscript in a park somewhere, and now they want you to help them finish it according to some “rules” that will be revealed later on. And it says you need scissors and glue and stuff. Which I suppose might be interesting, but it’s not what I signed up for. Anyway, I’m going to persevere and see what happens. I’m not flipping ahead to see anything before I work my way through page by page.

In other news, I might finally finish off the last of the leftover Christmas pudding tonight…

New content today:

That La Niña arrived quickly

I just said yesterday that the Bureau of Meteorology reported the formation of La Niña conditions, heralding the possibility of a cooler/wetter next two months of summer, and today it magically seemed to have come true. Today was really chilly, and very wet. The temperature was a minimum of 19.3°C overnight, and rose to only 20.3°C during the late morning, before plummeting down into the 17s for most of the afternoon and evening. We’ve had nearly 30 mm of rain as well, in windy squalls blowing intermittently across the city, which make it seem even colder. It was actually the coldest day in Sydney since mid-October.

I didn’t go out much, but I did get in a 5k run early in the morning. I started in a brief period of no rain, but it began raining on me halfway through the run

My wife took Scully to work and I had to go pick her up at lunchtime, but I drove rather than walking in the heavy rain at the time.

This evening I was really back into my online ethics classes, with three classes in a row. I had a new girl in the first one, who was very sociable and talkative, and engaged with the class questions really well, giving some very well thought-out answers. And after the class she wrote me a note through the Outschool platform to say how much she loved the class and how it made her think about the topic in new ways. That was really nice to receive. So I think I have a new enthusiastic student, which is great!

New content today:

Missed Monday, back to work Tuesday

I just completely forgot to do my blog post yesterday until it was too late. I had a day full of working on comics stuff, and avoiding going outside as much as possible because it was very hot.

However I did have to go out in the morning to drop the car off for an annual service, and then walk home in the heat – it’s about 25 minutes walk away. And then in the afternoon I had to walk back to the service centre to pick the car up again. There was an additional expense as the car needed a new battery installed, but otherwise it’s in good condition.

The heat broke with a cool change overnight, bringing some rain. Today was gloomily overcast all day, much cooler, and threatening rain, although there was barely a sprinkle. The Bureau of Meteorology today issued a report that La Niña conditions had returned, which may indicate increased rainfall for the remainder of the summer. I’d been enjoying the relatively dry conditions for the past few weeks, after the rain-soaked and very humid summers of the past four years.

Today I did some more comics stuff, making the first strip of Episode IX for Darths & Droids. I ran out of things to make lunch with at home, so had to go out and decided to get some pies. But when I got there the pie shop was closed! Probably still on a Christmas break. I ended up getting some Vietnamese rice paper rolls instead. Then I caught the Metro to my wife’s work to pick up Scully and walk home from there with her.

Tonight I restarted my online ethics classes, after two weeks break for Christmas and New Year. The new topic this week is Journalism. With questions such as:

Is it generally more important for news to be reported quickly, or accurately?
What purpose does journalism serve in our society? Why does it exist?
How can we tell if the news we see is really true?
Has the Internet made journalism better or worse?

It should be an interesting week!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Booking Tokyo

Today was very warm, 31°C in the city, 39°C in some suburbs. I did a 5k run in the morning, reluctantly, as it was already almost 25°C at 9am.

Back home, I had two main tasks for the day. First I photographed a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, based on the scripts I’ve been writing the past few days. This is really getting near the end. I wound up a few of the story themes and there’s not much left to do with the remaining ones. I expect I might be able to finish completely with one more batch of comics, probably made late January or early February.

The second task was to book several of the things we’d planned out for Tokyo at my sister-in-law’s place yesterday. We booked a tea ceremony, in Ginza. And a day trip tour to Hakone to see Mount Fuji. These things will be done by the others while I am working in ISO Photography standards meetings. I also want to book tickets to the Shibuya Sky observation deck, but they only open for booking four weeks in advance, so that has to wait until the end of January.

While booking those, I also booked a car rental for Auckland for our short trip to New Zealand in March. This is only a 3-day trip over the weekend to visit my wife’s nephew and his partner there for their combined 30th birthdays. My wife’s sister and mother are going too, but they are arriving several days earlier and spending a week there. We’re going to collect the car from the airport on Friday and go pick them up at their hotel to drive up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend, before coming back to Auckland for departure on Monday.

I assembled some of the IWC comics. And then spent a bit of time in the afternoon pondering story details for Episode IX in Darths & Droids, discussing with co-authors, and making notes. It’s quite a shift in mode from normal strip writing in the middle of a movie. I have to switch mental gears and get refamiliarised with the new movie. I’ve spent the past two years viewing scenes from Episode VIII over and over again, and now I have to discard all of that and start on the new movie. I’ve rewatched it twice in the past few weeks, including one time through in slow motion, rewinding and pausing every minute or so to catch details and make notes.

For dinner I made pizza, topped simply with potato and rosemary. I used a couple of tips I saw on a cooking show last week. Because I’m using a domestic oven rather than a pizza oven, the temperature is lower and the pizza cooks more slowly (though still pretty quickly as I use the maximum temperature). So one tip is to add more water to the dough, since it has longer to dry out in the oven. I increased the water from a strict 1:2 ratio with the flour, adding an extra 5 mL to make 130 mL of water to 250 g of flour. And I hand-stretched the dough by first using my fingers to delineate a fatter crust around the rim before flattening and stretching the central area. Overall both changes worked well!

New content today:

A nice Italian dinner, planning for Japan

Friday was online games night with my friends, so no blog post. Earlier in the evening, I went with my wife to a new Italian restaurant I’d discovered recently, named Enoteca 128. It’s a short drive from our home and has outdoor tables so we can take Scully. It’s in a relatively quiet alley off the main road, so it was a bit quieter than some of the usual places we go, and Scully could relax rather than bark at everyone walking their dogs past.

The food was delicious. We began with some zucchini flowers stuffed with sweet potato and taleggio cheese, served with a spicy dressing of softened red capsicum and almonds. We both had tagliatelle pasta, with a simple tomato and basil sauce for my wife, while I had the lamb ragu. Then for dessert I had a honey pannacotta with fresh berries and honeycomb. It was all very god and we’ll definitely keep this place in mind for future visits.

Earlier in the day we did a big walk and I worked on some comics stuff. And then after getting home from dinner I played games with friends: Ticket to Ride, Jump Drive, Just One, Azul, Can’t Stop. I won the last game, so finished on a high note, despite not doing so well in the others.

Today, Saturday, I did a 5k run first thing in the morning. The cool weather is heating up again and it was already 25°C when I did my run at 9 am. So I went a bit slowly.

After lunch we went over to my wife’s sister’s place to meet her and their mother and do some itinerary planning for our upcoming trip to Tokyo at the end of February. They want to plan and book some activities, such as a tea ceremony, and a day trip to Mount Fuji. We went through a bunch of options and found some online activities to book. So that’s more organised now. We also discussed our other trip, to Auckland in New Zealand, which is just a few weeks later. For that one we need to book a hire car, as we’ll be doing some driving, up to the Bay of Islands.

New content yesterday:

New content today: