David Morgan-Mar – Page 24

Backwards weather day

Well. I mentioned that yesterday was hot, and the forecast for today was much colder and rainy. They were not kidding.

Today’s maximum temperature in Sydney was 17.8°C. At midnight. It got colder to the dawn, and continued getting colder throughout the morning. Today’s minimum temperature (so far) was recorded at 1pm, at 11.7°C. Since then it’s got a fraction warmer, but is still only hovering either side of 12°C.

And the rain has been steady all day at a moderate rate. We’ve had 32 mm since midnight, and it’s heavier right now, so possibly we’ll reach the forecast amount of 40 mm by midnight.

After teaching two online classes in the morning I finished off writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, ready for our next planned one. I took Scully out in the rain for her toilet, and then instead of walking all the way to my wife’s work in the rain I drove over there to drop Scully off, before driving back home and walking to the station here to go into town for today’s lecture at the university.

Today the students began doing project work for their assessment task. The professor didn’t have any coursework lecture, but he gave an informational lecture about JPEG standards development, which he works on as part of the JPEG committee. Then we had a couple of hours of advising the student teams on their project work. I spent most of walking around and talking with the students, answering questions and giving advice on their project plans. It’s a bit more intensive than the usual lecture/tutorial sessions.

Back home I had two more ethics classes this evening, and in the hour in between I made pasta alla norma, with an eggplant and tomato sauce.

The rain should ease tomorrow, but will probably continue through the night.

New content today:

Finished the Hunger Games movies

Last night I finished watching the last half of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, completing the four movies in the series. It was okay, but I think the series peaked in the middle two movies. The ending of the last one was too predictable, even though it set itself up as a bit of a twist. Overall I enjoyed the worldbuilding, but there were some illogical things that stood out as unrealistic. Anyway, overall I enjoyed the series and think it was worth watching.

Today I completed a new Darths & Droids strip for tomorrow. I took Scully for a long walk. The weather was warm, but overcast and not as hot as the predicted 30°C. Rain has moved i this evening, but it’s not heavy yet, and it’s still quite warm outside, 20°C at almost 9pm right now. Tomorrow is supposed to be a maximum of just 18°C, and 40 mm of rain, so things will probably get wild and windy during the night.

This afternoon I finished writing up the session log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session. I shared it with my friends for checking of any errors or omissions. We’re planning the next session in mid-October.

I made broccoli frittata for dinner, before my three classes in a row – something easy for my wife to heat up and eat while I was busy.

New content today:

A short bushwalk at Allambie Heights

This morning I wrote up my next week’s ethics class, on the topic of Detecting Lies. I’m going to play a little game where I tell the students two “facts” about me, one of them true and the other a lie. And they have to ask me questions and try to figure out which is true and which is false. I’ve chosen a list of unlikely but plausible things. Hopefully it should be fun!

The idea is to get the kids thinking and talking about how easy or difficult it is to tell whether someone’s lying. What signs are there? How could you probe to find out if someone’s lying? What if someone invented an app that could tell if people were lying by analysing their voice, and it was accurate – what effect would that have on society?

After writing that up, I took Scully for a drive to refill the car’s fuel and to pick up some pies for lunch at one of my favourite pie shops, at Allambie Heights. I had a vegetable curry pie and a pumpkin and feta one. Last time I looked on Google Maps at the park where I normally eat my lunch there, I noticed there are some bushwalking tracks right behind it. So today I explored a short loop track with Scully. It leads into the Manly Dam Reserve, also known as the Manly Warringah War Memorial Park. The area I was in was at the top of some hills, so we had a good view over the park.

You can see the Manly Dam reservoir in that photo. I don’t think it’s used for drinking water any more – the park and reservoir are used for recreation. Here’s Scully posed on the lookout rock.

The track we walked along was mostly surrounded by heathland. Scully was not impressed.

Back home in the afternoon I sorted some more Magic cards to prepare for selling them. I also made a sourdough loaf to give to our neighbours while returning the now-empty and cleaned jar of home-made marmalade that they gave to us a few weeks ago. I took them over while the bread was still warm from the oven, and they said they’d try some tonight.

New content today:

Kickstarter refund done!

That Kickstarter campaign from 2017 that I mentioned yesterday, that never delivered my backer rewards, but which reached out to offer a refund after 7 years….

I sent an email to them, with a screenshot of my pledge, with add-on items. It came to US$287. Quite an amount to be out of pocket for so long.

And they came through! They refunded not only the full amount, but they even rounded it up to an even US$300. I wasn’t expecting that.

In other news I did my 6 ethics classes online today. And my back seems to be better, so when my wife got home from work I went for a 5k run in the evening before it got dark. I took it easy and did a fairly slow time, also because it was significantly warmer than it usually is when I go running.

The only other thing to report is that I’m currently watching the Hunger Games movies on Netflix. I noticed them on there and decided to watch the first one on a whim. I had a rough idea what the story was about, and the plot arc of the first movie was pretty predictable, although I did enjoy the first half where it was leading up to the actual Hunger Games contest. I found the worldbuilding and the quirks of the characters interesting. The second half was more predictable and routine. Overall I rated it decent, but not great.

But then I watched the sequel, Catching Fire. Much better movie. There were some real unexpected things in there, and I got more drawn into the story. I’ve now also watched Mockingjay Part 1, which was good too, and am about to start Mockingjay Part 2.

New content today:

Random blinds cleaning

Today I suddenly decided that I wanted to clean the vertical blinds that we have on the windows in the living room. Unfortunately with the humid weather we’ve been having the past few years they’ve developed mould spots on them, which I attempt to clean occasionally with mould remover, but they keep coming back. So I decided to take the blinds down completely and wash them in bleach solution to totally kill the mould and clean the spots off.

This was far easier said than done. The blinds are fiddly once removed from the wall mounts, and the long vertical blades are all connected by strings which can get tangled. I washed them, but then had trouble laying them out to dry. Eventually I decided I had to rehang them as sunset was approaching and I didn’t want our windows to be uncovered at night, and they were still a bit wet between some of the blades.

The result was not great and some of the blades got wrinkled in the washing process. And some of the connecting string bits that keep the blades parallel broke. The blinds are pretty old and I’m thinking it’s time to replace them with brand new ones. So probably some time during the week I’ll call a blinds company and have them come measure up the windows for new ones.

In other news, I got an email today from a Kickstarter campaign that I backed in 2017 that never delivered any rewards. It says to contact them and they’ll arrange a refund! Wow… I’d given up on getting anything from this Kickstarter about 4 or 5 years ago. Now just to see if they really follow through and process the full refund.

Apart from these things it was a pretty usual Sunday. Some comics work, walking Scully with my wife, cooking dinner (Indian spiced chick peas and potato), and three ethics classes.

New content today:

No running Saturday

Normally on Saturday morning I’d do a 5k run. But this morning my wife was doing her work thing again for the exhibition from the art class students, like last night. so I was looking after Scully. Also, last night at the board games event I twisted funny and slightly pulled a muscle in my lower back. I’d put some ice on it, but it’s still a bit sore today, so I thought I’d take a rest from running to make sure I don’t aggravate it in any way.

After lunch I walked down to the art exhibit with Scully to meet my wife, who helped to pack it up from midday. Then we walked back home together, so we could all get some exercise.

In the afternoon I made some Darths & Droids strips, and then we drove over to my wife’s mother’s place to deliver some things and hang out for a bit. While there I took Scully out to the edge of the cliff overlooking the harbour.

We left a bit after 5pm and decided to stop at a suburb on the way home to see if we could find a nice place to eat dinner. There were a few restaurants, but none of the menus appealed until we found a take-away pizza place which had a couple of simple tables out the front on the footpath. So we ordered some pizzas and just sat there to eat them, right out of the cardboard boxes. Sometimes it’s fun to just do something simple like this, rather than a fancy restaurant meal.

New content today:

Sushi and pizza day

First thing this morning was picking up the groceries from the supermarket. We had to get a new bottle of olive oil, and that one item added about 30% extra to our normal weekly grocery bill. It’s expensive stuff!

After some classes, I took Scully up the street to get some sushi, both for my own lunch and also some for my wife to eat after work before she headed back to work for a special exhibition in the evening. Her work runs art classes and they were having an exhibition of pieces done by the students, with sales to raise money and stuff. They’re also doing it on Saturday morning, so she has to go in and do some stuff there for that too.

While she was doing that, I went to a friend’s place for board games night. I didn’t have too long, because I needed to leave by 9pm to pick up my wife from her work. But we got in a game of Flamecraft, which is all about dragons doing cutesy things to collect resources and spend them in various ways to create enchantments and score points.

We paused the game for pizza when it arrived. The place we got it from had a couple of very interesting pizza toppings: pulled pork and coleslaw, and one with Szechuan prawns. They were both delicious.

New content today:

Deep learning and fire weather

Today was the final content lecture of the image processing course at the university, with the lecturer going over deep learning as a technique for pattern recognition in images and videos. For the next few weeks the students will be concentrating on their assessment projects, which is where the fun really begins. So far the students who have talked to me are planning some of the usual suspects for project ideas: tumour detection in medical images, car and other object detection for automated driving, handwriting recognition, and so on. I’m hoping some team will come up with something cool and new.

Today was also the first total fire ban of the… summer that we’re not in yet. The temperature only reached 27.4°C, but it was very windy and the humidity was super low, getting below 10% in parts of Sydney. I’ve been noticing extremely low humidity the past few days, as it’s drying my skin out and I’m using tons of moisturiser.

There’s no rain forecast for the next week and temperatures should get up to 29°C again. Some of the grass in the parks is starting to turn noticeably brown from lack of rain. We had 2 mm of rain last Friday, but apart from that it basically hasn’t rained for almost a full month now. Which is very unusual for Sydney.

More interesting responses tonight from kids about that car driving question about letting people cut in ahead of the queue in the turning lane:

2 American + 1 Canadian kid: Let the car in.
1 New Zealander: Don’t let them in.
2 Hong Kong: Very strongly don’t let them in. When I explained why it could be dangerous not to let them in, the Hong Kong kids both changed to: Let them in, but everyone should honk at them.
2 Thai kids: You should let the car in. But for different reasons: (1) because it’s dangerous to leave them in the other lane; (2) to be nice and “show them mercy”.
1 Hong Kong: “Definitely not!” They should block the car out until they give up and keep going straight. Because they’re doing the wrong thing and deserve to be punished.
1 Portugal: No, block them out, because otherwise everyone will think they can do the same thing.

New content today:

Comics batch done!

This morning we had to do an emergency bed linen change and wash, after Scully threw up on the bed. Thankfully this is a very rare occurrence, but it’s nasty when it happens.

I spent much of the day finishing off that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote and photographed a couple of weeks ago. I do batches of 30 strips at once for efficiency purposes, enough to last six weeks. And now they’re all done and uploaded, so I won’t have to do any more until mid-October. Phew!

I actually completed what I think will be the last strips in a couple of the themes, as I work towards winding down the entire comic. It’ll be interesting to see how many readers realise which strips are the last ones for any given theme.

In ethics classes tonight I asked that question I posed yesterday: If there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out?

Two kids from Taiwan were both very insistent that you not let the car in.
One girl from Australia said you should let them in, but wind down your window and….
I thought she was going to say “Yell at them.” But she actually said, very politely and meekly, “… tell them not to do it again.”
And one kid from Singapore said you should let them in, even though they’ve done the wrong thing, because it’s dangerous to block the second lane.

A friend of mine predicted that the answers would vary by country, and so far he seems to be right.

New content today:

Tax return time

Today I prepared my class plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics class, on the topic of Driving. I came up with a lot of questions, and in the first class tonight got through only about half of them. Which is a good thing – better than running out of material!

One interesting question I’m asking in this one is if there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out? And why? I expect there to be some varied answers to this one!

Scully got a big walk at lunch time – we spent about an hour and a half out before returning home. The weather has improved since the weekend and it was a really nice mild day.

This evening after dinner (lentils, potatoes, and broccoli with some curry spices) my wife and I sat down to do our tax returns. I’m sure I mentioned this last year, but the Australian Tax Office has really streamlined tax returns and it takes only a few minutes online to confirm all the financial stuff they already know, and to add in some deductions and my foreign income from Outschool (that the ATO doesn’t automatically know about). We were done with both of our returns in under half an hour. Job done for another year!

New content today: