David Morgan-Mar – Page 25

Like Garfield, Mondays can be the worst days sometimes

Monday is my busiest day with online ethics classes. I have four between 8am and 1pm, with an hour break in between the two sets of two. And two of my most challenging classes are in this batch, with kids who are reluctant to speak, have difficulty speaking, I have difficulty understanding, have technical issues with their audio, and/or have lots of distracting background noise making hearing the difficult. It takes a real effort to concentrate on what they’re saying, or give them enough time to think, or encourage them to speak, or work around the audio issues.

By 1pm I was worn out. It was time to take Scully for a walk and get some lunch. We went up to the fish & chip shop and I grabbed some fish & chips there, then we walked down to the park by the ferry wharf to sit and eat by the water. This is a nice secluded park which is never busy, so it’s good for Scully to run around in. After eating I threw a ball for her to chase and fetch a bit, before we started walking home.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch. I got through a few, but still have many more to go.

My wife took Scully on another walk before dinner, and I met them up at a supermarket to buy some pizza cheese and pumpkin for dinner.

Tonight I have two more ethics classes. These are easier ones, but the last is from 9-10pm, so it’s quite late. Phew! It’s a long day.

New content today:

Last gasp of winter?

Today dawned cold and windy. I forced myself to go for a 5k run, but it wasn’t pleasant, being around 14°C and very windy. On my normal route I ran past a house that had had a tree fall over, probably during the night, and I had to run around it as the top was extending out of their property into the footpath area.

After showering and cleaning the bathroom, I spent time assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took last week. I got a couple of weeks’ worth done, but still have three more ready to make.

The day remained cold and windy, but no rain. Things will warm up over the next few days, and be back to 27°C again by Wednesday.

Preliminary results from yesterday’s local council elections seem to indicate that our incumbent Mayor will be re-elected, which I think is a good thing.

Oh, and Duolingo’s Japanese course is throwing more kanji at me. I haven’t even managed to learn the hiragana yet! I’ve downloaded Anki flashcard software to do a crash course in learning those so I can master them, but I need to find some time to get started on it.

New content today:

Local council election day

Today was election day in the New South Wales local council elections. We have three levels of government in Australia:

Federal: Covering all of Australia. At this level we elect the Parliament of Australia and (indirectly) the Prime Minister.
State: Each state elects a state government, generally a Parliament similar to the Federal one, led by a Premier. The contiguous territories also elect their own territorial governments. I live in New South Wales, so vote in the NSW state elections.
Council: The states are divided into Local Government Areas (LGAs), usually called “councils”. For example, the state of New South Wales currently has 128 Local Government Areas, 33 of which are within metropolitan Sydney. The smallest covers less than 6 square kilometres, and the largest over 53,000 square kilometres. Voters elect a small group of councillors, who elect the Mayor of the LGA from among them.

I’m in the North Sydney Council area, so today I was voting for councillors for this LGA. My wife went to a yoga class first thing in the morning, and after that we met up at a local high school which was set up as a polling place. It wasn’t very busy, the queue in front of us was literally only two people, so we were in and out after voting in just a couple of minutes. While I was waiting there for my wife to arrive, two men approached and one went in to vote, while the other waited outside. A polling place worker came over and asked the waiting man if he was here to vote, and he said no, he didn’t live here, he was visiting from the USA. This sparked a conversation between the poll worker and the man about the differences between our electoral systems.

After voting, we walked home a long way, via the shops at Waverton to pick up a loaf of bread and so my wife could see the new Bay Brew cafe that has opened up in the premises of the old Waterview Cafe.

At home I worked on a couple of new Darths & Droids strips. I also played a game of Root with my wife. We haven’t played this game for several weeks, so it was good to pull it out again. This time I played the Eyrie (birds) while my wife played the Alliance again, and we used the bot players for the Marquise (cats) and Vagabond. It’s the first time we’ve used the Vagabot, and it was surprisingly effective, racing to the lead mid-game. But my wife managed to haul it in and overtake to win, with everyone else just a few points behind.

For dinner tonight we drove over to Four Frogs crêperie and had galettes. They had a special with Swiss cheese, gorgonzola, bacon, walnuts, and fresh figs, which I tried. It was pretty good! Rather than have a dessert crêpe, I had a second savoury one, with chorizo and mushrooms, which was also nice.

I didn’t do a 5k run today, since I did one yesterday evening, before the board games night started.

New content today:

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: