David Morgan-Mar – Page 4 – dangermouse.net

Dental day

Today I wrote my class plan for the next week of critical thinking. The topic is “Stranded on a Desert Island”. I’ll be asking the kids questions about survival and rescue, both alone, and also as part of a group of strangers. One question will be asking them if a waterproof bag washes up with them with one book and piece of gear in it (other than a radio or anything else that would mean easy rescue), what book and gear would they choose.

While thinking about this, I casually browsed some survival books on the Internet, and I ran across this interesting looking one: The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding a Civilization.

When I’d finished, I had to dash up to the dentist, for my regular dental hygiene and check-up appointment. And when I got there, guess what book was on the waiting room table:

The very book I’d been looking at online less than an hour before! So of course I had a good flip through it while waiting for my appointment. It does look very interesting, although not nearly as practical a survival guide as some others. It’s a lot more eclectic and fun than a useful guide.

The hygienist gave me a clean bill of health after cleaning my teeth, but the dentist took x-rays and suggested some work to fix an old filling that is starting to deteriorate, before it causes problems. I need to schedule that work in some time in the next few weeks.

After the appointment I went to my wife’s work and picked up Scully to bring her home for the afternoon. I did some comic writing, and then an online class this evening before relaxing for the night.

Another long run on a busy Monday

Monday… 4 critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I had lunch, and then went for a run. I ran 7.5 km today, trying to keep up this new habit of doing longer than 5k at least once a week.

Then I had a shower, and it was almost time to head into town for my university teaching. I went in and tried a new place for dinner called Cheeky Bao, which does bao bun burgers, an interesting fusion of Asian and Western cuisine. I tried the Korean fried chicken burger, but only discovered after it arrived that this wasn’t one of the signature bao bun burgers – it came on a regular style bun. Oh well, it was still good.

The lecture tonight was on machine learning classification for image recognition. Pretty easy for me as the tutorial section was more a demo than questions for the students to work through, so I didn’t have to do as much interaction as usual.

Picking paint colours

Today I went to the hardware store with my wife to look at the range of paint colours and grab some brochures and paint swatches to bring back home. We want to change up the colour scheme of our place a little as we plan towards getting it repainted in October. We grabbed about a dozen different “white” shades and very light “neutral” shades, and then picked a bunch of colours that we like to consider doing accents in places like the architraves, skirting boards, and cornices.

One of my friends suggested a feature wall in a different colour, and I explored today with taking photos of the interior and opening them in Photoshop and selecting walls and changing colour overlays to simulate painting them different colours. This achieved the effect of making my wife say to thank my friend for suggesting it, because now she knows for sure that she doesn’t want a feature wall.

We also received a quote for the painting from the painter who came to look on Friday. It’s roughly what we expected, so we asked to go ahead and book a date. The painter is away on a holiday for the start of October, but the best time for us to do the painting is the week of 13-17 October, because that coincides with my next ISO Photography Standards meeting. It’s in California, but I’m not flying over, and will be attending online. I need to take the week off from teaching Outschool classes so I can do the meeting, which will be 11pm to 7am in my time zone – absolutely the worst possible. So I’ll need daytime to recover, and won’t be up to teaching classes. If we can get the painting done the same week, it would mash the inconvenience together into just one week.

But I suspect we’ll have to get the painting done the week after. Which is worse, but not terrible, as I can use the daytime in between my meeting nights to pack things away in preparation. It will be worse again if the painter can’t do it until another week later. So we have to wait and see when they’re available.

We’ve also invited our new neighbours over for a board games evening in a couple of weeks. We know they like modern board games, so it will be a good chance to actually sit down with them and get to know them better, compared to the very brief conversations we’ve had so far when bumping into each other in the hallways or garage.

Sketching at The Rocks

Friday night was online board games with my friends. We played some games of Jump Drive, Knarr, Can’t Stop, and Just One. Nothing really big or long, as people were popping in and out with things they needed to do. I made pizza for dinner in the middle of a game, another guy took his dog for a walk, and so on.

During the day I did my usual critical thinking classes.

After lunch we had a painter come in to inspect the place and prepare a quote for repainting our apartment. We’ve decided to bite the bullet and get that job done. It will be a big job, requiring packing a lot of things into moving boxes and storing them in the garage so we can move the furniture into the middle of rooms to allow access to the walls for the painters. The guy said it would take a full week to do the job. We’re planning to do this some time in October or November.

Today I did a 5k run in the morning. The day was very cold and very windy. A cold front system is blowing up from the south, bringing a lot of cold air. We were supposed to get snow on the Blue Mountains west of Sydney overnight, but I don’t know if that actually happened or not. It only snows up there about once every three or four years.

Scully had a vet checkup to follow-up her tooth extraction last week. The vet said she’s doing well and can go back on crunchy foods. Then after that we dropped her off at the groomer for a full cut and wash. While Scully was at the groomer, my wife and I took the Metro into the city and used the opportunity to go places where we can’t take Scully. We got off at Barangaroo and walked over to The Rocks.

We browsed around in a art supply shop and bought a few things. I found some fillable brushes with actual bristles, that you can fill with ink or liquid watercolour. I’m going to try them with ink for drawing. Then we stopped at La Renaissance, a French patisserie, and had some pain au chocolat. I did a sketch while sitting at the table outside the patisserie.

We moved to a bench seat by the street across from The Garrison Church, and where we also had a view of the Harbour Bridge. Mt wife sketched the Bridge, while I started work on the church. Unfortunately, about a quarter of the way finished, a bus pulled up and parked right in front of us, entirely blocking our view! The driver turned the engine off and got out, having a break. I had to walk around the bus and stand on the other side, next to the traffic, to finish drawing the church.

After heading back and picking up Scully from the groomer we went out to our local pizza place for dinner. Normally I have pizza, but tonight I tried a fettuccine with lamb ragu and mushrooms, which was really nice.

Making pinhole cameras

After two online classes in the morning, I did a 5k run today. When I got home I had lunch and then had a shower and left to go in to Wenona School for a second visit to help do science things with the students there.

Today I was working with some Year 8 students, helping them make pinhole cameras, both with open pinholes and also ones with lenses in the hole to focus the light and produce a brighter image. The lab assistant brought out a collection of dozens of lenses, many of which were in paper sleeves marked with diameters and focal lengths. I asked if the focal lengths were likely to be correct and she almost laughed as she said no.

So the first order of business was the find a set of lenses of different diameters with roughly the same focal lengths. We found four different diameter lenses, and there were many of the two middle diameters. We measured the focal lengths by holding them up and using the lenses to focus the view out a window into a sharp image on a white board, and measuring the distance from the board to the lens. Some of the focal lengths were too short, but we found a good set with lengths around 20 centimetres.

Then I got the girls to help cutting cardboard boxes (which held reams of copier paper) to lengths matching the different focal lengths. The lab assistant had brought out Stanley knives to do the cutting because I’d requested some when emailing the science coordinator about equipment. But I realised it might not be a good idea to have 13-year-olds using such knives and called over the coordinator to ask. Lucky I did, because she said that the girls were definitely not allowed to use them. But they could use scissors, so I got them to work cutting boxes with scissors.

I used a Stanley knife myself to cut a circular hole in one to fit one of the lenses, and had some girls use tape to affix the lens in place. Then they taped a sheet of tracing paper over the open end of the box, and we tested it out. The lens projected an upside down image of the view out the window onto the tracing paper and it was nice and sharp! It worked beautifully. This got the girls excited and they played with standing in front of the window and waving their arms while others watched the live image on the back of the box. It was pretty cool.

We ran out of time before completing all the boxes, but the partially complete ones were put on a trolley to be stored away safely for next time, when we’ll finish them off.

I headed home and then in the evening did three more critical thinking classes. Unfortunately, my Internet died during the first one, and I had to hurriedly open Zoom on my iPad (which has 4G) to continue. The second class I ran entirely on my iPad. It worked, but was a bit clunky. I had to hold the iPad in my hand the whole time to get a good camera angle for the video, and I couldn’t share prepared slides I had to illustrate some things. Fortunately the Internet came back in time for the third class. It’s been really flaky this week, dying multiple times on the weekend as well. I don’t know what’s going on with it.

Hopefully it won’t happen again…

A lesson on post-scarcity economies

Because I was busy with other things yesterday, I put off preparing my new critical thinking topic for the week to today. I had to do it in time for classes this evening, so I worked up a lesson plan on the topic of post-scarcity economy. I set it up by talking about how the prices of technology like TVs and computers has fallen enormously since their introduction. Televisions in particular I was a bit surprised to discover have fallen to about just 1% of their value when they were first invented in the 1930s, taking into account inflation. I ask the kids what if this trend continues and in the future TVs and computers become so cheap you could buy them for less than a dollar? Or even that they might be given away for free.

Then I follow up with getting them to imagine this applies to all products. Anything a person might need or conceivably want is super cheap, either free or effectively free. We discuss what a world like this would be like to live in. What people would do, if they didn’t need jobs to make money? Would there be more or less arts and science? Would it be a better or worse world than we have now?

I ran the first three classes tonight and it was really fascinating. Opinions of the kids ranged from “this will never be possible” to “this could happen within 30 years”. And from “it would be a utopia, everyone happy, doing the things they enjoy” to “it would be a nightmare, everyone lazy and nobody doing anything intellectual”. It’s hard to recall a more polarising topic that I’ve done. So it’s a good one!

It was warmish again today, but we had a heavy black sky roll in over lunch time, and I got caught in some light rain with Scully while out for a walk. It didn’t rain much though, and the sun came out again later in the afternoon.

On the problems I mentioned yesterday: I tried PayPal again today and this time I tried transferring an amount below what I discovered to be a single-transaction limit, and it worked. I only found this limit with a Google search – I couldn’t find any mention of it on PayPal’s user help pages. It’s definitely lower than amounts I’ve transferred successfully in the past, so it seems PayPal has introduced this limit without telling anyone (or me at least). Anyway, one problem solved.

The other one, backing up my wife’s new MacBook, I haven’t solved yet, but I did find this StackExchange post about what sounds like the same problem, with two different possible solutions. I’ll try them later when I have some time.

For relaxation I’ve started watching Project UFO on Netflix. It’s a four-part series which is sort of a Polish X-Files/Chernobyl mash-up set in the 1980s. Very Cold War Soviet-style vibe, with dry humour and UFO hunting. I’m very interested to see where it’s going and how it ends.

A touch of spring?

After last week’s cold and relentless rain, this week is turning out beautifully. It’s sunny and even a little warm. It feels like spring is arriving. Many flowers have been appearing already. Magnolias are in full bloom in many places, and some of the trees are even losing their flowers and showing new green foliage already. Cherry blossoms are out, and azaleas are appearing too.

However the Bureau of Meteorology tells us it’s all an illusion. They say next week will see four cold fronts in rapid succession, bringing possibly the coldest weather of the entire year and more rain. They’re even saying it might snow in places like Canberra, where it rarely happens. Also there will be gale force winds with possible destructive effects. But I’m enjoying this week’s warmth while it lasts.

I spent today working on a science lesson for an online class tomorrow. We’re going to do states of matter and a precipitation reaction, with epsom salts and washing soda.

I’m also struggling with two technical issues. For the past two days I’ve been trying to withdraw funds from PayPal into my bank account. I’ve done this many times in the past and never had any issues. But every time I try to do it since yesterday, PayPal has displayed an error message telling me I’m over my daily withdrawal limit. I didn’t even know they had a daily withdrawal limit. But no matter how low I make the amount, it still says I’m over the limit. So I can’t get any money out of PayPal at all.

Secondly, my wife recently got a new laptop, a MacBook Air. I’m trying to set it up to use my network backup drive as the Time Machine backup drive. I’ve followed all the instructions on apple.com to set up the drive as a shared network drive, with a user with read/write access, and I can connect to the drive from the new MacBook. But when I try to configure it as the Time Machine backup drive, it says it doesn’t have read/write permission to the drive, despite me connecting with my username and password (my username that does have read/write permission to that drive). I can’t figure out what’s wrong.

More pleasantly, here’s a photo of that waffle I had for lunch the other day:

Nice looking, isn’t it?

And here’s a photo I took today which I’ve annotated with all the new high-rise apartment construction going on in the neighbourhood.

This doesn’t show all the construction either. There’s more hidden behind the palm tree on the left. I’ll try to take another photo from a different location and show some of that too.

Image processing lecture done

Today was a full-on teaching day. Four critical thinking classes filled the morning, up to 1pm.

Then I had lunch, and went for a 5k run. Had a shower, and went over my notes for tonight’s lecture at the University of Technology Sydney. I mentioned last week that the lecturer is away this week and asked me to give the lecture tonight. It was an introduction to machine learning and AI for image processing, and it went really well. Several of the students thanked me as they left afterwards.

Before the lecture I had Thai pad kee mao for dinner at a good place I know near the university. Next week I might try somewhere new, but this week I decided to stick to somewhere I knew had quick service, so I wouldn’t be late for the lecture.

Now time to relax before bed…

Internet outages and restarting sourdough

On Friday night when I hosted Dungeons & Dragons, one of my friends returned the sourdough starter that I had him mind while I was in Europe. It’s taken us several weeks since my trip to actually see each other, so this was the first chance we had. I also gave him the Hungarian Rubik’s Cube that I bought in Budapest as a gift for him. When he opened the box he was astounded that the colour ordering on the faces of the cube were non-standard, and in a way he had never seen before. Also the faces were coloured with stickers, which modern cubes haven’t used for many years. So it was definitely a unique and memorable gift, which I’m glad about.

Anyway, yesterday and today I fed the sourdough starter and today I used it to make a new loaf of bread. It’s still rising, but I’ll bake it later tonight.

Also today I’ve been dealing with intermittent Internet outages. It went out yesterday for a while too, but today it went out three or four times. Unfortunately one was right before a Zoom class I was supposed to teach, so I had to cancel it, and send messages to the students using my phone. I had to refund all their class fees too. Fortunately the connection returned a bit later and I managed to do the next class okay.

Not much else to talk about. It’s been a fairly lazy day. I think I’m recovering from yesterday’s long run effort.

D&D: Back to Thistlebrook, meeting Reynard Thorn

Friday I did my regular grocery pickup, then five critical thinking classes, and cleaned the house in preparation for hosting Dungeons & Dragons at my place. We had six players, plus me as the DM, which is a full house. Usually one or two can’t make it, but we play anyway and their characters just sit out. But it’s good with everyone.

They’d finished the dungeon exploration where they found the wizard flowers (see recap of the last session). Now they still had to get back to the town of Thistlebrook, but it was late, so they had to stop to make camp partway there. They chose a hidden location on a hill with a good view. The next morning they continued, but Fingers the thief scouting ahead came back to warn them of an approaching party of snake people. They hid and watched, and as the snake people passed, the minotaur Korm (who they’d tricked back in the dungeon) raced up to meet them. There was an animated discussion, and then one snake person in a cloak with a serpent lower half raised a finger and zapped Korm with a spell, blasting him away completely. The snake wizard lowered his hood and the party saw that it was Xiximanter!!! The undead snake wizard they’d met back in the Tomb of the Serpent Kings, way back in session 3 of this campaign, two years ago!

They knew better than to take on this guy, and let him pass by, heading towards the wizard flower dungeon. Korm said he’d been working for the snake people, so presumably Xiximanter was upset at what the party had done.

They headed back to Thistlebrook, where they had a few things to do. Settle up with the sage Thaddeus Vindle, who had hired them to retrieve wizard flowers. They decided to sell him three of the four they recovered and keep one for themselves. Then there was the matter of dealing with the curse of Spathio, the God of Swords. The High Priestess of Orendial, God of Peace had promised to remove the curse if they destroyed Orlugg Broadstaff, the giant-mage in the wizard flower dungeon. They had done so, so the Priestess removed the curse for them. But now the party are worried that maybe Spathio will be upset that they got out of completing his curse…

They did a couple of weeks of training to go up levels. Then Vindle contacted them for a dinner meeting, and told them what he’d discovered about the wizard flowers. And that he’d found information about another old wizard research location, in an ancient abandoned abbey a couple of days ride south of the town. Here they were doing research into extra-planar travel. He suggested they could mount another expedition.

But as dinner ended, a rowdy mob formed in the streets, booing members of the town guard who were dragging six captives through the streets. It was Reynard Thorn (a Robin Hood figure beloved by the poor of the town but wanted by the Reeve) and members of his “bandit” gang. Thaddeus suggested they were unlikely to execute them tonight, but rather wait for daybreak tomorrow to make it a public spectacle.

The party quickly decided they should try to rescue Thorn and his followers, tonight. They ran ahead to the town Watch House via back streets and arrived before the guardsmen with the prisoners. They observed them being led inside the only gate.

Fingers the thief drank a potion of invisibility that they’d found in the wizard flower dungeon, and then sneaked in to scout the watch house. He returned and said the gate led to a courtyard and the cells were underground, down a set of stairs open to the courtyard. As they discussed tactics, a mob of townsfolk arrived with flaming torches and most of the guardsmen ran out to defend the gate from them. This gave the party the opportunity to sneak around the back of the watch house, where Fingers (still invisible), climbed a wall and lowered a rope for the others to follow.

They left Mezza the wizard to guard outside, and Nogge the fighter on the battlement wall as a lookout, with Notgandalf’s magic eye so he could see if there was any trouble as he accompanied the remainder of the party into the cells. They passed a guard room and found the cells, but had to smash the locks open which made noise and alerted the guards. They made a stand at the door and managed to grab three guards and toss them into a cell. The fourth guard put up more resistance, and Reynard Thorn stabbed him with a dagger that the rescuers had given him.

They left the groaning guard all ran outside and manage to get back up the wall and over to the outside without being spotted. Reynard thanked them and suggested the city wouldn’t be safe for them this night after the guard reported the breakout and the other identified them, and they should accompany him to his forest hideout. They decided to do so, but left Mezza and Nogge to go back to their inn and collect their stuff, since they were outside and no guards saw them.

And there we left the game for the night, to be picked up next time!

Today was fairly lazy, except for going for a 7.5k run. I took advantage of the fact that it’s finally stopped raining, for the first time in six days. It was actually a very nice day, warmer and much drier than the past week. I also went for a walk with my wife and Scully and did some sketching. Not much else.