Daily update – dangermouse.net

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:

Some photos, some image processing

I mentioned yesterday that the shops next to Maggio’s Italian Cafe in Cammeray were being demolished. I took some photos but didn’t have time to upload them yesterday, so I thought I’d show them today. Here’s a view of the rear of the properties:

This is close to where I sit on a bench while I eat the lunch that I’ve bought from Maggio’s Bakery. There’s a nice shady bench where I can sit and eat while Scully hangs out nearby. So I saw the demolition work in progress while I was eating yesterday. And then when we left, I walked out to the street at the front of the buildings:

Here you can see Maggio’s Cafe (not the Bakery, which is in a separate shop a couple of doors to the left). The yellow facade used to be a small grocery store, and the white one next to it is also being demolished – I forget what sort of shop used to be there. (Google Streetview just helped – up until mid-2022 at least it was a place that did casual art classes, where you learn to paint while sipping wine, and then in early 2024 it became a display suite for new apartments. Possibly apartments which are now about to be built on the site.) It looks like the old brick facade is being kept – you can see it is intact, but all of the building behind, seen through the windows, is gone.

I suspect the plan is to build shops at street level, with a few floors of new residential apartments above. There’s quite a bit of this sort of urban renewal going on around the local suburbs at the moment.

I also took a photo today, at the University of Technology Sydney.

I liked the building shapes here. The left and right buildings are part of the university. The greenery-covered building with the suspended solar reflector is so-called Central Park tower across the road. I don’t quite know how the reflector is supposed to work, since the mirrors are angled downwards.

Okay… I found a website with some engineering information about it! There are also heliostat mirrors on the lower roof level of the adjacent tower, which reflect sunlight up onto the suspended mirrors. Interesting! In fact I think you can see one of the roof-mounted heliostats at the lower right corner of the sky in my photo.

I was at the uni of course for this week’s image processing lecture. The professor talked about machine learning in an image recognition context.

In the evening I made lemon pepper pasta for dinner, using another of the free lemons I got last week.

New content today:

More signs of spring

Out walking with Scully at lunch today and the London plane trees are all starting to produce new spring leaves. And wisteria is blooming all over the place. And jasmine.

My wife and I both hate jasmine. We can’t stand the smell of the flowers. But as far as I can tell this doesn’t seem to be a very common thing. I don’t recall ever meeting anyone else, except my mother, who also hated the smell of jasmine. Whenever I tell people this, everyone looks at me like I’m crazy and declares that they love the smell of jasmine.

Anyway, we walked all the way to Cammeray to have lunch at Maggio’s Italian Bakery. I didn’t want to overload on sweets today, so I had two slices of the pizza, a mushroom and a capricciosa. And this afternoon I made a quiche for dinner, so my wife and I could eat our slices separately because I had classes online from 5-8pm.

At Cammeray they’re demolishing a couple of shops next to Maggio’s Cafe (which is a couple of doors down from Maggio’s Bakery, run by the same people). It looks like they might be keeping the old Victorian era front facade on the street and redoing the entire rest of the building behind it.

Oh, and I thought of a cool idea for a future ethics/critical thinking class. I’ll get the kids to do a Turing Test on me, but I won’t tell them if I’m answering as me, or copying their questions into ChatGPT and pasting the results. I’ll prime it first by telling it about the exercise and that it needs to impersonate a human response as best it can. I tried this today and it worked… moderately well, but not great. And then I’ll see if the kids can work out if I’m being human or an “AI”. It should be fairly easy with the right sort of questions. The exercise will be for them to think of the right questions to ask.

New content today:

Making a will

Yep, you heard that title right. Today my wife and I took the important step of starting to draw up wills. We’d been talking about it for a bit, but today we had an initial appointment with a solicitor to go through the details, legal formalities, and so on. We covered what we want to happen if either of us dies, or in the event we both die at the same time (or in quick succession). We also covered powers of attorney and other stuff. The solicitor will draw up drafts based on what we covered and pending any amendments or errors we’ll get to sign them in the next few weeks.

That appointment was in the afternoon. In the morning I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on the subject of “Hospitality”. I did a first class this evening, but it was abbreviated because the only student had to leave early. I’m hoping there are enough questions and subject matter to sustain a full length class. I think it should be okay.

Weather was chilly again today. But should be back up to 29°C in a couple of days. Spring here really isn’t a “warm” season, it’s more like cold and hot days randomly interspersed.

Also today I collated, photographed, and listed on eBay a big pile of Magic: the Gathering cards. All the common cards and basic lands from the 1994 Revised Edition of the game, 4 copies of each, for a total of 360 cards. If anyone reading this is interested, the eBay item is here.

New content today:

Lightning Tuesday update

It’s late and I want to get this done super quickly. Not much to report today: 6 ethics classes, mailing some packages, the day was extremely windy again, made pizza for dinner. I didn’t have enough time to make new comics, so Irregular Webcomic! will have another week of reruns.

New content today:

Planning for a New Zealand trip

Today I did my 5k run in the morning before it got too hot. I briefly thought about trying another 7.5k, but yesterday was exhausting enough! Even though it was early in the morning, the sun felt like it had a sting in it and I used sunscreen.

I spent the morning doing a new Darths & Droids comic. In the afternoon I planned out a couple more weeks of ethics lesson topics, coming up with preliminary lists of questions for a week on “Hate” and a week on “Driving”. I also made a sourdough loaf for the new work week starting tomorrow, so my wife can take sandwiches from home for lunch.

We’ve also been planning a short trip to New Zealand, in March next year. My wife’s nephew has moved to Auckland. From Oslo! – where he spent a few years after leaving Sydney. So since he’s now relatively close to here, his mother (my wife’s sister) is planning a trip to visit for his birthday next year, and my wife asked if we could go along too. Her sister is going for a week, but we’re just going to take a long weekend, leaving on Friday and flying home on Monday. So today my wife chose some hotels in Auckland and we booked one. We also did flights a few days ago.

So we now have three trips booked for next year: Tokyo in February, for my ISO Photography Standards meeting. Auckland in March. And Berlin in June, which will be for the next ISO Photography meeting, which will be a plenary meeting of the whole technical committee (which happens every two years – the last one was in Okayama, Japan, in 2023).

This is after this year, when we’re not traveling anywhere. We knew we weren’t doing any overseas trips, but we’d considered a driving trip to Adelaide around September/October. However when my wife changed jobs we had to reconsider, as she wouldn’t have enough leave saved up, so we abandoned that idea.

In other news, our new neighbours next door gave us a jar of home made Seville orange marmalade! We’ve been eating it on bread and it’s deliciously tart.

New content today:

Almost no-games night, and an exhausting Saturday

On Friday I had my usual online teaching classes, and in between took Scully for a walk. The weather was hot, up to 29°C in the city, and reached 31.6°C at the airport, which set a new record for highest temperature ever recorded in the Sydney suburban area during winter. It was nice, but everyone is dreading the summer to come.

We went out to our local pizza place for dinner. They do a Nutella pizza served with vanilla gelato for dessert, which we occasionally get if we’re in the mood and not too full, and we felt like it last night. Really nice.

I logged into our online board games night, not quite in time to join in a game of Codechains, which is a game one friend invented and implemented on our Discord bot. It’s a word association game a bit like Codenames, but different and fully cooperative between all players.

Then we started a game of Distilled, which one player had read the rules for and taught us all how to play. It seemed like a good game, but we got annoyed by the Board Game Arena UI, which forced us to do actions sequentially when we could easily have performed them simultaneously, so it dragged on and after getting about 2/3 of the way through the game in 2 hours or so we decided to quit and play something else.

So, after about two and a half hours of doing stuff with my friends I still hadn’t played a full game of anything! We moved on to Just One (which we completed), then Can’t Stop Express before calling it a night.

This morning I got up a bit earlier than usual. The sun is rising earlier as we head towards the spring equinox, and the warmer weather is definitely making it easier to get out of bed. I did a 7.5k run today, pushing myself beyond the routine 5k. I felt like I took it a bit easy, but managed to record 42:32, my best time for 7.5k.

Then it was a busy day of housework, cleaning chores, and more inventorying of Magic cards. And in the afternoon a longish walk with Scully. The weather today was cooler and very windy, but it’s supposed to get back up close to 30°C again for a few days next week.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Pancakes for dinner

I’ve been trying to feed my sourdough starter a bit more frequently to get it in a healthier condition, so I’ve been generating some starter discard. And so I’ve been looking for ways to use it. Tonight my wife went to a painting class, so I made diner for myself, and decided to use the discard as the basis of a pancake batter. I just added an egg, a splash of milk, and some baking powder, and it came to the right consistency. I had the pancakes with ricotta, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

They turned out really nice! It’s a little strange having a sweet dinner, but it can be fun every now and then.

Today was the fourth lecture of the image processing course, with the professor back after I filled i for last week’s lecture. he reminded me that it wasn’t actually my first official coursework lecture – I did lecture 4 (today’s topic) last year when he was away! I wrote about it back then. He read my blog and pointed out how I was now Wrong On The Internet, so I feel duty bound to correct it. 😀

I decided after the lecture to head home on the normal train rather than the new Metro, since the best walking route home fro the Metro stop is still messed up by work on the pedestrian crossing lights, necessitating a significant detour. I think the old train is quicker overall at the moment.

I also went ot the post office this morning to mail some more Magic cards to a buyer. And while there I hopped over to Moon Phase (the croissant place) and tried one of the char siu buns. I’ve wanted one for a while, but they’ve been sold out the last couple of times. But today I got one. And wow, it’s amazing. It’s a next level steamed pork bun (char siu bao). Instead of the steamed doughy bun, it’s light flaky croissant pastry with a super crispy top. It was so good.

New content today:

The winds of August

Everyone who lives in Sydney knows that August is the windy month. But this year it’s been an unusual August, with not much wind and unusually high temperatures. Until today, when the wind hit with a fury.

We’ve had wind gusts recorded up to 95 km/h, and it’s been extremely windy basically all day, starting before dawn, and still blowing noisily outside now at 9pm. Trees have been swaying wildly. I had to take Scully out for a walk at lunch time, and we passed jacaranda trees which were shedding yellow leaves in huge billowing clouds. No doubt there are some trees that have been blown down by this wind.

Normally the August wind is cold. But today was hot. 28.1°C in the city, up to 29.6°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow will be cooler but the forecast for Friday is 30°C. This would be warm for summer, but it’s still winter! We may even be in with a chance to break the hottest winter day ever recorded.

Today I spent time writing new Darths & Droids strips and sorting out and inventorying more Magic cards. An unfortunate thing happened with my ongoing selling of cards. There are some junky uncommon cards from the Legends expansion of 1994 that were never worth very much – puttering along at resale values around US$5. Until the release of a new card in June which created a powerful combo with these old cards. Suddenly they spiked to over US$80 each briefly before settling into a new stable price around US$50. I decided this would be a good time to sell these old cards and I put half a dozen of them onto eBay last week, expecting to get well over $300 for them.

But yesterday Wizards of the Coast announced a new card ban, banning the new card from tournaments because it was overpowered. So now this combo is no longer legal in tournament decks. With two days left to run on my auctions. I’d been expecting people to bid the cards up to around $50 each in the last day, as is usual for auctions. But now I’m not sure what they’ll make, and I may end up mailing out a bunch of cards that people buy for $10 each – and it will be $21 in postage if anyone overseas buys them (though the buyer also pays postage, but this may just discourage people even further from bidding).

Oh well… they’re bits of cardboard and they’re only ever worth what someone will pay for them.

New content today:

Starting mega-engineering

This morning I wrote up the lesson plan for the new week’s ethics classes, on the topic of “Mega-Engineering”. I start with potential technological solutions to climate change, such as large scale carbon capture, stratospheric aerosols, or space mirrors. Then I move on to an existing mega-project: the Three Gorges Dam. And ask about good and bad things about these things. Then go on to speculative future things like arcologies, space elevators, and Dyson spheres.

I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well. It was only one student, and she was returning after a long break. She was surprised that I remembered her!

I took Scully on a longish walk at lunch. I had a sausage roll at The Grumpy Baker. They used to be delicious, but they’ve changed the recipe and now the meat is dry and gristly and rather unpleasant. It’s been this way the last few times I tried one, hoping that it would be back to how they used to be. I think I’ll have to remember to just never buy them again. Very disappointing.

One of the LED light bulbs in the bathroom blew again today. This is the third time in about a year. I think there must be something wrong with the wiring… LED bulbs should last much longer than that as I understand it. The weird thing is: There are two sockets in the oyster light fitting. I install one daylight colour temperature bulb and one warm colour temperature bulb, so we get a pleasant mix of colour temperature. The warm one blew the first two times. Last time I switched the sockets and put the daylight one in the suspect socket. But now it’s the new warm bulb that’s blown again. The daylight one has been fine for like 3 or 4 years. Warm ones keep blowing every few months. Despite swapping sockets. A friend thinks it’s most likely humidity from hot showers getting into the fitting and messing with the voltage step-down circuitry, blowing that before the actual LED itself.

New content today: