Daily update – dangermouse.net

Mother’s Day lunch, more rain, no aurora

Today is Mother’s Day in Australia. I called my mother this morning, and she said she was on the phone with one hand in a mixing bowl, mixing together some hamburger meat and stuff.

I did a 5k run, again managing to get most of the run in before it started raining again, though it started sprinkling as I approached the finish, and was raining heavily within about 10 minutes.

The rain is just getting super annoying now. We were supposed to have a good chance to see some aurora australis from Sydney tonight because of the ongoing geomagnetic storm conditions. But again it’s a complete washout, with rain and thick cloud in the evening.

For lunch today we went to my mother-in-law’s place, where her family gathered for Mother’s Day. We took most of the cinnamon rolls which we’d made yesterday. It was a casual lunch with party pies and sausage rolls and quiche. We left in time for me to be home for my 4pm ethics class.

And it’s been classes until mid-evening now. I should probably go and think about something to eat for dinner…

New content today:

Cinnamon rolls!

My wife and I made cinnamon rolls today! Before rising and baking:

And after:

She got me a “bake at home” box with all the dry ingredients and instructions. We aded milk, butter, and an egg and produced 20 rolls. Most of them will be taken to Mother’s Day lunch at her mother’s place tomorrow.

This morning I did a 5k run, managing to time it almost perfectly in between the rain, which has hung around all day. (It’s pouring as I type this.) There was a news article this morning saying that we might potentially break the record of 16 rainy days (≥ 1 mm) in a row for Sydney. It’s been 12 so far, and the forecast is about 50/50 for it lasting at least another four days.

It’s pretty horrible. We have a drying rack in the bathtub, festooned with wet clothes from whenever we go outside, and they take forever to dry because the air is so humid. There are umbrellas constantly drying off, and wet shoes everywhere. I don’t mind 3 or 4 days of rain, but when it gets up near two weeks without respite, it’s pretty miserable.

We gave Scully a bath this afternoon because she’s been getting a bit “wet dog” smelly. We might need to do it again in another few days.

Oh, apparently there have been sightings of the aurorae caused by the current geomagnetic storm as far north as Sydney’s latitude. Just not in Sydney, of course, because we’ve been under a blanket of cloud and rain. Pretty sure we missed the last lunar eclipse or two because of rain too.

And oh yeah… I didn’t post anything yesterday because it was online board games night with my friends. It was… a rainy Friday. I did some online classes, took Scully out briefly, but spent most of the day inside sorting through more Magic: the Gathering cards to get them into sellable lots. For dinner we had pizza at the local pizza place, which is always good. They have a nice cosy “al fresco” area out the back where we can sit with Scully, which is covered and sheltered from the rain.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Marking done

Today I did the marking for the first experiment planning report for Data Engineering. I had four teams’ reports to mark. I think the quality is definitely better than last year, though there was still some significant variance overall.

There was more heavy rain this morning. It’s been raining every day since 1 May, and the forecast is for rain every day until at least 13 May. I needed to go to the post office to try to get them to reroute the lost package back to me, rather then continue delivering it to Canada, as I refunded the buyer all of the money. In the channels where I’m selling these cards, reputation is everything, and I’d rather take the hit on refunding the money than get a negative seller reputation that would make it difficult to sell more cards. But the post office said there was no way they could do that. So, I have to trust that if the buyer eventually does receive the package that he’ll let me know and be reasonable about sorting things out fairly from there. I do have reasonable trust that he will, since as I said reputation is prime in these circles and the guy has a positive rep that he won’t want to tarnish too.

Anyway, I decided to drive up instead of walk in the rain. It doesn’t save much (if any) time, but it does mean about a kilometre less walking in the wet. But by the time I got there, the rain stopped and the sun came out!

Since I had the car out by now anyway, I decided to drive over to Maggios’ Bakery at Cammeray for lunch, where I got a slice of pork sausage pizza and a pistachio chocolate scroll. And tonight for dinner we have minestrone, to round out the Italian food day.

New content today:

Tale of a missing package

I’ve been selling my old Magic: the Gathering cards piecemeal over the last 4 years, and as indicated here recently I’ve started a renewed effort to sell more of them. I’ve ever had a problem with shipping them to all corners of the globe. Until now.

On 24 April I sent a package of cards to a buyer in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. This morning he sent me a message indicating he hadn’t received them yet. I always send the packages with tracking, so I checked the tracking info on Australia Post’s website and discovered that the only update on there was that the package had been received at my local post office where I lodged it. The next step should be “Cleared and awaiting international departure”, but that wasn’t there. Apparently the package is still in Australia somewhere.

I went to the post office and talked to someone there about it. They brought up the tracking details in their system, which has more info recorded than shown on their tracking website. The delivery address was correct, except for some reason it didn’t display “Canada”. I’m not sure why – I filled out the customs form online and it did auto-completion of the address, so it should know that it’s in Canada.

My theory: I guess the bar code has been scanned and it just shows a street address and Victoria (the city in British Columbia), without Canada, so it got sent by domestic mail to Melbourne, in the Australian state of Victoria. Presumably it’s sitting there somewhere, waiting for someone to figure out that it can’t be delivered, actually read the handwritten address, and realise it’s meant to go to Canada.

So… maybe it will get to international post handling eventually, and from there it should be smooth sailing to the destination in Canada. But… the problem is that the buyer wanted some of those cards specifically because he’s meeting the artist at a tournament on Wednesday next week, and he wanted to get them signed. Even if they figure the parcel out tomorrow and get it on a plane, it’s not going to be delivered to the final address in time.

Also today there was a bit of an incident in my Data Engineering course at the university. The professor and I had to defuse a situation with some members of one of the student teams having a disagreement. I don’t want to go into details, but it was rather uncomfortable and I felt like some lines were crossed. Hopefully we resolved things and nothing similar will happen again.

New content today:

Working on mysterious beasts

Lego D&D set, stage 10 of construction today, which adds castley bits to the top:

Today I wrote the lesson for this week’s new ethics/critical thinking class topic on “Mysterious Beasts”. Stuff like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Yeti, chupacabras, and so on. Much more a critical thinking type class, although there are some ethical questions along the lines of “If such creatures were proven to exist, what should we do about it?” and “Should we take into account potential undiscovered creatures when doing environmental studies for proposed developments?” and “If Bigfoot is intelligent, should we leave them alone?”

I took Scully for a drive today to the Allambie pie shop, and to fill up on petrol on the way there. The cheapest petrol station by far in this area is on the way there, so it’s a good doubling up of reasons to go that way.

And I started work on marking the first student reports for the Data Engineering course. This is the experiment planning report, with the final report and video presentation due in two more weeks.

New content today:

A beautiful evening run

I didn’t do a 5k run yesterday because of the foul weather. Although rain was forecast today, and there were a few showers around, it was mostly pleasant and sunny. My wife came home from work a bit earlier than usual, and I took the opportunity to go for a run before sunset. At the halfway mark the view was so nice I had to pull out my phone and take a photo.

I now have 6 ethics classes on Mondays, and that takes up a lot of the day. After the first four I had a break for lunch and took Scully for a walk to the post office. There’s usually not much of a wait, but today there was a queue of ten other people there before me, so I had to wait a bit. One guy had a whole hand-trolley with multiple boxes containing packages he wanted sent off. He just kept pulling them out one after the other and was still getting through them by the time I left.

During the afternoon I took a break to assemble part 9 of the Lego D&D set.

This adds a castle tower construction on one end, with a door accessed by the ladder. It’s a prison cell. And inside…

And from the other side we can see a mushroom patch in what looks like it might be an outdoor area.

In other news, I’ve burnt through all of my gems in Duolingo. When they converted to this gem reward system a while back, I had something like 40,000 of them, and I thought it would last me ages. But you need to use them up to keep practising when you make too many mistakes, or to access the mastery review exercises, so I’ve been slowly spending them faster than gaining them. And now they’ve run out. I can’t do any of those things any more without spending money. So it might be time to find an alternative to using Duolingo to keep up with my Italian practice.

New content today:

Friday D&D night, Saturday Star Wars night, Sunday… work

I missed updates on Friday and Saturday due to running games both night. Friday was Dungeons & Dragons at my place, the finishing up the adventure of Titardinal’s Tower. I spent much of the day in between ethics classes preparing the adventure for the evening.

I kid of repeated the dose on Saturday, spending all day preparing an adventure for a Star Wars adventure using Scum & Villainy rules, which I ran at Professor Plums, the local geek shop, for a special May the 4th Star Wars night. The adventure outline was:

Greedo gives the PCs a job to retrieve a Kyber crystal from a Jawa sandcrawler. They get the crystal, but as they leave the sandcrawler, Imperial troopers attack the crawler for some reason. They get back to the cantina to meet their onward contacts, only to discover the alien has had his arm sliced off, and Greedo is lying slumped dead in a booth with a blaster wound to the chest… And then things get complicated.

Ponda Baba was their pilot, but now he can’t fly because of the missing arm. He and Dr Evazan were supposed to escort them to Dantooine to sell the crystal to Rebel agents. So they have to find a new pilot. But then Mos Eisley spaceport is locked down because apparently someone blasted their way out of there, so they have to get through that somehow. When they finally get to Dantooine, the place is crawling with Imperials apparently looking for a Rebellion headquarters.

I had six players, mostly around 12-15 years old, plus one 40-ish woman who was the mother of one of the girls. She was clearly into Star Wars and seemed to have the most fun recognising the plot as the adventure unfolded, whereas a couple of the kids didn’t know the original movie, so it was a bit lost on them, But I think everyone had fun playing. Here’s the flyer the shop used to promote the event:

Today I was also very busy, catching up on things that I couldn’t do the past two days because of prepping for the games. I made another week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! strips, and wrote most of a Darths & Droids strip, but I’ll have to finish that tomorrow.

New content today (I’m not going to list Friday & Saturday’s strips, just click back if you need to):

No more problems with Instagram?

After yesterday’s trouble with Instagram, I tried searching today for what to do if Instagram stops working after you deactivate a linked Facebook account. I didn’t find anything specifically about this problem, so decided to explore a bit more in Instagram itself. And lo, when I opened the app, it was working properly again. So… I dunno… maybe yesterday was just some weird glitch that coincidentally happened after deactivating Facebook. Anyway, it all seems good now. I’m very happy that I didn’t have to troubleshoot or go through some ridiculous series of steps to fix it.

Today was pretty busy. Five ethics classes. There’s a girl in one of the classes, she’s really outgoing and funny. Today I gave a scenario and started asking questions as usual. She said, “You know, whenever we get these stories about someone acting ethically dubious, I think you’re always just writing stories about me.” That was pretty funny.

And in between I was busy making comics. I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and we were again lucky to dodge the intermittent rain that’s been floating around all day. And for dinner I made pan-fried potato gnocchi with pesto. That’s about it for today, really.

New content today:

Problems with Instagram

Okay, so I deactivated my Facebook account a few days ago. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years. Today I wanted to use Instagram and… it wouldn’t show me my normal feed. I couldn’t post a photo. I went into the Account Settings to try to log out and back in again, and it wouldn’t load the account info page.

I figure this must have something to do with my Facebook account being deactivated, because they’re both owned by Meta. But I switched to Scully’s Instagram account (yes, she has one), and that was working fine. But Scully doesn’t have a Facebook account. So clearly Instagram can work without an associated Facebook account. So why is mine now completely broken?

I’ll have to look into this another day, because today was very busy and I’ve just finished three ethics classes in a row, after spending the middle of the day at the university doing tutoring for the Data Engineering course. We’re approaching the end – only two more weeks to go. But I’ll have marking of student reports and videos to do.

This morning I also had to dash up to the post office to mail some more Magic cards to people. The weather was rainy again today, and I got sprinkled on, but it wasn’t heavy. It would have been miserable taking packages there in heavy rain.

In other teaching news, I heard back from Loreto Kirribilli and now that it’s second term of the school year, they have organised a group of four Year 9 students for me to mentor. We’re going to do fortnightly sessions this term, and then maybe organise something different in third term. I go to visit the school to begin in two weeks. I’m looking forward to this -it should be fun, and also hopefully really inspiring for the students.

Oh, and finally, last night I had a big panic when Wednesday’s Irregular Webcomic! wasn’t ready in time for the automated update, and I quickly assembled the comic, uploaded it, and forced a manual update. It was only when I woke up in the middle of the night that I realised it was Tuesday, not Wednesday, and I’d therefore manually published Wednesday’s comic just an hour after Tuesday’s one!! So to correct for this, there’s no new comic tonight – since tonight’s comic was actually published yesterday.

New content today:

Irregular Webcomic! #5183 (Yesterday should have been 5182)
Square Root of Minus Garfield #5461
Lightning Made of Owls #932
Comments on a Postcard #5562

… And wintry weather has arrived

Tuesday, time to write my lesson plan for the new week of ethics classes. This week the topic is “Taking Advantage”. As in people who do things like cut in to queues, or park in disabled spots (when they’re not disabled), or generally otherwise take advantage of other people by bending rules, ignoring social conventions, or generally being insufferable. I said yesterday this week’s topic would be “Mysterious Beasts”, but I was getting ahead of myself – that’s for next week.

The weather turned cold and dismal today. A cold rainy front came in mid morning and cooled things down from a top of 19°C, so that by lunchtime it was just 16°C. There was also intermittent rain all day. The forecast is pretty dismal too: cold and rainy like this for at least the next ten days. We are expecting heavy falls on the weekend, close to 100 mm.

I took Scully for a walk in a brief non-rainy period. And this evening I cooked a recipe that we call “cauliflower bomb”. The recipe is online here, although with a less evocative name. It’s one of the more complex recipes I make, with several steps of preparation, cooking, and lots of pots and dishes and utensils to wash up afterwards. I also roasted the cut off cauliflower leaves, which are delicious when roasted with oil, salt, and garlic until crispy. We had those as an appetiser before the main cauliflower itself. I mentioned this recipe back in 2020 when I discovered it, and that blog post has a photo from then.

I also did some comic stuff today, both Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! I’m cutting really close to publication time on both at the moment, and in fact missed the update time for the latter by an hour or so. Hopefully I’ll catch up this weekend.

New content today: