Daily update – Page 23 – dangermouse.net

5k run + brisket burger

I had a mixed bag in the health stakes today. I did a 5k run, and then I blew it all by having a barbecue beef brisket burger for lunch. This was at the Naremburn shops, where I usually get something from the bakery, but today I tried something from the fish & chip shop, though I eschewed the fish & chips and looked at their burger menu, and was attracted by the brisket burger. It was very good and I have no regrets.

While walking home, a bird pooped on my hat. Now, this probably wouldn’t have stood out enough for me to report it here, except for something which I also didn’t bother to mention yesterday: a gull pooped square on the top of my (hatless) head yesterday too! It was after I’d picked up the games from the game shop and was walking towards the university for the evening lecture. I went via Darling Harbour, which is populated by numerous gulls, and one too a dump right above me as I was walking and… yeah… it was very unpleasant. Fortunately I was very close to a public toilet and it had copious soap and paper towels, so I managed to wash my hair in the sink and dry it off adequately before eventually heading to my pad Thai dinner and the university. Today I just washed my hat when I got home.

Tonight I started the topic of “Music” with my ethics classes. I think this is a good lighter topic after last week talking about brain uploading, which weirded a few of the kids out. Everyone tonight felt excited and happy to talk about music, which was good!

This afternoon I had a bit of spare time to start looking at my photos from Amsterdam in June last year. I still haven’t fully gone through and processed the photos that I want to put into an album for this trip, and I kind of want to get that done and start work on this year’s Japan trip before my next trip to Europe in November!

Here’s the Singelgracht canal:

And the Rijksmuseum:

New content today:

An ominous early spring

It’s officially spring here, and though we’re less than two weeks out of winter it’s already feeling like late spring. Smoke has been hanging in the air over the city for the past few days, the result of controlled burning operations to reduce fuel load in the bush areas on the fringes of the city. Gentle winds have been blowing it across the city and most suburbs have been feeling the effects.

I went into the city a bit early today to pick up a copy of Cyberpunk Red that I’d ordered from the game store. While there I also grabbed copies of Scum & Villainy, and Root: The Roleplaying Game. Then I walked over to the university for this evening’s image processing lecture. I went via Darling Harbour, and caught this photo of the sun in the afternoon sky:

I’d seen earlier in a Sydney forum online someone saying they’d moved here since 2019 and the current smoke was awful, and they were asking if it was anything like the smoke we had during the bushfires in 2019. And everyone was saying this is nothing compared to what it was like in 2019, when we pretty much couldn’t see the sun for days on end and ash was falling from the sky. It was a horrendous, apocalyptic time. What we have now really is nothing compared to that. (My posts from 19 December 2019, 21 Dec, 31 Dec, 12 Jan 2020)

Looking back at the city from the other side of Darling Harbour:

I found another new place for dinner before the lecture. A Thai place, where I had pad Thai with soft-shelled crab:

In other weather news, the ginkgo trees here are starting to show new leaves, later than most of the other trees which are developing new foliage. Lots of flowers are out. And the forecast for the next week is looking ominous. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday are all forecast to have temperatures around 34-35°C in parts of Sydney, though the coast will be a few degrees cooler. This is serious summer weather, before the spring equinox. You can feel everyone here holding their breaths for this impending El Niño summer.

New content today:

A new game design course running again

This morning I finished off the week of ethics lessons on the “Brain Uploading” topic. There’s been a very wide range of reactions to the idea of scanning someone’s brain and running a copy/simulation on a computer. Some kids think it’s cool and want one, some think it’s weird, but they could learn to get along with chatting with one, and some think it’s an abomination and want nothing to do with it. One went so far as to say that if a friend got a brainscan copy running on a computer, they’d stop being friends with them.

In the middle of the day I had a nice break, taking Scully for a long walk over to the Italian bakery and back. I had a bit of lunch there and brought home some Italian biscuits for dessert tonight.

My wife came home from work just after lunch, to work from home for the afternoon. This gave me the opportunity to go for a 2.5k run before having a shower and heading out with her and Scully for an evening walk after work, as the sun was setting. It was chilly, but nice in the sunset light. I made Thai green curry vegetables and rice for dinner.

And then later this evening I had the first lesson in a new iteration of my 6-week Creative Thinking and Game Design course. With three students, this should be more fun than last time I ran it, with just one student. The first lesson is a bit cram-packed with information, and I think the kids were a bit overloaded by the end of it. But thankfully the next few have a bit less content and it will ease off as we progress through the weeks.

New content today:

The new house being built nearby

Not too much out of the ordinary to report today: making Darths & Droids comics, a 5k run, and evening ethics classes. So I thought I’d mention some of the construction work going on around the neighbourhood where I live.

I’ve talked about the huge redevelopment where dozens of houses have been demolished recently and work is beginning on clearing the land to eventually build new apartments. But there’s other smaller works going on that I walk past regularly. At the top of the hill near where I begin my runs is a property which was an old 1960s-era apartment block, which has been demolished and is now going to host a modern retirement living complex. That’s approaching completion, with the building exterior done, and work now being done on the landscaping and (I assume) the interior fit-outs.

Down the street a bit from here there is a single house property which had until just a few weeks ago had an old fibro house on it. That was demolished and the land cleared super quickly, and now there’s a two-story house going up rapidly, using timber framing. Both storeys are already up!

Timber-framed houses are a bit unusual here. Most places are built with solid brick, so it kind of stands out as strange, watching it being built. There are two other residential homes not far away that were also redeveloped from old run-down homes in the past couple of years, and both of those were brick construction. Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how fast this new house goes up. My impression so far is that it’s been ridiculously rapid. I don’t have a photo, alas, but maybe I’ll take on this week.

New content today:

Games night and plumbing day

Friday I had a bunch of classes, followed by going out to a friend’s place for in-person board games night. We played games of Sequoia, Modern Art, Istanbul, and Coup. Here’s Istanbul:

It’s the longest game we played and I think the one I enjoyed the most. It was very close, with one guy winning it just one turn before myself and another player would have also reached the winning condition (and it would have gone to the tiebreaker condition).

Today I tackled a chore that I’ve been meaning to do for a few weeks. Our shower had begun to be a bit drippy, with it getting harder to turn the water off properly. I really dislike the job of replacing the valves in the taps because its fiddly and messy, and I have to get tools from the garage. So I tend to put it off as long as possible. But I decided I had to bite the bullet today and get it done. And last time I only bothered to replace the cold tap valves, so I thought I better do the hot ones as well this time.

I started at 11:30, thinking I’d be done by soon after midday so I could have lunch. In fact I didn’t finish until after 1pm. When I unscrewed the shower cold water tap I found the reason why it had been dripping lately:

The old valve was completely mangled and worn out! Once I’d done the replacements and turned the hot and cold water mains back on, everything seemed to be working nicely. So hopefully I won’t need to do that again for a year or more.

This morning I did a 5k run, clocking 27:01 on my new route. I think this will be a faster route, without the steeper hills of the old route, nor the extended uphill slog over the last 2 kilometres or so.

This afternoon we all went on a walk up to the shops. I grabbed a gelato from the local gelato place. As I sat eating it, my wife noticed a sign at the specialist grocer next door advertising Doglato – an ice cream product for dogs. While I waited outside with Scully, she went in to take a look, and emerged with a small tub of peanut butter and honey Doglato. We gave Scully a bit, but it was frozen pretty solid so difficult to scoop out. We ended up taking the tub home and sticking it in the freezer, and will try giving Scully some more over the next few days, which will be easier with access to our kitchen utensils.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

Today after lunch I took Scully on a slightly different walk. I checked a map to find something a bit new to do, since we’ve covered many of the same old walks so many times. I realised there was a place we could go about the same distance but that we haven’t done very much.

This walk goes down a steep street down a valley towards a sports field nestled by a creek at the edge of the harbour. But up the hill a bit is this little fern-lined valley.

That’s the street, which is narrow and doesn’t have much traffic, as it leads to a dead end at the sports field.

To go back uphill, we climbed the Stairs of Cirith Ungol:

I don’t know the real name (if any) of these stairs, but that’s what I call them. They’re cut into the sandstone and are pretty steep. Today they were covered with leaf litter as well, which made the footing a bit treacherous. (There’s another mention of them here.)

Scully handled it okay though. That’s her at the top, the little black blob. Although this isn’t the actual top of the stairs – there are several more beyond what you can see. Eventually it opens out into a street, and we can walk back home from there.

In other happenings today, I had a bunch more ethics classes on the brain uploading/transhumanism topics. Made a comic. And had enough time left over to finally format my Japan travel diary from June into HTML web pages. I haven’t embedded any photos yet, but if you’re curious you can read the diary here. Actually, I posted most of it to this blog back in June, from Japan. If you read it then, you probably don’t need to do it again now.

New content today:

Trying a new sandwich

This morning I worked on finishing off my lesson plans for the new week of ethics classes. I’m doing two related topics for the different age groups: Brain Uploading for the younger kids, and the broader topic of Transhumanism for the older kids.

For lunch I went for a walk with my wife and Scully to Botanica Garden Cafe, which does some really good food. I wrote about the first time I went there back in March. I’ve tried a few things off their menu and today I thought I’d try something I hadn’t had: the poached chicken and brie sandwich.

It was good, and very filling. There’s a lot of chicken stuffed in there. I barely wanted to eat dinner by the time evening rolled around. But did make some fried rice and had a smaller serving than I usually would have.

In the early afternoon I worked on version 2 of the Haunted House game for the game design class. I went for a 2.5k run after that, but still felt so full from lunch that I had to take it pretty easy and didn’t run a very fast time. On the way up the hill for my pre-run warm-up to the starting point, I passed more of the demolition work that is going on near here for redevelopment into loads of new apartments.

This is another whole street of houses that have just been torn down, a couple of blocks over from the photo in this entry. It’s a huge area that is being worked on.

Tonight I started with three ethics classes on the “Brain Uploading” topic. In the first class I started with the premise that you could scan your brain and run a copy in a computer, and it would be an exact emulation of you, with your memories and personality. All three kids that it sounded awesome and wanted one. The second class, in contrast, had one kid who was keen on it, one who wasn’t so sure, and one who was totally freaked out by the idea and said it would be the scariest and most horrible thing ever. Should be fun running this over the next week!

New content today:

Scully by the water, new Japanese food

At lunch today I took Scully for a walk down to the park by the water. The pigface plants were flowering:

And here’s Scully by the water:

After dropping her off at my wife’s work in the afternoon I went into the university in the city for tonight’s image processing lecture, for which I’m on tutor duty again after delivering last week’s lecture. Today we start three weeks of material on machine learning and its application to image processing, recognition, and classification. But first I had to have dinner!

I’ve decided to try a different restaurant every week for this semester, and not just go to the same old places repeatedly. There are plenty in the area, so I shouldn’t run out, and it’s a good chance to try new places. Tonight I found a Japanese place which Google described as “bustling”. Only when I got there it was completely empty.

Probably because I had to eat at 5pm, to make sure I could get to the lecture by 6. I had agedashi eggplant and tempura udon.

It was pretty good! And now I know a good Japanese place near the university.

New content today:

Big Lego comics day

After getting three ethics classes out of the way this morning, I worked hard on Irregular Webcomic! today. I had to finish off writing a batch of strips, quickly, so I had time to photograph the whole batch, and then assemble some of the comics for this week, since the buffer was empty. This meant some of the comics didn’t get punchlines as good as I would have liked, but thankfully when I got to assembling the comics I managed to rewrite one of those to my satisfaction. Actually, it’s the one that’s gone up this evening already!

Apart from that, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and then again with my wife after she got home from work. And I cooked a quiche for dinner. And… about to relax and watch an episode of Question Team with my wife.

New content today:

Honey cakes

Today we had my wife’s mother, sister, and brother over for lunch. Just a simple thing with sandwiches. But her brother brought a selection of honey cakes from Christina’s Honeycakes to have after the sandwiches. There were six flavours and we cut the squares in half so people could try a wider selection. I really liked the peanut butter one.

Having guests over meant cleaning the house before they arrived, so that took up part of the day too. I also had a bit of a mess with Outschool admin to deal with – parents asking for class times that were already full and me getting in a tangle offering an extra place (maximum one) to two different parents without realising it, then having to deal with the issues when one signed up and the other couldn’t. Ugh. Its still not settled yet either – I’m going to have to deal with this more tomorrow.

New content today: