Daily update – Page 77 – dangermouse.net

Relentless humidity

After I went to bed last night following virtual board games night, a huge storm broke. I was drifting off to sleep when it began: pounding rain, lightning, and thunder. I don’t know how long it lasted, but it was a while.

This morning I slept in a little, then got up, had breakfast, and went for my 2.5k run. I really thought I was doing a god time, pushing myself a little, and getting really exhausted by the end of it. But the clock told me it wasn’t that great. It just probably felt more exhausting because it was 24°C and 94% humidity.

The maximum temperature today was just over 30°C, but it was steamy humidity all day. And then there was another storm late this afternoon, although the most intense part swept just north of me and we only saw the edge of it. We go some moderate rain for half an hour or so. And then the clouds cleared and the sun came out again, baking the moisture back out of the ground. It’s 9pm now and it’s over 90% humidity again. And this is the way it’s been pretty much all this week. I really wouldn’t mind if it got hotter, if only the humidity would go down a bit. (Of course, in a summer or two, I’ll be complaining about the 42+°C temperatures and skin-cracking 5% humidities…)

I don’t think I mentioned the other day that when working on that tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting, I actually scribbled out a couple of pages of calculus and was using Matlab to figure out some things. I’m just reminded now because I have the pages sitting next to me here in the desk.

Scully got to go out today with an old friend – Bella the dog who she has stayed with a couple of times when we’ve gone on holidays. Bella belongs to friends of ours, and one of them came over with Bella and one of the kids to visit for a bit.

New content today:

Virtual board games night again

Today was another warm and very humid day, with intermittent rain. It seems we’re stuck in this weather pattern, and it’s not particularly pleasant.

I had to make a quick Irregular Webcomic! today, because my buffer had run out and I hadn’t had time this week to make a full new batch. So this is a temporary fix until next week when hopefully i can get a new batch underway on Monday.

Tonight is virtual board games night with my friends, after we skipped last week due to it being New Year’s Eve. One of my friends has implemented a new Discord bot game, based on a game he plays with his family, in which you have to make words based on letters spotted on car number plates. We played it a few times and I actually managed to win a game, which I was pleased with.

We’re continuing now, as I type… It’s been fun and promises to be moreso as we continue into the evening.

New content today:

Summer humidity

The weather has been ridiculously humid lately. We’ve been having temperatures around 30°C, and humidities hovering in the 80-100% range. WIth some occasional rain to really drive home the humidity. This is in contrast to the summer of a couple of years ago, when we had much hotter and drier conditions. La Niña is causing this current warm (but not hot) and humid phase. It’s meaning I’m finishing my 2.5k runs every morning completely dripping in sweat.

Today: more ethics teaching, another 3 classes, and more Darths & Droids production.

New content today:

Ethics of laws

This evening I restarted my online ethics classes on Outschool, after a break over Christmas and New Year. I had three classes in a row, so it’s diving right back in. There were 7 returning students and 3 new ones all together, so I did my class introduction bit a couple of times. Then we got stuck into the topic, which was “laws”.

We started with questions about why we have laws, would it be possible to have a society without laws, what might such a society be like? Then we moved on to the fact that historically laws were stated unilaterally by a king or emperor and everyone had to follow them, so what gave them the authority to do that? In modern society in contrast, governments make laws, and what gives them that authority, and is it any different to a king?

Then we moved on to questioning if everybody in a country needs to follow the same laws. What if someone strongly objects to a law, or disagrees with it for religious reasons or whatever, should they still have to obey it? What about people from ancient traditional cultures, whose traditional laws conflict with modern government laws? Is it fair for a government to recognise ancient cultures by allowing them to do things that other citizens can’t do?

All this stimulated a lot of very interesting discussion with the kids! I think it’s a good topic that really led to a lot of tricky questions and thoughtful answers.

In other news, earlier I worked on a particularly tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting and script writing. I wrote a good chunk of material, but it needs polishing and reshaping a bit to flow properly, so it’s not finished yet. I also took a walk up to the shops because I had to visit a pharmacy to get some things. I’ve been trying to avoid going anywhere with people due to the now rampant COVID omicron strain going around, at least until I can get a booster vaccination in a couple of weeks, but I needed some things. Usually the shopping area is bustling with people, but today it was almost like a ghost town a a few people around, but nowhere near the normal levels. I stopped to grab some sushi on the way home for lunch.

New content today:

Starting biology

The Christmas break is over. My wife got up early this morning, and so did I. She’s working from home again, due to COVID, so we’re back into that routine again.

I spent much of the day making slides for tonight’s resumption of online science classes with my one-on-one student. Last year we started with physics, going through atomic theory, electromagnetism, and light. I thought we could start off the new year by changing fields into biology. So today I made a presentation on cells. I found a fantastic collection of public domain microscope images and videos of cells on Flickr, by the Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library. And an incredible collection of public domain biology diagrams by one very generous Wikimedia Commons contributor. Together they made a great presentation.

New content today:

Last day of holidays

It’s Monday, the public holiday in lieu of the New Year’s Day holiday which was on Saturday. Tomorrow is back to work for many people after the Christmas/New Year break, including my wife, and myself, as I begin teaching classes on Outschool again tomorrow after my break.

Today was warm and summery. We went for a long walk with Scully in the mid-afternoon, and were pretty hot by the time we got home.

I worked on writing the lesson plan for the new week of ethics lessons – the topic for the week is “laws”. Asking questions like why we have laws, and what gives a government (or anyone else for that matter) the authority to make and enforce laws?

Another thing I’ve been doing today is downloading PDFs of the old TSR Dungeon magazines, containing Dungeons & Dragons (and occasionally other game) adventures. Someone on reddit linked to a Wizards of the Coast approved (hence legally available) archive of all 221 issues on archive.org. I remember when Dungeon was first published, and I had print copies of issues 1 and 2, though I never bought any more as I had very limited money at the time, and I preferred the broader gaming subject matter of Dragon magazine. So being able to have the entire collection as PDFs is amazing. And not only is there a copyright-holder-approved archive of Dungeon magazines, but there are Dragon magazines there too.

New content today:

Clearing a memory backlog

Two things that happened in the past few days, but which I forgot about when writing here:

1. Yesterday when I was out with my wife walking Scully in the early evening, we were enjoying the quite strong breeze that was cooling down the heat of the day. I didn’t realise quite how strong the wind had become until we happened across a scene on the street: Two young men were examining where a large tree branch had fallen onto the street, blocking it. It was a eucalyptus branch, and pretty substantial – maybe 4 metres long and the diameter of a dinner plate at the base end where it had splintered off the tree above. It was fortunate that nobody had been under it when it fell, as it could have been very dangerous.

But unfortunately the car belonging to one of the men was under it at the time. The branch had caught it at a glancing angle on the side, smashing the tail light and causing some significant dents and scrapes in the bodywork. The guys were maybe teenagers, and one of them looked at us as we approached. They didn’t seem to know what to do, and one asked me who would be liable for the damage to his car – would it be the local council? I answered that I didn’t think anyone would be liable, and the damage would need to be covered by his insurance.

We left then trying to pull the branch away from the car, but they weren’t having much luck as it was pretty heavy. This morning when I walked past the same spot, I saw that the State Emergency Service had come to chop the branch into firewood sized chunks and has piled it up by the side of the street, with emergency tape around it.

2. A few nights ago, I think it was the night of 30 December, I took Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet. As I always do, I gaze up at the stars (assuming a cloud-free night). Orion is prominent in the northern sky at the moment, with red Betelgeuse at the bottom, and the bright blue of Sirius in Canis Major trailing it to the right. (This is upside down compared to what people in the northern hemisphere see, of course.)

Anyway, I was looking up at Orion, when I saw a very bright streak of light flash rapidly from east to west, just below the constellation. It was a meteor. I see them occasionally when taking Scully out, but this was one of the brightest I’ve seen. So that was pretty cool.

Today, I spent time assembling and writing annotations for Irregular Webcomic! strips for the coming week. I got stuck into some mathematics for one of them, so it took some time. I even had to break out Matlab to do some calculations.

For dinner I made quiche, with home made shortcrust pastry. Previously I’d been rolling the pastry cold from the fridge, and wondering why it always cracked around the edges. Searching the net turned up some advice to let it warm up a bit before rolling, and that seemed to help a fair bit, so I’ll do that from now on.

New content today:

New Year’s Day 2022

My wife got tired and went to bed early last night. I stayed up a bit later, but still went to bed and finished reading before midnight, although I heard the fireworks going off before I drifted off to sleep.

This morning was a brand new year. It was a moderately warm, but cloudy day. I took Scully out a couple of times, and in between I worked on Darths & Droids comics. I did a bit more random housecleaning stuff, though nothing as major as the last two days. I baked some sourdough. I made enchiladas for dinner.

And we worked with Scully and her Picasso Paws art kit that she got for Christmas!

You place blobs of paint on a small canvas, then seal it inside a ziplock bag which has been smeared with peanut butter on the outside.

The dog then licks the peanut butter, smearing out the paint on the canvas inside the bag.

When done, cut and peel off the bag, revealing the artwork!

It was a lot of fun, especially for Scully, who loves peanut butter. And painting.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve – end of 2021

I don’t really do end of year retrospectives, so let’s just cut to the chase and see what I did today.

I got up early and headed straight to the supermarket. I managed to book the earliest available timeslot for grocery pickup, which I took because I figures the earlier in the morning I’m there, the fewer potentially COVID-infected people will be around. I grabbed my order and was out of there within about a minute. I also popped into the bakery and grabbed a loaf of Vienna style bread for a special dinner for tonight.

After getting home, I went for my run, and then after that I finally had breakfast. This is very unusual – I normally have breakfast within a few minutes of getting up, so I’m not used to waiting any length of time before eating in the morning.

Continuing from yesterday’s window cleaning, I did more spring cleaning stuff. First I attended to the balcony door and glass panels. I took the sliding insect screen door off the track and washed it clean, then cleaned all of the glass door panels. After remounting the screen door, I continued washing the balcony, which is really a job I should do more often as it collects blown leaves and dust quite quickly.

Inside, I decided to clean out some wardrobe space which has been dedicated to keeping boxes from products such as our cameras, iPads, phones, and laptops. I kept the boxes in case we ever sold the items, but given that we’ve sold exactly zero in 20-odd years, I figure maybe it was time to just get rid of them and reclaim the storage space for something useful.

I took Scully for a walk over lunch while my wife went to the gym. We went over to the fish and chip shop where I got some fish & chips for lunch. I ate at my favourite local lookout spot, with a view over the city. it was a warm sunny day, with not a cloud in the sky. Fortunately, after some vandal poisoned the shade trees at the lookout spot a few years back, one new tree has grown to provide shade on the bench where I sit again.

Back home, I realised there was something I needed to do by the end of the month! The Outschool Dungeons & Dragons group that I run for kids has a monthly adventure writing challenge, and for December I posted a challenge to write an adventure featuring a spooky lighthouse. I said I’d post my own adventure at the end of the month, so now I had to write one. I knuckled down and typed out 100 words of adventure material in a few hours, which I then formatted with some of my own photos as illustrations and exported to PDF, before posting it to the group. Phew!

For dinner tonight, New Year’s Eve, we have something special. For starters I used the figs I bought the other day to make grilled figs with ricotta and honey:

After that was the main course, baked brie in bread with hazelnuts and honey:

Just look at that melty cheese!

That’s the way to put back in all those calories burnt doing exercise and housework today!

It’s now still a few hours before midnight and 2022. I hope you all have a good New Year’s Eve, and that 2022 brings us all some relief from this miserable pandemic thing.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve eve

I spent much of today wrangling Matlab with various datasets, writing code and extracting statistics. I’m working on developing student exercises for the Data Engineering course at the University of Technology, Sydney, for the next semester (as I’ve mentioned a few times before). I ran into some issues with the datasets that I’m using, and need to figure out how to deal with them. Some of the numerical data is aggregated across multiple entries and needs to be divided according to an indexing variable… eh, it’s a bit complicated, and I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Troy by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Trojan War, and third in his series of Greek mythology. (I’m very much looking forward to the fourth book, which will cover The Odyssey.) He begins with the earliest causes of the war, and of course ends after it concludes and the Greeks begin heading home.

I’ve never read The Iliad, but I know it’s Homer’s epic covering the Trojan War. However I was very surprised that about halfway through the book, and most of the way through the war, Fry mentions in a footnote that “This is where Homer’s Iliad begins”. And then about 3/4 through, before the war is over, and even before the Trojan Horse is mentioned, there’s another footnote: “This is where Homer’s Iliad ends”. I checked and it turns out that The Iliad indeed doesn’t cover the whole war – it only covers a relatively tiny slice of a few weeks towards the end of the ten-year siege of Troy. So that was an interesting discovery.

The next book on my list is William Shakespeare’s The Merry Rise of Skywalker, the 9th in the series of Shakespeare-esque retellings of the Star Wars movies by Ian Doescher. It’s reminding me of a few things from the movie, that have prompted new ideas for Darths & Droids. So I’m reading it with a notebook by my side to write down things to include in the planning for our comics.

I took Scully for a walk around lunch time, and then another with my wife along as well before dinner.

Dinner tonight was “leftover veges fried rice”, to clean out the fridge before new groceries tomorrow. We have special plans for tomorrow’s dinner for New Year’s Eve. We often do a cheese platter and crackers thing, but this year we’re going to try some baked brie and crusty bread as a variation.

Oh! And the other big thing I did today was clean all the windows! (I was sitting here typing and wondering what I did all day, and forgot about it until now!) This is a fairly big job, since we’re two floors up, so to clean the outsides I need to remove the moveable window pane, then remove the insect screen, and then lean out the window with a long-handled squeegee. I wash the moveable pane in the bathroom, and also the insect screen, and then replace them all, and clean the inside of the fixed pane with window cleaner. Then repeat for all the other windows.

The other part of the job was replacing the rollers on the moveable pane for the bedroom window. For some reason the rollers keep seizing up and so after a while the window only opens by sliding, rather than rolling on wheels, which makes it much more difficult to open and close. The rollers come in little plastic cartridges, which slot into the window pane frame. But the fit is very tight. Last time I just hammered them in, but that made them difficult to remove today. So this time I decided to sand them down a bit to make them fit a bit more easily. Fortunately I had some fine sandpaper in the garage.

Anyway, with all this wrangling it took a few hours to clean and repair the windows. But now they’re so shiny clean that it looks like empty holes in the walls. Of course they’ll end up dirty again before too long…. but that’s life.

New content today: