French lentils

Today was a day for more ethics classes, plus working on some Darths & Droids comics.

I also tried something new for dinner tonight. I cook with red lentils a fair bit, usually making some variant of dhal, to have with rice. But after reading some recipes I decided to try getting some French Puy lentils, which take longer to cook and hold their shape. I cooked them tonight, boiling them first and draining them. Then I fried up some chopped onion, celery, carrot, garlic, potato, then added the lentils and a chopped tomato, with a splash of red wine and seasoning.

I forgot to take a photo before eating, which is a shame as the resulting dish looked marvellous. It tasted pretty good too and my wife declared it a positive.

New content today:

My days are full of teaching stuff

I’d completed my lesson notes for the new week of online ethics classes yesterday, so I had today free to work on … other teaching notes!

I spent time doing the next level of detail in outlining the university Data Engineering course that I’ve been tasked with helping to sort out for early next year. I did a week-by-week lesson plan, indicating what should be taught during a lecture component and a practical lab/tutorial component for each week. Each week contains a few bullet points of material, including the course assessment tasks where appropriate. I started work on organising material from the previously existing course into the weekly components, and editing some of the old introductory material to fit the new course structure, but I realised I should get the lecturer to take a look at it first and sign off before I get stuck in too much further, lest it need any changes. So I’ve left that there for today, but it was a good solid chunk of work.

This evening I had the first three lessons on the new ethics topic of buying and selling. I start by asking them to think about what makes things valuable, and tell me their thoughts. I’m getting an interesting cross section of ideas so far, with qualities like rarity, age, sentimental value, usefulness, investment of labour time, and production costs all coming into it. Some kids even said nothing really has value other than people agreeing that it does – which is either insightful or they’ve heard that somewhere before.

Then I’m telling them the story of De Beers and their global monopoly on the supply of diamonds and how they artificially created the idea that diamonds are incredibly valuable. And I ask a bunch of questions around the ethics of them doing that. A few kids were shocked and said their price manipulations should be illegal, while others said if they owned the diamonds they could market them however they wanted, and it was good for their own business to do what they do, so no problem. So that’s a nice controversial one for starters!

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Yesterday’s walk, and more walking

I have photos from yesterday’s walk, which was along a creek known as Tannery Creek, in a suburb out towards our 5 km COVID restriction limit. I’m guessing the creek was named for historical tanneries that used to be in the area, though if so they are long gone.

Tannery Creek Walk

This walk started in a park by the harbour shore, where there was a boat ramp, and thus lots of cars with boat trailers taking up all the parking spots. We had to park out on the street and up a bit from where we panned to start walking. Being a public holiday, there were a lot of people out for picnics and boating outings. Hopefully in COVID-compliant groups of five or less.

Tannery Creek Walk

The walk started as a broad flat path of firm packed leaves, but quickly narrowed to a dirt and rock track through close trees and bushes.

Tannery Creek Walk

We chose a branching loop that took us up the hill away from the creek for a while, into drier terrain. This looped back around on another path before rejoining the path that ran along near the creek bed.

Tannery Creek Walk

Down by the creek it was a lot wetter and cooler and shadier, with large ferns and mossy sandstone rocks.

Tannery Creek Walk

We walked upstream, having realised from doing several of these walks lately that it’s nicer to walk upstream in the bush, and then downhill back to the car, rather than going down the creek and having to slog uphill back to the car along hot streets.

Tannery Creek Walk

It was another very nice walk, and we spotted plenty of birds, including a white-faced heron towards the top end of the creek. I didn’t expect to see one in dense forest – they usually stick to coastal areas or open grass in my experience.

Today I did a couple of walks with Scully while my wife worked at home, and later went out for a practice walk to her dance fitness class venue, which is starting up again next week when our COVID restrictions ease and they can start running the classes again. At lunch time I took Scully past the bakery and picked up a pie for lunch, while this evening I did a loop around some of the local shops.

And most of the rest of the day I worked on the next ethics lesson plan, about buying and selling, and the science lesson that I just had this evening with the girl whose mother wanted her to do some one-on-one classes.

Dinner tonight was a bit more of a success than last night’s. I made pizza dough and topped it with pesto, ricotta, cheese, potato, and fresh rosemary. That turned out pretty good.

New content today:

Attempted eggplant tarts

Today was Labour Day Monday, a public holiday. Not that it was much different to any other day in COVID lockdown.

I went on another exploratory walk with my wife and Scully, to new places we hadn’t been before within our 5 km radius from home. I have some photos, but it’s too late now to prepare them, since we’ve spent this evening watching The Adventures of Tintin on Netflix. I’m a big Tintin fan – of the books – but I’ve never seen this movie until tonight. I got bad vibes from all the publicity and avoided it until now. It’s a bit uncanny valley in the character animation, and it plays very fast and loose with the story material from the books, but it’s not as terrible as I feared, and there were a lot of nice references to the greater Tintin canon sprinkled throughout, which someone like me could pick up on. I feel like it would have been nice if they played the canonical story straighter and didn’t include so many gratuitous action sequences, but it was okay.

For dinner tonight I planned to make eggplant and haloumi tarts. I grilled the eggplant first to make it soft…

Burnt eggplant

… but I forgot about it while doing something else, and came back too late to find this. So yeah, I completely ruined dinner. I was so put out that I ended up just making fried eggs on toast for dinner instead.

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Creative game design part 2

This evening I had the second lesson of my 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving, with game design as a practical exercise. We did brainstorming, and came up with a bunch of wacky ideas for games. Some examples of the ideas for game themes that the stidents and I came up with:

  • A cooking competition
  • A doctor examining patients
  • Causing trouble in school
  • Ruining someone’s wedding

I really like the last one, and kind of hope we end up developing that one into a game, but I’m planning to be guided by what the students think when we come back to the ideas next week.

Today daylight saving began here in New South Wales, by the way, so all my classes are now an hour later – because I’ve kept them the same time for all the students in other countries. I need to go through every class and decide if I want to move it another hour later when the northern hemisphere goes off daylight saving at the end of October. That will be to keep them at the same time for European and American countries that have DST. I think a lot of Asian countries don’t have DST at all, so classes with Asian students won’t need to move. It’s a bit of juggling, and I’m going to have to end up telling some of the students that their classes will be shifting in time, so they might have to move to another class or possibly unenrol if they cant find a suitable timeslot. And then in 6 months I have to go through this all in the other direction.

But I’m happy that sunset is now an hour later (by the clock). I love the long light summer evenings. Speaking of which, it was very warm and summery today, with a temperature of 26°C. I went on another walk with my wife and Scully, just around our local area from home today. There were a lot of people out enjoying the warmth, with dozens of people having picnics in various parks that we walked past. Picnics were only authorised a week or two ago as COVID lockdown restrictions slowly ease here, and plenty of people are taking advantage of it.

I want to make use of the warm weather and evening sunlight to have a picnic dinner with my wife for our wedding anniversary, which is coming up in a few weeks. Not on the exact day, but some time during that week. It’ll be nice to sit in a park, with a view over the harbour, and have a pleasant dinner.

New content today:

A serious game suggestion

Saturday, and it’s a long weekend, with Monday being Labour Day. This October long weekend is traditionally considered the start of the summery half of the year, with swimming pools opening and stuff. Although it’s already been warm enough to swim for the past month or so, with warmer weather arriving earlier and earlier every year.

The other thing is that channel-billed cuckoos are back. I saw two of them today. These birds migrate north in the winter, and head back to our southerly climes around this tie of year. They’re big, noisy, loud birds, and other birds like to harass them noisily as well, so it’s usually pretty obvious when they’re in the area.

I went for another walk around more new places in our 5 km radius today, with my wife and Scully. This is Folly Point:

Folly Point

Scully by the water:

Folly Point

A panorama with Scully and my wife:

Folly Point

Willoughby Waterfall:

Primrose Park Track

And back home I worked on Darths & Droids comics for a bit. And I also did our tax returns, finally. I normally do them in July, but we’ve been putting them off for ages now, and it was finally time to get them out of the way. I did my wife’s and my tax returns, and it took about 20 minutes in total.

I forgot to mention an idea that we had last night during games night with my friends: A social deduction game played over text chat, where every player has a secret role which tells you to be either sincere or sarcastic. You have to enter text (without emojis) in your given mode, while trying to convince other players that you’re playing the other mode. The tentative title of this game: “Yeah, Right”.

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Splendid meals

Today I made the slides for the second lesson in my creative thinking course, based on the lesson plan I wrote up yesterday.

This evening I had two more ethics classes, on animal hunting. I’ve been ending the classes with a question for the kids to think about, without answering it: Experts say one of the biggest dangers facing the world is overpopulation of humans. What if an advanced alien species came by Earth and saw our population problems. Would it be okay for them to hunt humans?

In the second class today we’d previously discussed whether it’s okay to hunt overpopulated animals, and all the kids had been very affirmative that not only was it okay, but it was necessary to protect the greater environment. So… I got to the end of the class and left them with the above question to ponder, and one of the girls who I could see on the Zoom video silently did The Scream pose, and then slid her hands up to cover the top of her head as she continued the look of horror. It was really amusing to see!

This evening for dinner my wife and I ordered a special treat from a local Greek restaurant that we like to visit now and then. It’s a nice change from ordering pizzas. I went up to pick up the meal and we had spanakopita and roasted lamb shanks, with Greek salad. And there’s sticky date pudding for afters.

Tonight is online games night with my friends. We started with the game Splendor, which I haven’t played for a long time, and have always been really bad at. I thought I was winning, but then all of a sudden someone else took a huge lead and won the game, and I ended up third.

New content today:

Game design week 2 planning

It seems I’m spending all my time writing class material these days! Today I put the finishing touches on the lesson for week 2 of my Creative Thinking & Problem Solving course, which is using game design as an example. Week 2 is all about brainstorming – coming up with as many ideas as possible, and trying to make them diverse and original. I came up with some exercises to go through to prompt the kids to think creatively, and tried them out on my wife, and she was very impressed. So I’m pretty happy with that!

Taking Scully out for a walk today, we noticed that the bare dirt on the hill in the park across the street had been changed again since yesterday:

Landscaping work 2

They’ve recovered it in fresh turf! So they killed the grass with herbicide, then decided they didn’t want to landscape that area, then they scraped all the dead grass away, and now they’ve laid brand new grass. To be honest, I’m not actually unhappy about this, because the old grass was riddled with bindii (i.e. Soliva sessilis), and it’s just coming up to bindii season, in which patches of grass infested with this weed develop needle-sharp spines that make them painful to walk on. Scully feels these in her feet and tries to avoid walking on grass with any bindii in it. And this slope is one of her favourite areas to run around and lie on. So having fresh new grass there will be good.

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Planning for how to do planning

Today I had a Zoom meeting with the lecturer of the Data Engineering course that I’m helping to redesign for next year, as well as one of the university staff working in the area of assisting lecturers to plan and design their courses. She had a lot of good input on various teaching methods and ways we could approach delivering the material. I took a lot of notes, and we also went through a bunch of online tools that we can sue to coordinate the course redesign.

I need to get stuck into that soon, but first I had to finish off the lesson plan for this week’s online ethics classes in time for teaching three of those this evening. I don’t think I had quite enough written yesterday, so I added a few extra questions.

I’m a bit concerned about the landscaping work that council workers are doing in the park across the street. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I reported on them killing the grass on the slope facing the street. And that when I phoned the project manager to find out if herbicide had been used, she said that they had originally planned to remove the grass, but now had decided not to change it – so they killed the grass for no reason.

Well, today it looked like this:

Landscaping work

They’ve removed the dead grass, leaving bare soil. Obviously in preparation for doing something with it, but I’m not sure what yet. They have done some landscaping with bark chips and new plants in the small area at the bottom of the photo, but that was done and completed before the dead grass was removed – so I don’t think they’re going to extend that treatment to the whole area.

The problem is that they’ve left bare soil today… and the next three days in Sydney are forecast to be extremely wet, with possible thunderstorms each day. I expect the rain will wash a lot of that soil off that quite steep slope. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens and what sort of muddy mess is left at the end of the week.

New content today:

Thinking of creative thinking part 2

Most of today I spent planning out the second lesson of my creative thinking course. It was real knuckle down and get stuff done time. I took a break to take Scully to the dog park. It looks like it might be the only good chance this week, with heavy rain and possible thunderstorms forecast for Wednesday to Friday.

New content today: