dangermouse.net – Page 12 – David Morgan-Mar

A beach break for lunch

Today I had to refuel the car, and decided to take Scully on a drive to Collaroy and Fisherman’s Beach, next to the golf club there. Of course I stopped for a couple of pies at The Upper Crust, one butter chicken, and one Mexican beef. Excellent as usual.

It was hot and sunny and I expected to sit on the grass under the shade of a huge Norfolk Island pine tree that grows there. You can see it on the left edge of this photo:

But when we got there, there was an older couple already sitting there, with their dog. The patch of shade is fairly small, and Scully didn’t like the look of their dog, so we had to move along the beach a bit to the other side of the golf clubhouse and find a shady bench for me to sit on.

At least this spot gave me a good view of some Australian pelicans who were sunning themselves and drying off their wings. Among a swarm of silver gulls.

I also saw Australian ravens, masked lapwings, noisy miners, common mynas, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, rainbow lorikeets, and one grey butcherbird, all of which I recorded in eBird.

Back home, I worked on my ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Prizes and Awards”. I have questions like:

Why do people or organisations give out prizes and awards?
Do prizes sometimes get given to the “wrong” person?
Why are some awards, like Nobel Prizes, Olympic Medals, Academy Awards, so famous?
Is it fair that something or somebody that wins an award will become more popular?
Should awards always go to the best performer, or should effort and improvement also count?

Oh, and new neighbours moved into the apartment across the hall from us today, after our old ones moved out just last week. This seems a very quick turnaround given that our old neighbours were told they had to leave because the owner was intending to sell the apartment. We never saw anybody come in to inspect the place or any prospective buyers or new renters. And then suddenly two young women showed up today with furniture. I’m wondering if these woman actually offered a big rental increase and the owner decided to just tell the previous ones that they had to vacate. 🤔

New content today:

Warming weather and secret subjects

The weather here is steadily warming up throughout this week. We had 30°C today, but it’s going to climb slowly as the week progresses. With little respite at night, as the minimums will be around 21-22°C each night. That’s the worst part, really, since it’s difficult to sleep without having the air conditioning on.

So far five people have submitted secret “expert subjects” for my planned trivia quiz night with my friends I still have two or three more to tell me if they want in. Some of them are very obscure from my point of view, so I’m going to have to do some significant research to come up with questions!

Not much else to report today. I had a lot of classes as usual for a Monday. University courses start in a few weeks and this year the Data Engineering course I help teach is on Monday afternoons, 1-4pm. Which clashes with two of my ethics classes, so I’m going to have to reschedule or cancel them. I’ll have to get that sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

New content today:

Preparing a trivial competition

Today I slept in quite a bit. I had a good solid sleep and probably caught up a bit on less sleep on Friday night. After breakfast my wife requested a lift down to Kirribilli Markets with Scully, so I dropped her off before going on my 5k run. These things combined meant I went for my run significantly later than usual, and it was already 26°C by the time I started. Nevertheless, I went faster than yesterday since the humidity was a bit lower and that made it feel not so bad.

I worked on some comics, and I also spent some time thinking about a revived old project. Some years ago a friend ran a trivia quiz during one of our online games nights. I had the idea to run a quiz myself and wrote some questions, but ran out of momentum. But I ran across the half-written quiz the other day and was inspired to work on it again. I mentioned it to the guys and they were all keen. I’ve asked them all to think of and submit their individual “expert subjects”, for which I will research and craft specific questions related to that subject for each of them.

I think I’ll run it as a team event, with pairs or triplets of people, depending how many players we have. Hopefully it’s not a prime number!

I also came up with a couple of new topics for future ethics classes, which I jotted down some preliminary questions for: “Danger!” and “Always Connected”. The latter is about the modern phenomenon of everyone being constantly plugged in to communications networks, no matter where they are, in contrast to a generation or two ago when people could easily get off the grid and in fact were forced to much of the time.

New content today:

Finding Paths, and a new Indian restaurant

On Friday I had a busy day. I was chairing the latest meeting of the Standards Australia (SA) committee on photography, held over videoconference. We normally have three meetings a year, but the last one (supposed to be after the New York ISO meeting in June) was delayed so long because of staff turnover at SA (resulting in us not having a project manager for several weeks) that we finally decided to leave it until the next date, after the Sydney October meeting. And then it was tough to organise it in December like I wanted, so it was pushed to January.

It was a fairly routine meeting, except for a new attendee. One of our current committee members decided it’s time to cull his numerous committee roles and went to the effort to find a replacement to take over his representation of their university. The new guy I had a Zoom meeting with on Tuesday (which, looking back, I see I didn’t mention that day) to brief him on what our committee does and what sort of work he’d be expected to do. That didn’t scare hi off, so he attended on Friday as a guest, before they go through the motions of replacing the retiring member.

Otherwise I went through the discussions and progress from both the New York and Sydney meetings. Unfortunately our member from the Art Gallery of NSW couldn’t make the meeting because I especially wanted to thank her for the behind-the-scenes tour she organised for us at the Sydney meeting.

This meeting yesterday overlapped with one of my ethics classes, so last week I rescheduled it to be a day later and told the kids. But without that rescheduled one I still had three more to teach after the standards meeting, which with a break for a late lunch took me up to 6pm.

And then from 6pm we had online games night with my friends. One of them had organised for us to do some roleplaying this time, using Pathfinder 2e rules and a virtual tabletop (VTT). And by 6pm everyone else was ready to play and all waiting for me! So I pretty much had to dive straight in.

It was nice to be a player for once instead of running the game. This was a one-shot test run of the VTT, before the GM starts a proper campaign. There were five of us in the party; I was a halfling rogue who I named Quillby Bramblefoot. We were given a mission to check out a watchtower which had lit its distress fire signal, and told to recover a magical artefact from the tower, although the guy giving us the mission was a bit cryptic about it and wouldn’t tell us what it looked like or what it did. Which in hindsight may have been a hint, because when we got there and after fighting a couple of battles against wild boars and some semi-undead things, we found a cloaked woman who led us to the item and told us a different story about it. We didn’t get much further as it got late and we finished up there.

Today I got up and did a 5k run. It was very tough going because it was 24°C and 75% humidity. I can really see it in my times when the weather is warm and humid; it can make me a minute or two slower than a good time in cool, dry weather. Back home I showered to freshen up and then it was time for the make-up class that I’d moved from yesterday. Three of the four kids showed up, which was a good turnout for moving the class to a different day.

This afternoon I looked at organising more details for our trip to Tokyo in a few weeks. It was time to think about the dinner options and book some restaurants. I went through the vegetarian-friendly restaurants that my Japanese contact recommended for us to meet for dinner. One sounded truly awesome – mid-range fully vegetarian versions of traditional Japanese cuisine, conveniently located, great reviews. I tried to book it for 27 February… but it’s booked out for the whole month! This is another issue with vegetarian places in Japan – tourists book them out well in advance, because there are so few options for all the vegetarian visitors.

So I did some research and found a nice looking izakaya with an extensive vegetarian menu, in a good location. I emailed our contacts there and suggested this. I also booked dinner for me, my wife, and her mother and sister at Sakura-tei, an okonomiyaki place in Harajuku. It’s interesting using a Japanese restaurant booking site. They want to know so much about you! There was a drop-down asking what occasion it is, with about 50 options: Birthday (self), Birthday (spouse), Birthday (friend), Birthday (family), Friends, Women’s group, Welcome, Farewell, Holiday party, Reunion, Tourism, Business meeting, Team drinks, Family celebration, Kids event, Wedding reception, Anniversary, Engagement celebration, Date, Group Date, Proposal(!), Seminar, Music recital, Exhibition, Other. Those are all in the list, and I skipped some other entries. And another asking how many times you’ve been to the restaurant before.

Speaking of restaurants, we tried a brand new Indian place tonight. It’s the new one that opened up where Turka used to be. I checked the Google reviews and… it was very mixed. A lot of 5-star reviews, and a lot of 1-star reviews. People can be very opinionated, so we decided to try it ourselves. Unfortunately our experience was more 1-star than 5-star. The samosas were cold in the middle, as though frozen and not fried enough to warm through. The dosa had a good spicy potato filling, but the pancake around it was a bit tough, not nice and crispy. The malai kofta curry had decent paneer dumplings, but the sauce was fairly bland. So, we decided not to come back. There are a few much better Indian options in the area.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Leftovers and vegetarian Tokyo planning

Not much else to talk about today, so I thought I’d pick a food theme. Because I have ethics classes from 6-8pm, it’s difficult organising dinner for me and my wife to eat together. I need to eat around 5:30, which is too early for her. So we often end up eating individually on Thursdays (and Wednesdays). Sometimes I cook something that will withstand sitting on the stove staying warm for an hour. Last night I made a single pot of lentils ( a mix of red lentils and French lentils), with broccoli and potato. There was some left over, which I kept in the fridge until my dinner tonight, while my wife made herself some eggs later on.

The other leftover was the last few slices of sourdough from the loaf I made a few days back. I made a new loaf today, but it just came out of the oven this evening.

And the other food-related task of the day was going through options for vegetarian dining in Tokyo, to pick places to try and book for our upcoming trip. A contact on the Japanese ISO photography standards delegation sent me some recommendations, and this one looks really good: Saido. I think we’ll suggest this one for dinner with my contact and his wife (we had dinner with them last time we were in Tokyo as well).

New content today:

Walking while the weather is okay

Scully didn’t get much walking time yesterday because of the heatwave weather conditions, followed by the evening hailstorm. So given today was a lot cooler, I made sure to take her out for a couple of good long walks. First thing in the morning I took her up to Moon Phase, the patisserie, and got myself one of their delectable char siu buns. Barbecue pork inside a delicately laminated pastry shell, with a super crisp sweet glaze on the outside. It’s an astonishing flavour combination and works really well.

I spent some time today assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips, and also writing and making a new Darths & Droids strip. For lunch I just had some sandwiches with my home made sourdough, cheese, tomato, and lettuce.

After lunch I took Scully one a longer walk, around Waverton and down past the harbour shore. I also did an eBird count and tallied 12 different species. About average for a walk down there. The weather was mild and grey, and there were a few brief showers passing over during the day, with rumbling thunder, but nothing heavy.

Not much else to say about today.

New content today:

Dealing with tech issues

I had a couple of annoying tech issues today.

A few days ago I logged into my University of Technology Sydney account to check my email there. I found, to my surprise, an automated transcript of a phone message, left by the project manager of the Standards Australia photography committee. This confused me, because I never gave Standards Australia any contact details related to the university. They have my direct mobile phone number, and should be calling that. I don’t even know if there is a UTS phone number that is supposed to be able to reach me – I don’t have an office there, and as far as I know I haven’t been assigned a number there. SO this was a big mystery.

Today I emailed the project manager about something else, and mentioned that I was surprised to find a phone message from him at UTS. I asked him what number he called. He replied and confirmed that he’d tried my mobile number (though didn’t quote the number). And he just tried again, but it diverted to a message bank. My phone had not rung at all.

Now I was worried. I couldn’t even imagine how this was happening. How had someone calling my mobile been diverted to a UTS message bank without my phone even ringing? Was this happening to everyone who tried calling me?? HOW??

I got a friend to try calling my phone to see what would happen. He got through – my phone rang and I answered it. No diversion to a message bank at UTS. I went back to the project manager and asked him again specifically to give me the phone number he had called, and to check SA’s records to see if any other number was listed by them on their systems.

A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was the project manager! He was confused too. I stepped through the sequence of events with him, asking him to state what number he was calling. He said they only had one phone number for me, my mobile number that he’d just called, and that he just used Microsoft Teams to place the call…

And that’s when the shoe dropped. He had MS Teams place the call, so he wasn’t actually entering a phone number. I use MS Teams routinely at UTS. I was describing all this to a friend in a chat window at the time, and I said the guy was using Teams to place the call, and he said, “Ohhhh…. Okay, it was all weird and inexplicable before, but now it suddenly makes sense. Yeah, Teams will screw up stuff like that all the time.” Presumably what was happening was he opened his contacts in Teams, hit the “phone call” button, and Teams decided that since I have an account at UTS, it should direct my call there, instead of, you know, to my actual phone number.

I mean, that explains what must have happened, but why would Teams do such a stupid thing? Who on Earth thought that use case was a good idea? And presumably this is going to keep happening unless the project manager actually picks up the handset and dials my number manually. Ugh.

Anyway, the second issue I had was with Numbers (the Apple spreadsheet). I had a bunch of cells with date values in them, which I wanted to format just to display as months. I had them formatted as “January 2025”, but wanted to change them to “Jan 2025” format to save some column space. So I selected the format drop-down list and was confronted with the following:

As you can see, every option under the sun, except the one that I wanted! Fortunately this was not as serious an issue as the phone thing, because I created a custom format and got what I wanted.

The other main thing about today was the weather. Wow. It was really hot. We got up to 43.3°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was a few degrees cooler, but still around the 40°C mark. But then at 4pm a storm rolled in, dropping the temperature a good 15 degrees in just a few minutes, strong winds blew in, and the clouds unleashed heavy rain and hail. We got some hail at my place, but my wife reported that where she works, just half an hour’s walk away, there was a lot of hail, blanketing the ground in a white layer like snow.

A few hours later now and several storm cells have come through, dumping heavy rain and splitting the sky with lightning and thunder, separated by calmer periods. The temperature now is below 20°C, which is a nice respite from the heat.

Tonight I started this week’s new ethics class topic, on “Opinions vs Facts”. I spent the morning writing up the lesson plan. The class went well, with some very interesting and nuanced discussion from the kids on the differences and similarities between opinions and facts in various tricky contexts.

New content today:

Public holiday, but I’m working

Since Australia Day was on a Sunday yesterday, the Monday is a public holiday. My wife had the day off work and spent time at home doing her watercolour artwork. While I didn’t have a day off at all, and did my usual 6 ethics classes!

There wasn’t much time for me to do much else. There was some light housework, cleaning a few things, doing cooking for dinner, and so on. But basically not much else. Oh, I did put in a little work on Darths & Droids, making a comic and reformatting part of the website to move the fan art stuff to the new bonus material area.

Oh, because my wife was home all day I also spent an hour or so removing photos from her phone, backing them up on my computer. Some of them went back about three years!

New content today:

Australia Day lunch

Today was Australia Day, the annual day when half of the country celebrates and other half wish that we were celebrating the occasion on a less controversial anniversary.

We hosted a lunch for my wife’s immediate family. We made some salads and roasted some chicken breasts to go on bread rolls. My wife also made a batch of brownies.

Over lunch we discussed our upcoming trip to Japan, and organised some planning details. I booked our tickets to Shibuya Sky, the observation deck to get a view over Tokyo. We wanted to get tickets for a bit before sunset, the best time to be up there. But even though the tickets only went on sale today for the day we want to go, when I logged in to buy them every entry time from 14:40 to after sunset was already sold out. So we settled for a 14:40 entry. Since there’s no time limit to your visit, we can choose to either stay for sunset, or leave a bit early after we’ve had enough.

Lunch took most of the afternoon and I went into ethics classes after that, so didn’t get much else done. Oh, in the morning I did a 5k run and had a shower afterwards, which consumed a big chunk of that time. So that was pretty much my day.

New content today:

Moving neighbours, booking Japan, games night

Yesterday I had my usual ethics classes during the day. I was also franticly updating the JR East website to see if I could buy tickets from Tokyo to Kawazu for our upcoming trip to Japan.

We’re planning to go to the Kawazu Cherry Blossom Festival, and the only day we can go is Monday 24 February. Which happens to be a public holiday in Japan. And over a million people go to this festival every year. And I’d previously checked about buying train tickets to get there from Tokyo, and seen that the JR East website only makes tickets available one month in advance. So on the 24th of January it was the first opportunity to buy tickets. I wanted to get them as quickly as possible to avoid missing out if the trains sold out.

But when I checked in the morning, I could still only buy tickets up to the 23rd of February. So I was intermittently refreshing the page, thinking it would probably tick over at some time during the day. 9am Japan time came and went, and still no change. I had to teach a couple of ethics classes, but sneaked in some updates. No change. But then after midday Japan time he site updated and I could book tickets!

I chose a train departing Tokyo just after 8am, arriving in Kawazu about 10:30, and a train returning at 15:44, getting back a bit after 18:00. I managed to book the tickets. But I noticed that the next two trains returning to Tokyo (about every half hour) had no seats available already by the time I’d finished! I suspect that given it’s a long weekend, a lot of people want to return to Tokyo that evening.

On Friday evening it was board games night at one of my friends’ place. I arrived while some of the others were playing a game of Landmarks, a new game for us. Since one person was giving clues and the rest of us were trying to solve them together, I could join in. In this game one player is trying to lead all the others across a hexagon map, by giving word clues. It starts with three hexes having words on them, and then the clue-giver attempts to direct the guessers where to place new hexes by writing related words on them. You should put them near hexes with related meanings and far from hexes with opposing meanings. It was tricky and we messed up several times, but ultimately managed to win by the skin of our teeth.

Our host made home made pork, fennel, and apple sausage rolls, which were delicious snacks.

Then we split into two groups since we had seven people. I played Root with two others, while the other four played Ticket to Ride: Europe. In the Root game, I played the Vagabond, with the others playing the Cats and Birds.

It was a very close game, with all of our points tracking one another closely throughout. But in the end the Cats prevailed. After this we rejoined groups for a big seven-player game of Apples to Apples to round out the night.

Today I went for a 5k run in the morning. I took it easy since I felt a bit tired, but was still pleased with my time. Then I cleaned the bathroom and shower while cooling off afterwards.

I’m making sourdough today and we didn’t have any bread left, so we walked up to the pie shop for lunch. Then later we went out again to do some shopping for lunch tomorrow, when my wife’s family are coming over. We’re just going to roast some chicken and make potato salad and a green salad.

On the way back we passed this brand new public art installation near the shops – it wasn’t there just a couple of days ago:

The bird in the statue’s hand looks like a tiny pelican. I’ll have to take a closer look another day to see if I can positively identify it.

New content yesterday:

New content today: