The Solar System

Today I had another science class with my online student from England, who I’ve been teaching intermittently for some months now. I decided we could move away from biology and start looking at some more astronomy. I prepared a lesson on the solar system this morning, pulling together lots of cool images form various space agencies and observatories. The great thing about these is that most are either in the public domain, or very liberally licensed, so fantastic images are easy to find and use, which is not the case for some other subjects.

And in between teaching that class and two more on the ethics of human rights, I got a message form a parent of a student who I had in ethics a few months ago saying that she was looking for a D&D group for her daughter and stumbled across my gaming group on Outschool. She signed her daughter up right away, and asked me if I had any plans to run actual game sessions in classes. That’s exactly what I plan to do some time in the near future! So I told her, and she said her daughter would be thrilled to be one of the first one to try my adventures online.

So that’s very cool – and it provides motivation for me to get this idea up and running as soon as I can. It will need to be after my trip to Germany in 2 weeks, but hopefully some time in July/August I can get it running.

New content today:

Scrambling with 2 weeks to go

I’m continuing to rush to get everything done that I need to do before we head overseas in 13 days. I worked on making several Darths & Droids strips today. I also had to wrap and package up some Planet of Hats original strips for a reader who bought them. I’ll be mailing those off on Monday.

I did some housecleaning. Went for a run to get some exercise for the first time in several days – it’s been way too cold and miserable to do it during the week past, but today was sunny and not so windy, and a touch warmer.

Tonight I boiled up another batch of my hoard of frozen bunya nuts and made pesto to have with pasta for dinner.

Oh, and here’s a photo of Scully I took last night at the Italian restaurant.

Scully at local Italian restaurant

New content today:

Comic crunching

Today I had a few chores to do: grocery shopping, tidying up some laundry.

And I spent some time working on writing Darths & Droids comics, to try to build up enough buffer to last through my upcoming trip to Europe in a couple of weeks. Two weeks from today I’ll be flying out to Germany for my next ISO Photography standards meeting. My wife is coming with me and we’ll be spending a few days sightseeing in the Netherlands afterwards before flying home.

That prior meeting online that I mentioned a few days ago turned out to be at 3 am in my time zone. I have no idea how the invitation managed to know that and convert the time zone. Anyway, the convener apologised for the inconvenient time for me and said it wasn’t essential that I attend, so I’ve sent my apologies.

Tonight is real life games night, but I’ve excused myself because I needed some time to relax and spend with my wife and do a few more tasks rather than spend the entire evening out. We went for pizza at our favourite local place. It was really cold, but nice to go out and have a walk.

New content today:

More marking – done!

I spent most of today marking those data engineering project reports from the university. I had reports to read through, and then presentation videos to watch. The videos were meant to be 15-20 minutes long, but some teams submitted longer ones – the longest was almost half an hour! I had to mark the reports and videos on 11 separate marking criteria,. assigning marks for each criterion and writing comments for each one. Then I had to paste all the comments and marks into separate fields in the university grading system, so 22 separate pasted entries for every student. Multiplied by 5 teams of 5 students each…

So that was about 2 solid hours of copy-pasting, at the tail end of all the reading, video watching, comment writing, and mark assigning. It was exhausting, and I’ve just finished now, after 10pm. But it’s done!

The only other things I did today were one online ethics class this morning, and then after that I took the car to get new tyres fitted. While it was in the tyre shop, I took Scully for a walk and got an early lunch at a patisserie about 20 minutes from the shop. And, um… that’s today.

New content today:

Report marking

I got stuck into marking final reports for the university data engineering course today. I’ve been putting these off because I’ve been busy with other things, but the deadline is Friday, so I really need to work on these now.

And it was really cold today. The forecast temperature would have made today the 4th coldest June day in the last decade, though it got a fraction of a degree higher at 14.8°C, so I’m not sure where we ended up in those terms. But it wasn’t only cold, it was very windy, with gusts over 70 km/h for much of the day.

I went out with my wife and Scully at lunch time for a quick trip to the post office, and it was pretty miserable out there, despite the sunny sky. Leaves were swirling everywhere and small branches were scattered around having snapped off trees all over the place. Scully didn’t like it much either and raced home.

New content today:

Ethics of human rights

It’s Tuesday, which means a new topic in my online ethics classes. This week we started on human rights. I spent this morning writing the lesson. I’m using a summarised version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as the introductory story to set up the discussion. (You kind of need to know the story to understand the following, so if you don’t know it, either go spoil yourself at the linked Wikipedia article, or ignore the next paragraph.)

After summarising the story, I asked: Is the city of Omelas fair to everyone? Most of the kids this evening gave the predictable, expected answer (“No”), after which I ask them to explain why they think so. But one kid said: “Well, it depends how they pick the kid. If someone just walks down the street and picks a kid they see, then that’s not fair. But if it’s done by spinning a wheel or something, then that’s fair.” I pursued this further by asking if it was fair in the sense that everyone is treated the same? The kid said, “Well… you could make it fair if the kid was released after a month or so, and they used a different kid. So everyone would have a turn being the one who has to suffer.”

The weather here has taken a very wintry turn. Yesterday evening we had a storm front come through with 110 km/h winds, causing some minor damage across the city. Today has been very windy and bone-chillingly cold. Tomorrow is expected to be even colder and with stronger winds. Across parts of south-east Australia we’ve had snow down to altitudes as low as 600 metres, which is unusual. The good news is that there hasn’t been much rain.

In other news, our electric kettle seems to have broken. That’ll be annoying until we can get a new one. We’ll have to boil water to make tea on the stove, like savages…

New content today:

Too much stuff to do

It’s late and I still haven’t really done as much as I wanted today.

I had an appointment at the optometrist to check my eyesight. My reading prescription hasn’t changed, which is good, and my distance vision is still excellent. And the retinal images and glaucoma test were both good. So that’s all good news.

New content today:

Not specifying a time zone

I have a meeting invitation in my email. It’s for an ISO photography standard technical meeting. The “When” field says:

Friday, 10 June 2022 3:00 am – 4:00 am

It doesn’t specify a time zone. So I’m not sure when the meeting actually is. It was sent by a guy in Helsinki. There are two somewhat plausible options:

1. It’s 3-4am Helsinki time (10-11am here). This would be my preference, obviously. It requires the odd choice of the organiser to schedule at 3am in his own time zone – but this is not beyond reason, as most of the people involved in the meeting are in Japan or the USA, and that time makes it a reasonable time of day for everyone else.

2. It’s 3-4am in my time zone (8-9pm Helsinki time). I find this less plausible, because I don’t know how the invitation could know what time zone I’m in. The organiser would naturally have selected his own time zone, and then got Microsoft Teams to send out the meeting invitations. But the invitation is going to my email address – and I don’t see how Teams could possibly know what time zone I’m in, so it shouldn’t be able to automagically convert the meeting into my time zone. And I’m not using a Microsoft mail client, so my mail client shouldn’t be trying to do anything “clever” and converting times in an MS Teams invitation into my own time zone.

I tried searching to find out, and I found two different contradicting answers on answers.microsoft! One said that Teams meeting invitations are in the time zone of the meeting convener, and another said that it automatically adjusts to the time zone of each invitee!

Either way…. the meeting invitation really should tell me what time zone the meeting time is in. Why does it not do that??

The gist of all this is that I had to send an email to the convener to ask what time the meeting is on, even though that information really should just be in the invitation.

New content today:

85% complete

The secret project is now 85% complete, after a hard day of working on it. Not long to go now!

At lunch I went on a long walk with my wife and Scully to the Italian bakery about 3 km away. They had a special today, which was a banoffee croissant. Imagine a pain au chocolat, with the addition of some sweetened mashed banana in the middle, drizzled with toffee on top, sprinkled with some of those tiny chocolate malt balls, and topped with dried banana chips. It was as delicious as it sounds! Alas I neglected to take a photo. I just hope that they have it again some time when I go back there.

New content today: