It’s virtual games night with my friends, and we’ve just completed our ongoing game of Forbidden Waters, which has taken us three session to finish. We cooperated enough to win the scenario as a group, but several of us ended up with individual bad story endings. In particular I was a seasick pirate, and I ended up sentenced to life in a floating prison, where I was sick every day.
The COVID news here was dire again, with 291 new cases, a new record high for the state.
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New South Wales recorded 262 new COVID cases in the last 24 hour period, a new record high since the beginning of the pandemic. Today’s press conference was an exercise in the politicians evading questions about further lockdown measures, and sticking to the single line that people should go get vaccinated as soon as possible. The Chief Health Officer stressed that people should get their second doses as soon as possible, to get protected as soon as possible, even if it sacrifices long term immunity by being less than the recommended wait between doses – since everyone is going to need booster shots in another year anyway.
Not wanting to take any more risks with disease than necessary, I contacted my vaccination clinic to see if I could move my second dose appointment up from 1 September. They gave me an 18 August booking, cutting 2 weeks off my wait. I really don’t want to end up being exposed somehow and getting COVID just days before being fully vaccinated.
Apart from that I mostly spent today jumping between writing Darths & Droids comics, and being distracted by my wife’s work-from-home IT hardware woes. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say that her being on the phone to IT support all day is more distracting than her regular work.
With Darths & Droids I set myself a target of writing and making 3 new strips. For the next part of the story I had to review our planning notes in some detail, which took some time, and then do some additional note making to tie things together a bit more, before starting to write. I did end up writing four new strips, but haven’t had the time to make any of them yet. So… partial success. Honestly, I’ve had less productive days when distractions and creative block have conspired.
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Today I had a couple of tasks with Scully in the morning. I needed to run an errand to pick up something first thing in the morning and took Scully with me for the walk. And then not long after I got back my wife had to leave for an appointment. We’ve found the hard way that if she leaves while I stay home with Scully, Scully cries and whines non-stop until either my wife gets home, or Scully finally gives up about an hour later. The simple way around this is if I take Scully on a short walk and my wife leaves while we’re out. Then when I return home with Scully and my wife isn’t here, she just settles down and is fine. Who knows what goes through a dog’s mind?
After that I knuckled down to write the lesson plan for my next week of online ethics classes. The topic this week is “Creators and their works”, probing questions such as:
I also had a contingency extension asking if it’s okay to use an invention or scientific breakthrough that was made by a bad person, and if that’s different to liking a work of art made by a bad person. And I explored whether the art form made a difference, in particular with the case of popular music, where people who like the music often also admire the band members, perhaps seeing them as role models, and if this is different to books or paintings, where the creator feels more distant.
And this evening I had two consecutive classes, rather than the one I’ve had on Wednesdays. I created a new Wednesday timeslot last week, and it filled to the capacity of four students by today! It seems my class is popular enough that I could probably keep adding new timeslots every week and keep having them fill up.
During the classes, I think this topic went more smoothly than last week’s on peer pressure. Last week I ended up with a lot of similar questions, and simple yes/no responses, and all the kids agreeing with one another. But today the questions were more open-ended and prompted more discussion, especially as in each class there ended up being some disagreements between the kids’ opinions. So I’m really happy with this one.
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COVID news: 199 new cases in NSW in the past 24 hour period. It’s dropped below 200, but may still be statistical fluctuation. At least it’s not growing rapidly, although secondary indicators show that our health system may be beginning to struggle. There are outbreaks in several hospitals, with dozens of medical staff now in isolation. And for the first time our contact tracers have been unable to do 100% follow-up of suspected COVID exposure contacts within 24 hours. If the contact tracing system starts failing, there will be more potential cases circulating in the community without isolating during their infectious period, and things could go south quickly.
Every day this past couple of weeks has felt like teetering on a knife-edge. All we can do is maintain distancing from all our friends and family, stay at home, and hope tomorrow’s news is better.
In a more positive piece of news today, Telstra (our major telecommunications carrier) has announced that from now on all payphones will no longer be “pay” phones – they are going to be free of charge. All calls to Australian land lines and mobile phones made from a public phone will be completely free. We still have around 15,000 public phones in Australia, because of a government requirement of Telstra to maintain infrastructure to allow convenient access to communication for all Australians. Public phones have become more scarce in major cities (although I know of several within walking distance of my home), but are still common in rural towns and Outback communities. In a somewhat uncharacteristic moment of civic generosity, Telstra has decided that they can afford to write-off the $5 million a year it takes to maintain the public phones, and simply allow anyone to make calls for free. I tried to find out if any other countries have made this move, but Google was particularly unhelpful with any search query I tried, so I don’t know.
I spent time today writing and making Darths & Droids comics.
But this evening I had a special ethics lesson, as part of the NSW Primary Ethics volunteer teaching that I would normally be doing eevery Wednesday morning at a local school. Those classes have not begun this term due to the Sydney COVID lockdown and schools being closed, so Primary Ethics has organised a series of Zoom classes for the volunteer teachers, led by a staff member who runs a class form the new high school ethics curriculum.
So tonight I joined a class of 16 teachers, and we answered questions based on the high school ethics topic of “The Meaning of Life”. A big question! This is a brand new topic, which hasn’t been trialled in high schools yet, due to the course only starting this year, and being interrupted by COVID. Obviously we weren’t going to actually come up with an answer to the meaning of life – the class was structured around pondering questions like: “Can there even be any simply definable meaning of life?” “If we could know the meaning of life, would it change how we behave?” and, my favourite, “Why did the aliens in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy go to such great lengths to try to find the meaning of life?” (really a proxy question for: Why do we try to figure out the meaning of life?)
It was fun, and it gave me some cool ideas for tackling a similar topic in my own online ethics classes.
Random photo I took while out walking around the neighbourhood yesterday:
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This evening was the first lecture and tutorial of the image processing course that I’ll be tutoring for this semester. I had a bit of a mad scramble today when I realised that I needed a Zoom account based on my new university email address, and also a Microsoft account with the same address for using MS Teams, and then realising I had no idea how to get them as the university domain had been reserved by the university with both Zoom and Microsoft, so I couldn’t just create a new account and choose my own password. I had to go via the university somehow.
In the end I figured out MS Teams, but I still haven’t figured out what to do about the Zoom account – I may need to contact the university IT department or something. Thankfully I could join the Zoom lecture as a guest, and told the lecturer my predicament (via email) and he let me in.
The first lecture was very introductory, and the tutorial segment was just the lecturer going through some basics of how to use MatLab. Next week we get stuck into some more meaty content, and the tutorial part will be the students doing exercises while I supervise and assist, mostly via MS Teams I think. There are 5 tutors and I think each will be assigned a subset of the students to look after, so I’ll have about 30-40 students to handle. So next week will be the real test of how well I do with this! Hopefully I’ll get a Zoom account sorted by then.
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It’s the 1st of August, the last month of winter here, and today it really felt like spring already. Sydney reached 25.6°C, and it was fine and sunny when I went out for a long walk around the neighbourhood with my wife and Scully. We chose a different direction today to our normal route, ending up out on the next peninsula along the harbour, where we did a short bushwalk along the water, on a narrow earth path through the trees, between the waterline and the rears of the houses up on the hill. We’re very fortunate in this area to have some beautiful walking tracks, among trees and away from roads, and often with great views of the water.
On our way home it clouded over dramatically and cooled down as a cold, windy change came through. It should cool down overnight and the next few days are going to be a lot colder.
Today I worked on some more of the Galactic Puzzle Competition puzzles with friends, and in between I wrote and made some Darths & Droids comics.
In COVID news, NSW recorded another 239 cases, the same as the record high set 3 days ago. (Yesterday we had 210 cases.) I’m really hoping this is a plateau and will start dropping soon, but we need to wait a few more days to see what the trend is.
It’s been a busy few days, with getting through all the stuff I need to do before starting my tutoring job tomorrow. It’s going to be interesting to see what it’s like in a Zoom class with 200 students! But the first class should be an easy introduction. The lecturer said it’ll just be him going over examples, and the students won’t start any independent work until next week, which is when I’ll really start doing things.
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Saturday… I had to complete the pre-job training I started yesterday. I was wrestling with trying to get the online training module loaded in Firefox, which was stated to be necessary because it didn’t work on Safari or Chrome. But My Firefox was refusing to let me log in, for a couple of frustrating hours until I realised I had JavaScript disabled. 🙄
Then I did the training which was supposed to take an hour, but ended up taking maybe 90 minutes.
And I’ve spent some time working on the Galactic Puzzle Hunt with friends. A bit too much time, perhaps…
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170 new COVID cases in New South Wales in the last 24 hours, which is a welcome drop from yesterday’s high. Fingers crossed that this is the start of a downward trend, although to be honest I’m not very confident about that.
I spent much of today doing administrative tasks for the new casual tutoring job that I applied for a few weeks ago. I’m now on the University of Technology Sydney’s staff list as a casual academic. I needed to sign a contract, submit a passport quality photo for a staff ID card/access pass, activate my staff email account, do an online training module on occupational health and safety, do another online training module on sexual harassment, update my academic qualifications in the human resources database, add emergency contact person details in the HR database, check my banking details were correct, and then check out the course outline and presentation materials for the course I’m going to be tutoring. At some point I should also download MatLab and try out some of the exercises. (Being a staff member gives me a MatLab licence!)
It’s a course on Image Processing and Pattern Recognition. The lecturer is an associate of mine from my previous job. My role is as one of the course tutors, giving advice and assistance on the subject to individual students during the practical work portions and the end of semester project. The course begins on Monday, running in the evening from 6-9pm. Normally it would be face-to-face at the university, but because of the current COVID lockdown in Sydney, it will be all online for the first few weeks at least.
Tonight is another virtual games night with my friends. We’re doing an Olympic themed night. Each one of us has picked a country and we’re recording firsts, seconds, and thirds in each game we play.
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It was really all about the COVID here in Sydney today. NSW recorded 239 new cases, which is now the highest number of cases reported in the state in a single day, beating the previous record of 212 which was set during the worst outbreak last year.
Today’s daily press conference was very raucous, with a lot of reporters asking why Sydney wasn’t locked down faster and harder, and if the government had failed. Victoria got up to a high of 723 cases in one day during Melbourne’s horror outbreak last year – exactly one year ago to the day. The Victorian government enacted the strongest lockdown measures Australia has seen, closing down basically every retail shop except supermarkets and pharmacies. We’re nowhere near that here in Sydney yet – cafes and restaurants are still open, albeit for take-away food only. The NSW Government is facing increasing criticism that it’s not doing as much as Victoria did last year.
Where we go from here, who knows? They’re saying they hope to be able to lift the lockdown restrictions by October. Hopefully, yes. But maybe we’ll have another Christmas where we can’t see our families.
More personally, my wife and I have a big significant wedding anniversary coming up before then. Originally our plan was to celebrate it with a trip to Europe. A month or so ago, I was looking into booking a fancy restaurant so we could at least have a nice dinner out. Now I think we may end up celebrating this anniversary sitting at home.
In other anniversaries, this sign has been in the lift of my apartment building for a year today:
In some final good news, it’s taken her over three years, but Scully has finally learnt the pleasure of snoozing in a winter sunbeam:
I’m very surprised she’s never done this before. I figured dogs would be like cats and be all over this, but I guess not.
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The temperature reached 25.4°C here in Sydney today, up to 26.6°C in inland suburbs. Which is lovely and warm for winter. It almost feels like winter is over and spring is on the way, but I suspect there’ll be some more cold weather in the next week or two still.
I went out for a walk at lunchtime with my wife. I’d dropped Scully at doggie daycare for some fun time with other dogs. We walked down to the harbour swimming baths at the end of a nearby headland, which is a substantial walk, and ate up her full lunch hour by the time we returned home. It was beautiful being out in the warm sunshine, and I didn’t take a jumper or jacket, just wearing short sleeves for the first time in a couple of months.
COVID news: 177 new cases in NSW, topping yesterday’s 172. I also received email from the market organisers of the Lindfield Market where I’m selling my photography – they’ve cancelled both the August and September markets, and are currently hopeful that October can go ahead. I’m not so sure if it will, but we’ll wait and see.
Speaking of extended lockdown and cancelling stuff… my wife and I have a significant round number wedding anniversary coming up soon. We’d planned a couple of years ago to schedule a trip to Europe around it, but obviously thats not happening. A while back I tried to find a nice restaurant so we could at least have a night out and enjoy some fine food. But now I’m thinking we’re most probably going to have to spend this anniversary sitting at home.
In good news, I ran my first ethics class today on the peer pressure topic. It went really well – I could see the wheels spinning in the kids’ minds as they thought about some of the questions I was asking them. And after the class one of the parents left my first written review on Outschool. I’ve had some 5 star reviews, but nobody has written a text review until now. And it was really good, saying how much her daughter loved the class and how they discussed the topics together afterwards, and she said she highly recommended it. So that was good!
Last night I started watching a new movie on Netflix: Blood Red Sky. (I only watched an hour of it before bedtime – I’ll try and finish it tonight.) It’s a horror movie, and it has an interesting premise, that I was getting into.
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