food – dangermouse.net

New restaurant for dinner

Not much to report today. I did four critical thinking classes in the morning, had some lunch, and prepared the new topic for the next week, on Bikeshedding, or really a simplified version involving “thinking about the wrong thing”.

Then late in the afternoon I took a train into the city for this evening’s Image Processing tutorial at the university. The students are into their project preparation work, and will be submitting the first of two reports this Friday, followed by three more weeks of working on the projects.

Before the class, I went to a new place for dinner, called A Bowl of Noodles. It’s Shanghainese food, with an extensive menu and very good online reviews. I tried the fried pork chop with rice cakes, which was pretty good, but I’m keen to go back and try some other things.

When I sat down at one of the outside tables (since it was a nice evening), there was a woman there already, with a bowl of noodles and a bottle of Asahi beer. She looked like a student. As I waited for my meal to arrive, a waitress brought her a plate of six steamed buns. And then a few minutes later another plate of eight fried dumplings. The waitress looked a bit confused, like there’d been some mix-up with the order, and was about to take the plate away again, but the woman said, “Yes, I ordered all of this. I’m hungry.” And she gave the waitress her empty beer bottle and ordered two more beers! She wasn’t overweight, either, so I guess she must just have a fast metabolism or something.

Cleaning the garage

This morning my wife suggested we go to a food and wine festival, which was being held at a suburb about 25 minutes drive away. Different parts of Sydney have various local festivals throughout the year, and spring is a favourite time for them. We got there early, just as it opened at 10:00, and it wasn’t too busy, which was good. It would have been crowded at lunch time.

There were food trucks and a couple of dozen stalls from different wineries showing off their wines and selling glasses and bottles, and several stalls with small businesses selling things like jars of jam, chilli sauces, sweets, nuts, etc. There were also some general market stalls selling handicrafts, clothes, plants, and so on. It wasn’t huge, and we walked around all the stalls in maybe half an hour. My wife got an açai bowl with fruit and grains. I considered getting some dumplings but the serving size was too large for a snack, and I didn’t feel like a full meal an hour before lunch time.

We came home via The Flour Shop, a bakery nearby which we’ve been to once before and it was awesome. It was again so today. I got a pastrami, jalapeño, and cheese pastry, which was delicious, and a coconut puff to take home for dessert tonight.

After getting home, I cleaned the garage. This is part of the overall ongoing spring cleaning leading up to the grand repainting of our home in October. We’ve been rearranging stuff and throwing things out and now we are moving some things into storage in the garage, so instead of just chucking it down there I thought we needed to clean it properly. I swept and vacuumed the garage floor, removing a layer of grimy black dust, then wiped down any horizontal surfaces on top of storage boxes and the steel cabinets we have in there, before throwing out some stuff and rearranging things to be neater and more compact.

It took about four hours of work overall, but now the garage is clean, as in not dusty, and also tidy. A tough job, well done. It was really dirty though, as I hadn’t given it a dusting for a few years. Real grime-under-the-fingernails dirty, requiring several hand-washings. And a lot of moisturiser afterwards to smooth the dried skin.

Student image processing projects underway

Today was the usual busy Monday, with 4 ethics classes in the morning, then a bi of a break before heading into the city for the evening’s image processing session. The lectures are now over and we’re into the student project phase for the next few weeks. This is where most of the work for me is, where I spend the whole evening wandering around, checking how student groups are going, and answering their questions about the project in general or whatever specific image processing thing they’ve decided to work on.

For dinner before the session, I tried a place I haven’t been to before, called Yumko Korean Fried Chicken. They had a “lunch special” bento box which you could also have for dinner, with pieces of fried chicken, salad, rice, and a selection of three appetiser dumplings. It was really good, and very filling.

Another long run on a busy Monday

Monday… 4 critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I had lunch, and then went for a run. I ran 7.5 km today, trying to keep up this new habit of doing longer than 5k at least once a week.

Then I had a shower, and it was almost time to head into town for my university teaching. I went in and tried a new place for dinner called Cheeky Bao, which does bao bun burgers, an interesting fusion of Asian and Western cuisine. I tried the Korean fried chicken burger, but only discovered after it arrived that this wasn’t one of the signature bao bun burgers – it came on a regular style bun. Oh well, it was still good.

The lecture tonight was on machine learning classification for image recognition. Pretty easy for me as the tutorial section was more a demo than questions for the students to work through, so I didn’t have to do as much interaction as usual.

Finally getting ahead on comic production

I put in a few hours today in writing and making new Darths & Droids comics, trying to build up the buffer a bit. I’ve been doing them close to the last minute ever since I got back from Europe a few weeks ago, and wanted to get ahead again. I’m a couple of strips ahead now, which is good.

I realised I forgot to mention another thing I did yesterday, which was to file our tax returns for the last financial year. I’m still impressed by how fast it is these days, with the new automatic recording of everything relevant. It used to take hours to do it but now it’s just click a few buttons, enter a deduction or two, and you’re done in 10 minutes.

Today we went for a walk with Scully, about 11:00. We went to a cafe so my wife could get coffee, but I decided to get an early lunch, or brunch or whatever you want to call it. I don’t normally eat sweet things for breakfast, so this was a rare chance to get something like that, and I decided to order waffles. which came with banana, strawberries, and melted chocolate drizzled all over. They were really good, but loaded with sugar! I think it’s a good thing I don’t eat stuff like this much. (I think I can probably count the number of times I’ve eaten waffles in my life on my fingers.)

While sitting there we both did some sketching. I started drawing a car on the street, intending to make it a scene including the cafe tables, but I made the car a bit big and couldn’t fit any tables into the drawing! It went kind of wonky with the perspective too, so I’m not keen to show this one off.

For dinner tonight I made okonomiyaki, which I’ve been kind of craving for a while, but had to buy the sauce last week. Healthier than waffles!

One step back

My recovery from jetlag took a slight backwards step after the previous night’s good sleep. I did sleep more than I have been for the past week, but woke up a few times and tossed and turned a bit, but did eventually drift back off. But I felt much better during the day today; I didn’t get a strong tired spell mid-afternoon. So hopefully things are rejigging into place.

I worked on my new week’s ethics lesson plan. This week we’re going to discuss predictions, ranging from fortune tellers, to weather forecasts, to eclipses. Thinking about how reliable different sorts of predictions are and why, and how you can tell the difference. And the importance of predictions in everyday life, for example: Will that car hit me if I cross the road now? Where is the ball going and where should I run to kick it? How long is my homework going to take to finish? What is my chess opponent going to do? Should I take an umbrella today?

In other teaching news, I got contacted by CSIRO about hooking up with a new partner school for their STEM Professionals in Schools programme. The teacher at the school I visited a few times last year lost contact and apparently left the programme, so I was waiting for them to find me another nearby school to go to. They’ve partnered me up with Wenona, a girls’ high school not far from home, a little closer than Loreto actually. I’ve reached out to the contact teacher there by email, and hopefully will get a response soon and set up a meeting.

Scully and I went on a couple of walks. Returning from the second one, we bumped int our new neighbours in the hallway. They’ve had workers in today installing new timber flooring. They asked me about the locations of the gas meters, since they have a natural gas company rep coming tomorrow to read the meters prior to initiating a new account for them. And they said the renovation work should be completed by Friday, and they are moving in on Saturday. It’s a youngish couple, maybe late 20s or early 30s. They also said hi to Scully, though they weren’t super enthusiastic dog-lover racing over to skritch her. Though it might have been the fact they were both holding large boxes of renovation material.

For dinner I made cauliflower steaks, which are all the rage in vegetarian circles at the moment. Simple sliced a cauliflower into thick slabs, roasted it in olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper until it was going crispy, and served it with a tahini and lemon sauce and a side salad. Very delicious.

Fixing broadband… and glasses. And some nice food

Friday was online games night with my friends. After a busy day of ethics classes, and going for a 5k run in between.

In one of my classes, since we were talking about the topic of Science Fiction, the idea of AI came up, and what sort of things it might do in the future. One kid said:

Whenever I talk to ChatGPT, I use “please” and “thank you”, to make sure it doesn’t turn against me in the future.

My 5k run was very fast. The day was cold, only 14°C when I did my run around 11am. It meant I didn’t get hot and sweaty, and I managed my second best time ever for the distance, with 26:18. I was very pleased with that.

After lunch I went to pick up my new prescription glasses for use when working at the computer. I mentioned on Tuesday that they’d put the wrong prescription in, making them for close reading instead, and had to change them. I tested them out at the optometrist and they felt better, being good for reading something held with my arm fully outstretched. But when I got home I discovered that they were still focused too close. I had to lean forward uncomfortably in my chair from my regular posture to see the screen clearly. I used a tape measure to measure the distance from the screen to my eyes. The optometrist had said that screen-reading glasses are set for focus at 60cm. Which I discovered to be roughly true, in fact it was closer to 55cm where I felt my vision was clearest. But then I sat in my normal computer posture and measured the distance from the screen to my eyes, and it was 70cm. By the time I figured this out, it was after 5pm and the optometrist had closed for the day.

We stayed in for dinner and I made frittata with mushroom and tomato. After that I played online games. We played Knarr, Welcome to the Moon, Jump Drive, FLip 7, CodeChains (a game one friend invented and implemented on a Discord bot; it involves linking pairs of words into chains and then everyone trying to guess the same word that is being clued by both words on either side of every link), Just One, and Word Traveller. A lot of short games for variety.

First thing this morning I phoned the optometrist about my glasses and explained the problem. I said I didn’t want the second pair that I’d left there yesterday made with the same prescription – I needed it balanced to focus an extra 10-15cm away. They asked me to come in so they could check my eyes with the proposed correction to ensure right distance.

So after my wife returned from the gym with the car, I drove over to the optometrist. They remeasured my eyes to make sure and got the same refractive error, then wrote a prescription for new lenses to set a focal distance at 70cm as I requested. They said they’d get my second pair made with the new prescription and when they are ready I can swap the first pair back for new lenses. Fortunately this is under warranty so it won’t cost me any extra!

On the way home I stopped off at the Italian cake shop to pick up a cake to take to my mother’s place this afternoon. I got a chocolate and hazelnut torte. And then after my wife got home with Scully from her dog grooming appointment, we bundled into the car for the long drive to my mother’s place.

We arrived just before 3pm. My mission was to configure their broadband Internet and VOIP phone, which had stopped working when we deactivated their previous ISP account, as I mentioned on Thursday. I prepared by printing out a bunch of configuration info from the new ISP.

When we got there, I checked the ports of the modem/router. The phone was plugged into the only VOIP socket. The broadband was plugged into the second of 4 LAN ports. I moved it to the first LAN port, and bingo, the Internet came on! I could browse websites and access my mother’s email. That was easy.

But the VOIP phone still wasn’t working. I had some configuration information to enter into the modem, changing the old ISP server and proxy settings and entering a new VOIP password. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to work. I fiddled around a bit with it, but after a few minutes decided to contact the ISP phone tech support. I chose the new ISP for my mother because I’ve been very happy with their support on my own account, and they were brilliant again.

I got a very helpful guy who did some remote diagnosis stuff and then asked what router I was using. I said it was one supplied by the previous ISP. He said it’s possible that the VOIP was locked to that ISP and I’d need to get a new router, but he’d try a few things first. After changing some settings fruitlessly, he put me on hold while he contacted a co-worker with more experience, and together they did more diagnostic stuff and we explored the modem/router’s advanced settings. Eventually he tried turning off the firewall and lo! The phone started working! Aha! The other guy said the router’s default firewall settings were extremely restrictive, and it wasn’t letting the VOIP port through. They asked if I was okay leaving the firewall off, and I sort of hemmed and hawed and said I’d feel better if it was on. So they went back into the configurations and set up a firewall pass-through for the VOIP port, turned the firewall back on, rebooted the modem, and voilà!

We tested the phone, dialling out (to my wife’s mobile), and in (from my wife’s mobile) and it worked with no further problem. Phew! The tech support was really good. They had two of them on my call for over an hour, and they were determined to find a way to get it working without me having to go buy a new router. So kudos to Aussie Broadband – highly recommended if you’re after an Australian ISP.

We left my mother’s place later than we’d expected, and got hungry on the way home. We decided to stop at a place soon after we got off the freeway and back into Sydney’s outer suburbs (still half an hour drive from home). We went to Kipling’s Garage Bar at Turramurra, a place we’ve been to a couple of times before. We had a few tapas-style dishes to share, including arancini balls, and pulled duck with sesame chips:

And roasted cauliflower tacos:

Also some backed haloumi and for dessert a sticky date pudding. All really good. Then it was a drive back home for the evening.

A decadent dinner out on a school night!

Today I spent most of the day marking university assessments for the Data Engineering course. I started a few days ago and wanted to finish it off today. I had a report to read through and then three presentation videos to watch and assign marks for. It took much of the day.

I had a break at lunch to take Scully out. I didn’t mention that last Friday I went for an annual checkup to the optometrist, and I got a new prescription for glasses to wear while using a computer screen. I left one pair of glasses there to get new lenses made, and they said this morning they were ready to pick up. But when I got there and tried them on, it we immediately clear that they’d been made for book reading distance, not computer screen distance. They checked and sure enough the wrong prescription had been used. So I had to leave the glasses there and take my second pair back home again. I’d intended to swap them and have the prescription updated in the second pair as well. Oh well.

I grabbed some sushi rolls for lunch and sat with Scully in the nearby park while I ate.

In the afternoon I realised we didn’t have enough fresh vegetables at home to really cook anything interesting. So I took Scully out for another walk and we went to the local neighbourhood supermarket. On the way we walked past this vacant lot, where a house was standing just a week or two ago:

They demolished and removed that sucker really quickly! Presumably a new, more modern house will be built there soon. It’s a nice bit of land, on the top of a hill with a view south towards the city. The centre of Sydney is just out of sight behind the other house to the left, but you’d have a good view of it from a rear balcony on a house on this block.

I bought mushrooms from the supermarket, but when my wife got home this evening, I was feeling a bit uninspired to cook anything and I suggested we do something wild, that we never normally do: eat out on a mid-week night! I suggested we drive over to our favourite French crêpe and galette place. She liked the sound of that, so we hustled over there. Being a Tuesday night, it was nice and quiet. I had a “terre et mer” galette, with chorizo, garlic prawns, cheese, and cherry tomatoes:

With a traditional cup of French cider. It was delicious, and felt really decadent, having a fancy restaurant meal on a weeknight. We also shared a salted caramel sauce crêpe for dessert, which was also great.

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!

Eclipse, by Moon Phase

Today was really chilly. Overcast, but no rain, a bit windy, and it really felt like winter is here.

After my morning ethics classes I took Scully for a walk and we went up to Moon Phase, the Korean patisserie. I’d had a sandwich at home and was on the prowl for something sweet, and they had a new special pastry today. I give you, Eclipse:

It’s a crisp flaky pastry shell, filled with yuzu curd (a little bit visible below the meringue), small cubes of yuzu jelly, on top of a very crunchy almond layer which was kind of halfway between a cookie and almond brittle. The whole thing topped with soft meringue and various garnishing bits. It was really nice. I like lemon meringue tarts as a matter of course, and this was just elevated to a whole new level. The bakers there really are something special.

One of my friends is currently in Vilnius in Lithuania. He’s flown there with two friends to follow the tour of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, a band from Melbourne who are touring eastern Europe. He arrived yesterday and today was the only day of their ten-day trip on which they will not be attending a concert by the band – and he said he and his friends ran into the band while walking around Vilnius, and had a chat with them!

And in minor website news, I cleaned up the sidebar on the left ⬅️, removing some out of date links and adding my Bluesky account, and updated the full index page as well.