food – dangermouse.net

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.

Drying out; phone birding

Friday was wet again, but the rain stopped early in the afternoon and by nightfall the sky was clear. I actually saw stars when taking Scully out before bedtime.

I had my usual ethics classes, and in the evening was online board games night. We played games of Mountain Goats, Jump Drive, Settlers of Catan, Just One. We played five games of Jump Drive, and I did miserably in the first four. And then I thought I was going to win the fifth game, as I was ahead by several points and could reach the winning score of 50 points in my next turn… but one of my friends managed to score much more than I did on the last turn and beat me by one point!

Today was sunny! No rain! I think we were up to something like the past 5 weeks having only 4 non-rainy days. Everyone was well and truly sick of the rain. But today was beautiful – blue skies, a little warmer, and humidity down around 50% instead of 80-100% like it has been for weeks on end.

My wife and I took Scully for a walk down to the harbour side park near our place. Scully ran around and chased a tennis ball, and then I spent some time photographing birds. I only had my phone, but it was good enough to get the following photos.

Laughing kookaburra:

Masked lapwings:

Australian wood ducks:

White-faced heron:

And an Australian magpie spotted on the walk back home:

This evening we went out for dinner to Garfish, a nice seafood restaurant. We really like this place, but don’t go too often as it’s a bit pricey. The salt and pepper squid appetiser is really good, but this time I tried a new menu item: battered zucchini flowers stuffed with snapper and prawn.

And for the main dish I had grilled mirror dory with mash, spinach, and kaffir lime beurre blanc.

All really nice.

Did I miss yesterday?

I’ve realised with some shock that I totally forgot to write up a blog post yesterday. I don’t know what happened – I must have got distracted around my usual evening routine and it slipped my mind and I went into autopilot mode and never got back to it. Oh well.

Yesterday wasn’t especially interesting anyway. The most noteworthy thing was that it rained most of the day. We’re in a very wet spell, which is supposed to last another week or so. I did venture out in the car to a kitchen shop to buy an induction plate for our stove top. My wife bought a small Italian coffee maker, the sort that you put on a stove top to boil the water and it percolates up through the coffee grounds. We had an old aluminium one, but since it didn’t work on induction we got rid of it when we switched from gas to induction. My wife found one with a steel base that claimed to work on induction cookers, but it turned out to be too small to be detected by our cooktop, and didn’t work. You can buy these steel plates with a handle that you stick on the induction zone and it gets hot, and you can put the coffee pot on top, and it works! So she tested that and it works a treat.

For dinner I cooked spaetzle, and decided to make a cheese sauce to go with it, kind of like macaroni and cheese. I’ve never cooked mac and cheese in my life before, so I had to look it up. But when I found a recipe that said it was basically just a roux-based cheese sauce, I knew what to do without any further help. It turned out pretty good, although I made too much sauce!

Overnight I had an interesting dream: I was a scholar studying appearances of mysterious chefs throughout history, as documented by contemporary accounts. A chef who would suddenly appear out of nowhere with an assistant, cook amazing and revolutionary recipes for the poor and then vanish without a trace. I concluded they were all the same chef time travelling through history. Then one day as I was studying this, the assistant appeared and said he had come to take me back through time, because I was the mysterious chef, since I’d studied and learnt all of the original recipes that I’d introduced to the world.

Today my wife had the day off, so this morning we walked up to the nearest pre-polling centre for Saturday’s election.

Unfortunately I misread the rain radar and it was absolutely pouring for the 20-minute walk to the polling place. By the time we got there, my trousers were soaking wet from the thighs down, my socks and shoes were soaking wet – despite using an umbrella. But we voted, and won’t have to do it on Saturday, when it might possibly be pouring just as much and when everyone else will be voting. Fortunately the rain stopped while we were voting, and the walk home was dry.

For lunch we drove over to Two Chaps at Marrickville. This is a fantastic vegetarian cafe we’ve been to a few times. I tried the hash browns with poached eggs and mixed greens:

My wife had the sourdough crumpets with baked cauliflower, almonds, and capsicum sauce:

Yeah, they both taste as amazing as they look!

Last night I had the first class for this week’s new ethics topic, Flight, and tonight three more. It’s an interesting one, as we talk about the history of light and possible futures where we consider if people will have to fly less to help reduce climate change, and the challenges that might pose.

The joy and despair of roast vegetables

I’ve realised that although I love roast vegetables, the reason we seldom have them is because I really hate cooking them. I find it unenjoyable to make roast vegetables, compared to cooking most other things.

My wife and I were talking today about what to make for dinner to go with the last slices of leftover lentil loaf from Easter lunch. She suggested roasted vegetables: potato, pumpkin, onions, the usual sort of thing. My heart sank.

I’m not even sure why I dislike making roast vegetables. It’s not like it’s difficult or time consuming, other than just waiting for the oven to cook them. There’s something about all the oil, and the mess in the roasting pan… I don’t know. I love eating roast vegetables, but I really really dislike making them.

Anyway, my wife decided to take the reins and do the cooking tonight. So I got to eat roast vegetables without having to prepare them! So that was pretty good. She was home today because of the Easter Monday public holiday, and in fact only has three days of work this week due to Anzac Day being on Friday.

This evening I completed the last two ethics classes on the “Memories” topic. I did the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm experiment results with all my classes, and now that the topic is completed I can report the final result: 33/47 kids said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” on a slide that did not include that word. So that’s over 70% success rate in giving them a false memory, compared to a reported rate of about 44% for tests over many subjects. I saw that it’s more likely to work with adults and less likely to work with children, so my result is a little against the trend. But of course the numbers are not really high enough to make any significant conclusion, other than yes, it really is easy to induce false memories in people.

I claim this is ethical because I explain to the kids afterwards what happened, and how it works, and we discuss the consequences of the fact that our memories are unreliable, and how we should take this into account in our lives. It was a really good topic!

Missed Monday and a special seaplane lunch

Wow, Monday was so busy that I didn’t even realise I forgot to post aa blog entry until my wife asked me a short time ago, “Did you post on your blog yesterday?” It wasn’t exciting-busy, it was just a lot of online ethics classes, and walking Scully, and cooking dinner, so not really much to write about. Which is maybe why I forgot it.

Today, however, we had a special day out. My wife had the day off work and we booked a restaurant for lunch. A nice one, on the harbour shore, with a view. Unfortunately the weather turned overnight and it was chilly and cloudy and windy, but not uncomfortably so from our table on the wharf.

The restaurant is the Empire Lounge, at the Sydney Seaplanes terminal in Rose Bay. This is the only seaplane terminal in Sydney Harbour and they do scenic flights over Sydney, as well as shuttle services to some locations just north of Sydney where there are fancy secluded waterside restaurants that have a seaplane wharf for guests. There are no actual destinations that the seaplanes fly to, as they’re just not practical for any destinations within range. But the site was the old terminal for Sydney’s first international airport, receiving the Empire Flying Boat service from Southport in England, which took ten days to reach Sydney.

For lunch we had some of the hummus with focaccia to start:

Then I had the pan-fried snapper (with a side of green vegetables shared with my wife, no shown):

And for dessert a baked cheesecake:

The meal was pretty good, everything tasty and delicious.

Back at home I did some story planning stuff for Darths & Droids. I tried to write a new strip, but needed to work on background material to get the story arc straight in my head first, and also look up some old strips for continuity.

This evening I had the first class in the new week’s ethics topic: Memory. I have some interesting questions about reliability of memories. I used the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm test, showing a set of words related to sleep, but not including the word “sleep”. And then hid the words after about 15 seconds and asked the kids what words they remembered. The very first word “remembered” was “sleep! I wasn’t sure how well the test would work in getting them to remember something they never even saw, but it was very successful.

On TV, I’ve started watching the new season of Black Mirror. I really like this series, but with the first new episode I got a feeling of dread, like it was giving companies ideas, kind of like the infamous Torment Nexus. … Time to watch another one!

Sunday brunch and Incognito art

This morning I got up a bit early and did my 5k run. I needed to go early because I had to cool down and have a shower and change in time to walk up the street with my wife to meet up with her mother and brother for a morning tea at a local cafe. Although I’d had quick breakfast before my run, I was hungry after the exercise and turned it into a brunch by ordering the French toast, which came loaded with maple syrup, berry compote, and melted white chocolate. My brother-in-law joined me for a substantial brunch as he hadn’t had breakfast yet, while the others had lighter snacks.

When we got home I did some comics stuff and got ready for my ethics classes, beginning from 4pm today. And I made some green curry broccoli and rice for dinner.

My wife has been making some artworks to send off for an anonymous fundraising art event, called the Incognito Art Show. Anyone can register and submit up to three pieces of original art, which are then displayed online, and selected works in a public display gallery. People can buy the art without knowing who made it, which is only revealed after purchase. You can view and buy art online if you wish, and they ship internationally, so if you’re interested you might want to check it out. The artworks aren’t viewable or buyable yet because they’re still accepting submissions, but they will go on display from 26 May and on sale from 31 May.

Pretty cool!

Roti pies and German smallgoods

After breakfast this morning I went for a 5k run.It was a bit warmer and more humid than last Saturday, but I ran a similar time, so I’m happy with that. Although I was pushing hard and thought I’d done a bit better than that.

We made a special expedition for lunch today, driving all the way to Narrabeen, in the northern beaches region of Sydney, to try a new place that has really good reviews for their pies: Roti Pies.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it turns out the pies are pretty much exactly that. The crust is made just like Indian roti, and the fillings are all various Indian curries. My wife tried the cauliflower & chick pea korma pie, while I had a butter chicken pie and a lamb achari pie. They were really delicious, and the unusual roti pie crust was amazing with the spicy and juicy fillings. They leaked a bit, and it was a bit messy, but we sat at one of the outdoor tables there and had plates to catch it all, so it was fine.

After this, we went two doors down to a gelato shop and I had scoops of apple pie and coconut, cherry, chocolate gelato. I ate it as we crossed the road to walk along the grassy patch by the lagoon there, which was nice, and gave Scully a chance to walk on the grass a bit.

On the way back to the car we passed Brot & Wurst, a German smallgoods and grocery shop. We browsed around all of the cool stuff and bought a few things: German mustard, pfeffernusse gingerbread, stroopwafels, and a bottle of gluhwein syrup for mixing with red wine to make gluhwein. That should be nice with winter on the way!

Speaking of which, the weather still seems warm, with temperatures around 26-28°C during the day still. But there are signs of autumn, with the London plane trees lining many streets starting to go brown. The Bureau of Meteorology has released the long range winter forecast, predicting it will be another very warm winter, following on the last two which were the warmest two winters on record for Sydney. This one is likely to be similar again.

For dinner tonight I made calzones: one mushroom and one spinach, which I split and my wife and I had one half of each, with a basil and oregano tomato sauce that I whipped up.