standards – dangermouse.net

Super busy week: Saturday

Today was the final day of the ISO Photography standards meeting, so I had to be up and ready to start by 7am again. The last day is easier as it’s administrative stuff and usually not technical discussion. In other business I suggested that we should establish formal liaison relationship with the W3C consortium, since they are doing work on defining a HTML canvas for display of HDR images, which is potentially overlaps with work we are doing on defining a format for HDR and wide colour gamut still images. We don’t want to be duplicating work, or worse, coming up with competing standards.

Once the meeting was over, I had to prepare for the 5th lesson of my course on Creative Thinking and game design. Because of student schedule changes it’s moved form Sunday to Saturday fo the final two weeks. I printed and cut out the Ruin the Wedding game, and played it a couple of times with my wife.

We discovered that it was far too easy to ruin the wedding, sending the bride home in disgust both times before most people even made it to the reception. There were also flavour issues with events written on the card that should really only happen at either the ceremony or the reception being playable when people were pretty much anywhere. So we brainstormed ways to fix these issues and the kids came up with some ideas that should work. I’ll make a new version of the game and we’ll do another round of playtesting and refining next week – and that’ll be the course done!

New content today:

Super busy week: Friday

It was another full-on morning of technical discussions in my ISO Photography standards meeting this morning, beginning at 7am and going a bit over time.

At lunch I went for a long walk with my wife and Scully, over to the Italian bakery a couple of suburbs over. I bought a small box of biscuits for dessert and snacks. This afternoon I had to go pick up our weekly groceries, as I couldn’t do it in the morning. And then we all went to the dog park to see the people and dogs there. My wife came with me as she’d taken the day off work, so she got to see some of the regulars and their dogs for the first time in a long time.

I saw this gull on the walk.

For dinner we went out to our favourite local pizza place, keen to give them some patronage after the long lockdown when restaurants were closed. The staff were happy to see us (and Sully) again.

Coming home I spotted this ringtail possum on a fence, though unfortunately it moved as the flash went off:

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Super busy week: Thursday

The early starts are starting to wear on me. The ISO Photography standards meeting this morning from 7am went the full scheduled time, to 10:30. However, I had an unfortunate Internet outage at a critical time near the end – I was in fact in the middle of making some technical comments on someone’s presentation when my Internet connection died. It didn’t come back for about 20 minutes, by which time the entire meeting was over for the day. I quickly emailed the chair and the presenter to explain what happened and give my comments. It was about experiments to work out a method for measuring image flare in cameras caused by light sources outside the camera’s field of view. The experimental data being presented were really interesting.

After that I took Scully for a walk, and then at lunch time I took her to doggie daycare for the afternoon. She hasn’t been in over two weeks, and we like her to go at least every week or two to get some fun playtime and socialisation with other dogs. She really loves going there, and is always keen to run inside. And she comes home exhausted!

This afternoon I did more marking for the university image processing course student assignments. And this evening it was more ethics classes. Thursdays I have my latest class, starting at 9pm. Given my week or early starts, I’m very tired and it was a bit of a struggle getting through it. I’m really more a morning person – I don’t work or concentrate well late in the evening.

Two more early starts to go…

Oh, a photo of storm clouds gathering over Sydney from yesterday:

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Super busy week: Tuesday

Today was the first day of my photography standards meeting, meaning I had to get up early. After that finished, I prepared some slides for tonight’s science lesson for my online student.

I made some pizza for dinner, and made a sourdough loaf for proofing overnight and baking in the morning.

And I’m trying to get to bed early, so I don’t have time to write much now…

New content today:

Trigonometric survey

In my friends’ Discord chat today one of them posed this:

Survey question. You’re doing a trigonometry question. It says you’re standing on a cliff 250m high looking at a rock that’s 450m away. Is 450m the hypotenuse or the base of the resulting triangle?

Just to be silly, I quickly drew this:

Trig drawing 1

But then another friend one-upped me with this:

Trig drawing 2

Incidentally, the original friend asked “Survey question” because he was surveying us to find out what we thought of this poorly framed high school maths question. A coworker had asked him for advice on what to advise his child while doing homework, and my friend decided to canvas for opinions. But at least two of us thought he’d said “Survey question” as a prelude to a question about surveying. English is funny sometimes.

This evening I had a Zoom meeting for ISO photography standards. This is an ad-hoc group meeting for one particular standard: ISO 15739 Visual Noise, held between the regular week-long digital photography meetings. The group of experts working on this particular standard have ongoing experimental work to discuss, so the project leaders organised this interim meeting to go through some technical details. We met for 90 minutes, and there was a lot of very interesting discussion. We agreed on the plan for further experimentation, which will be done hopefully it time for the next meeting in October.

For dinner tonight I varied my pizza making by trying out some calzones.

I filled one with spinach and ricotta, and the other with mushrooms and ricotta. I didn’t know how much the insides would cook in the oven, so I pre-cooked the spinach and the mushrooms, and that seemed to work well. I also made a tomato sauce with garlic, onions, and herbs for spooning on top.

They turned out really well! I was a little worried about the insides leaking in the oven, but they were fine, and delicious. My wife told me I can definitely make these again.

New content today:

Piratey games night

What did I do today?

I went to the supermarket to pick up my big weekly grocery shop, that I’d ordered online for fast pickup. This time I said I was “in my way” a good ten minutes before I left home, and when I arrived it was ready for me to grab and go, which was better than the waiting around I had to do last week.

I did discover a slightly annoying thing. The minimum order of green beans from the fresh vege section was 0.25 kg, so that’s what I ordered. It turned out to be about 5 times as many beans as I normally buy! We’ll be eating beans with a lot of meals over the next week. And… the same thing with mushrooms.

From 11 am I had a photography standards meeting. This is the Standards Australia meeting to follow-up from the international ISO meeting I attended last month. As the chair of the Australian committee, I presented a report on the international meeting for the benefit of the Australian experts. Our committee is doing really well, having grown in membership recently, so this is really satisfying work.

Then at 4 pm I had another ethics class, with the prejudice topic.

And now in the evening it’s virtual board games night with my friends. We started with a game of Nidavellir, which is one of our current favourites. And I actually won the game, although I’m not sure I have a good grip on the strategy yet. We’re now into our ongoing game of Forgotten Waters, that we started a few weeks ago.

In COVID news, NSW recorded 136 new cases, which sets another new record for the year. Case numbers have gone up alarmingly in the past two days, and the number of people infectious without being in isolation is going up too. It feels like the outbreak is slipping out of control, despite the current lockdown regulations. The lockdown was scheduled to end on 30 June, but I can’t see any way that it won’t be extended, and in fact tightened even further. I feel like the only thing we can do now is hunker down, avoid people, and wait for our second vaccinations.

New content today:

Photographing Lego and writing ethical dilemmas

My two big tasks for today were photographing the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, and writing a new lesson outline for the next week of online ethics classes.

I got stuck into the comic photographing early, after I’d finished breakfast. Normally a batch takes me all morning, finishing around lunch time, but I raced through it today and finished a bit early. This gave me time to take Scully for a walk and buy some milk which we needed.

And then I did a bit of administrative work for ISO photography standards. I forgot yesterday that I had to write some comments documents for a group of five photographic chemical standards which are up for renewal this year. These standards failed to be renewed because not enough countries indicated they were still using them, so now we have a ballot to object to their withdrawals, which was something that was agreed we should do during the meeting in June, since obviously a lot of people still do chemical based photography. Anyway, I had to pull out my wife’s laptop again because I had to write comments in MS Word.

That done, I turned to writing my lesson plan for the upcoming week of ethics classes I’m teaching, starting this evening. So I had a hard deadline of a few hours. I wrote a class about ethical consumerism, and during this evening’s class we discussed the ethics of developed nations asking tropical communities to cut down forests in order to grow cash crops such as sugar, coffee, and palm oil. We went from there to product choices in supermarkets, and pondering whether ingredients should be labelled with source information, so consumers can choose products with awareness of such issues.

Last week in this timeslot I had only one girl in the class, but today there were two new students, and it was a nice variety of opinions. One was pretty adamant that companies should be forced by law to label products sourced from ethically questionable practices, and that people not buying those products would effectively stop the practices, while another kid was of the opinion that companies should not be forced to do anything, but rather provided incentives such as lower tax if they use ethical sourcing, and that consumers boycotting products was pointless because not enough would ever do so to have any effect. So it was a good class!

New content today:

Comics and Standards reporting

I did two main things today: Finished writing that batch of new Irregular Webcomic! strips, and wrote a report on the ISO Standards meeting I attended a few weeks ago. There’s not too much to say about the first, except that finished the batch, so I’m ready to do the photography first thing tomorrow.

The second: I have to write a report on each international standards meeting I attend, to deliver to Standards Australia, and then go through with Australian experts during a follow-up meeting. We have that meeting next week, so it was time I wrote up the report. It’s a little tricky because the template I have to use is a Microsoft Word template, but I don’t have Word on my Mac. Apple’s Pages will open the document, but it gets the formatting badly wrong – so badly that it’s impossible for me to edit the document in Pages. So I have to edit it in Word. My wife has Word on her laptop since she needed it for work purposes – so I’m not about to pay for another license to put it on my desktop. So… I have to set up file sharing between the two machines, transfer my docs to the laptop, edit in Word there, then export to PDF and then transfer the lot back to my desktop. Which is why I tend to put off the task until I can’t any longer.

Anyway, it’s done now, so I can breathe easy again for a while.

For dinner tonight I tried a new recipe, from a TV show I saw a few weeks ago. They have the recipe online, so I can just link to it for you: Forever-roasted pumpkin with lemon pepper butter. I tried to find curry leaves in my supermarket, but they didn’t have them, so I settled for sage instead. It turned out delicious, although an entire half butternut pumpkin was very filling as a meal for me and my wife. Next time I’ll do half as much, and serve it with a light side dish.

We both separately tried taking Scully out in her new doggie-carry backpack today. She’s a little tricky to get in, being a bit squirmy, but once tucked into the pack she settles down nicely and really seems to enjoy the ride. We want to keep using the backpack regularly so she gets used to it and sees it as something totally normal.

New content today:

Closing the ISO meeting

It was back to work today after the long weekend for my wife. This gave me time to work on catching up on Darths & Droids writing to repopulate the buffer. I want to get several strips in reserve because next week I have surgery to remove my tonsils (mentioned previously), and I’m not sure how productive I’ll be able to be for the few days afterwards. Surgery is never fun and I’m not looking forward to it.

This afternoon I took Scully to the dog park. It was a chilly day, and partly cloudy, and as the afternoon passed it threatened rain. Fortunately the rain didn’t develop while we were out at the park, but the clouds were dramatic and illuminated beautifully when the sun approached the horizon.

With sunset being around 5pm here at the moment, it’s starting to get dark by the time we head home from the dog park. I always look forward to the winter solstice and knowing that the sunlight hours are starting to get longer again.

New content today:

Last late night and market day

Last night was the last of five late nights of Zoom meetings for photography standards. The session again began at 23:00 and ended a few minutes late, after 02:30. The wrap-up session is administrative stuff, going over results from the technical discussions, action items, and setting up the next meeting, which will be in October. One important issue was deciding on a response to the Chinese notice of intention to start working on photography related standards within the International Telecommunications Union. I won’t go into details here, but we’re putting on the diplomatic cotton gloves because this is potentially a large issue.

I slept in to 08:00 this morning, but then had to get up to prepare for the day at Turramurra Market. I’d driven most of my stock out yesterday evening and set it up in the venue (which is locked up overnight). So this morning I basically only had to show up on time, and set up a small amount of additional stock that I brought on the second trip. My wife and Scully came along, so she could sell her doggie bandanas as well.

The market was… small. Very small. Smaller than I expected. There were just nine stalls, including mine. Lindfield has about 50 stalls, and Kirribilli which I did twice has close to 200, and of course correspondingly higher traffic. People did come through regularly, but there were never any significant numbers – maybe a maximum of 8 or 9 people browsing at any one time, and dropping down to virtually zero at times. I sold a few greeting cards, but not enough to make a profit on the stall rental. And we are booked to do it again tomorrow. Hopefully more people will come through on the Sunday.

Our stall was next to a woman selling biscuits. She had a small baking company, making shortbread style sweet and savoury biscuits. Food stalls always do well. People walk past my photography stall and have a glance and, no, they don’t have any use for greeting cards or a wall hanging. But everyone eats. So she was selling biscuits hand over fist. In between we chatted and she was telling me stories about her life and travels around the world. It was good, because it helped to pass the time in which there were no customers!

When the market closed up for the day we came home, and then went out for dinner at a local Greek restaurant. After a long week, I really felt like relaxing and having a nice dinner that I didn’t have to cook. Just the market tomorrow to go, and then I can really relax next week.

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