Tag: weather

Hot day, morning walk

The heatwave continues with parts of Sydney almost reaching 40°C today. It was a bit cooler near the coast, thankfully.

To avoid the midday heat, I decided to take Scully on a long walk first thing in the morning, even before I had breakfast. I had a half-formed plan to maybe grab some food on the way, but when we arrived at The Grumpy Baker all the outside tables were taken and the only decent options were the hot pies and rolls, which I didn’t feel like in the heat. So we just continued our walk and I didn’t eat anything until after we got home, a bit after 9 o’clock.

At lunch I just took Scully out briefly for a toilet and then we retreated back inside to the cool. I spent the morning writing up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic of “Points of View”. It was a tougher one to write up, and I’m not yet sure after one class this evening if the outline is really good or not. We’ll see tomorrow.

And I just did some comics stuff in the afternoon. Not much else to report today.

New content today:

Harbinger of summer heat

Today was warm. 26.4°C in the city, but we had the benefit of a strong cooling sea breeze all day. Inland suburbs got as high as 37°C. The heat will continue for the next four days at least, with the coastal fringe temperature climbing above 30°C. So I suppose summer is pretty much upon us.

It’s also humid. It’s been regularly in the 80s or 90s percent at night, dropping to 60s during the day. Despite little to no rain for the past couple of weeks. My 5k run this morning was pretty draining – about 23°C and 80% humidity at 9am. I ran a lot slower than yesterday, when it wasn’t nearly as warm.

After showering off, I worked on Darths & Droids comics for a bit. I also watched some of the cricket match being played in Perth, Australia v India. The Indians are absolutely all over this game and there’s no way they can possibly not win from here, without something ridiculous and amazing happening.

Oh geez, no. I just looked at the score at the end of the day’s play. Let me revise what I said. There’s no way that India can possibly not win from here. Full stop. I mean technically there’s a chance they could not win, but if it happens I’ll eat my hat.

I had some ethics classes to teach in the evening, but now I’m going to relax and watch some movie.

New content today:

Hot and busy time passing

Today was very warm, close to 30°C. But I spent most of it inside doing my Monday classes online, ending the topic of “Time Passing”. I started work on planning for the next topic, which is “Copying Things”, covering aspects of copyright, intellectual property, and so on.

The weather tomorrow is set to be much cooler, with a forecast maximum of only 19°C. It may be another day like we had a week or two ago, where the maximum temperature was set at midnight.

In the afternoon I went for a walk with my wife (who was home from work for the Labour Day public holiday) and Scully. And then I made listings on eBay for some more of my 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons books that I don’t want any more. If you’re interested and in Australia, these may be a bargain for you to pick up (if you’re overseas the postage will probably be prohibitive):

My last class tonight started at 9pm, but because of daylight saving starting here it’s an hour earlier for all the students, including one in the USA who had it move from 7am to 6am. He was dedicated enough to get up early for it, but was yawning a bit. All my other classes I made an hour later (for me), to keep them at the same time for the students, but this one I really didn’t want to move to a 10pm start – I’d be turning into a pumpkin before it ended at 11pm. Unfortunately it’s going to get even worse for this kid in November when the US goes off daylight saving, and the class becomes a 5am start for him. I suspect he won’t keep doing it after that.

Finally, a weird thing I noticed taking photos of my D&D books for eBay. I’m using my brand new iPhone 16 and taking photos saved in HEIF format. Some of the photos when I open them in Photoshop, I hit save and it allows me to save them as a JPEG. But some of the photos I hit save and it has a restricted set of save formats available, excluding JPEG. I have to use “Save a copy” to create a copy of the image before I can save it as JPEG. I suspected it might be because the iPhone camera was automatically using HDR mode for some photos and saving them in a higher bit-depth or a different colour space or something, but examining the HEIC files shows no such differences – they’re all 8-bit colour in Display P3 colour space. I examined the EXIF tags of the images and I don’t see any salient differences at all.

So I have no idea why some of these images Photoshop will allow me to save as JPEGs and some it won’t. I tried searching briefly for an answer online, but my search terms couldn’t locate anything relevant.

New content today:

Backwards weather day

Well. I mentioned that yesterday was hot, and the forecast for today was much colder and rainy. They were not kidding.

Today’s maximum temperature in Sydney was 17.8°C. At midnight. It got colder to the dawn, and continued getting colder throughout the morning. Today’s minimum temperature (so far) was recorded at 1pm, at 11.7°C. Since then it’s got a fraction warmer, but is still only hovering either side of 12°C.

And the rain has been steady all day at a moderate rate. We’ve had 32 mm since midnight, and it’s heavier right now, so possibly we’ll reach the forecast amount of 40 mm by midnight.

After teaching two online classes in the morning I finished off writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, ready for our next planned one. I took Scully out in the rain for her toilet, and then instead of walking all the way to my wife’s work in the rain I drove over there to drop Scully off, before driving back home and walking to the station here to go into town for today’s lecture at the university.

Today the students began doing project work for their assessment task. The professor didn’t have any coursework lecture, but he gave an informational lecture about JPEG standards development, which he works on as part of the JPEG committee. Then we had a couple of hours of advising the student teams on their project work. I spent most of walking around and talking with the students, answering questions and giving advice on their project plans. It’s a bit more intensive than the usual lecture/tutorial sessions.

Back home I had two more ethics classes this evening, and in the hour in between I made pasta alla norma, with an eggplant and tomato sauce.

The rain should ease tomorrow, but will probably continue through the night.

New content today:

Deep learning and fire weather

Today was the final content lecture of the image processing course at the university, with the lecturer going over deep learning as a technique for pattern recognition in images and videos. For the next few weeks the students will be concentrating on their assessment projects, which is where the fun really begins. So far the students who have talked to me are planning some of the usual suspects for project ideas: tumour detection in medical images, car and other object detection for automated driving, handwriting recognition, and so on. I’m hoping some team will come up with something cool and new.

Today was also the first total fire ban of the… summer that we’re not in yet. The temperature only reached 27.4°C, but it was very windy and the humidity was super low, getting below 10% in parts of Sydney. I’ve been noticing extremely low humidity the past few days, as it’s drying my skin out and I’m using tons of moisturiser.

There’s no rain forecast for the next week and temperatures should get up to 29°C again. Some of the grass in the parks is starting to turn noticeably brown from lack of rain. We had 2 mm of rain last Friday, but apart from that it basically hasn’t rained for almost a full month now. Which is very unusual for Sydney.

More interesting responses tonight from kids about that car driving question about letting people cut in ahead of the queue in the turning lane:

  • 2 American + 1 Canadian kid: Let the car in.
  • 1 New Zealander: Don’t let them in.
  • 2 Hong Kong: Very strongly don’t let them in. When I explained why it could be dangerous not to let them in, the Hong Kong kids both changed to: Let them in, but everyone should honk at them.
  • 2 Thai kids: You should let the car in. But for different reasons: (1) because it’s dangerous to leave them in the other lane; (2) to be nice and “show them mercy”.
  • 1 Hong Kong: “Definitely not!” They should block the car out until they give up and keep going straight. Because they’re doing the wrong thing and deserve to be punished.
  • 1 Portugal: No, block them out, because otherwise everyone will think they can do the same thing.

New content today:

Last gasp of winter?

Today dawned cold and windy. I forced myself to go for a 5k run, but it wasn’t pleasant, being around 14°C and very windy. On my normal route I ran past a house that had had a tree fall over, probably during the night, and I had to run around it as the top was extending out of their property into the footpath area.

After showering and cleaning the bathroom, I spent time assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took last week. I got a couple of weeks’ worth done, but still have three more ready to make.

The day remained cold and windy, but no rain. Things will warm up over the next few days, and be back to 27°C again by Wednesday.

Preliminary results from yesterday’s local council elections seem to indicate that our incumbent Mayor will be re-elected, which I think is a good thing.

Oh, and Duolingo’s Japanese course is throwing more kanji at me. I haven’t even managed to learn the hiragana yet! I’ve downloaded Anki flashcard software to do a crash course in learning those so I can master them, but I need to find some time to get started on it.

New content today:

More signs of spring

Out walking with Scully at lunch today and the London plane trees are all starting to produce new spring leaves. And wisteria is blooming all over the place. And jasmine.

My wife and I both hate jasmine. We can’t stand the smell of the flowers. But as far as I can tell this doesn’t seem to be a very common thing. I don’t recall ever meeting anyone else, except my mother, who also hated the smell of jasmine. Whenever I tell people this, everyone looks at me like I’m crazy and declares that they love the smell of jasmine.

Anyway, we walked all the way to Cammeray to have lunch at Maggio’s Italian Bakery. I didn’t want to overload on sweets today, so I had two slices of the pizza, a mushroom and a capricciosa. And this afternoon I made a quiche for dinner, so my wife and I could eat our slices separately because I had classes online from 5-8pm.

At Cammeray they’re demolishing a couple of shops next to Maggio’s Cafe (which is a couple of doors down from Maggio’s Bakery, run by the same people). It looks like they might be keeping the old Victorian era front facade on the street and redoing the entire rest of the building behind it.

Oh, and I thought of a cool idea for a future ethics/critical thinking class. I’ll get the kids to do a Turing Test on me, but I won’t tell them if I’m answering as me, or copying their questions into ChatGPT and pasting the results. I’ll prime it first by telling it about the exercise and that it needs to impersonate a human response as best it can. I tried this today and it worked… moderately well, but not great. And then I’ll see if the kids can work out if I’m being human or an “AI”. It should be fairly easy with the right sort of questions. The exercise will be for them to think of the right questions to ask.

New content today:

Almost no-games night, and an exhausting Saturday

On Friday I had my usual online teaching classes, and in between took Scully for a walk. The weather was hot, up to 29°C in the city, and reached 31.6°C at the airport, which set a new record for highest temperature ever recorded in the Sydney suburban area during winter. It was nice, but everyone is dreading the summer to come.

We went out to our local pizza place for dinner. They do a Nutella pizza served with vanilla gelato for dessert, which we occasionally get if we’re in the mood and not too full, and we felt like it last night. Really nice.

I logged into our online board games night, not quite in time to join in a game of Codechains, which is a game one friend invented and implemented on our Discord bot. It’s a word association game a bit like Codenames, but different and fully cooperative between all players.

Then we started a game of Distilled, which one player had read the rules for and taught us all how to play. It seemed like a good game, but we got annoyed by the Board Game Arena UI, which forced us to do actions sequentially when we could easily have performed them simultaneously, so it dragged on and after getting about 2/3 of the way through the game in 2 hours or so we decided to quit and play something else.

So, after about two and a half hours of doing stuff with my friends I still hadn’t played a full game of anything! We moved on to Just One (which we completed), then Can’t Stop Express before calling it a night.

This morning I got up a bit earlier than usual. The sun is rising earlier as we head towards the spring equinox, and the warmer weather is definitely making it easier to get out of bed. I did a 7.5k run today, pushing myself beyond the routine 5k. I felt like I took it a bit easy, but managed to record 42:32, my best time for 7.5k.

Then it was a busy day of housework, cleaning chores, and more inventorying of Magic cards. And in the afternoon a longish walk with Scully. The weather today was cooler and very windy, but it’s supposed to get back up close to 30°C again for a few days next week.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

The winds of August

Everyone who lives in Sydney knows that August is the windy month. But this year it’s been an unusual August, with not much wind and unusually high temperatures. Until today, when the wind hit with a fury.

We’ve had wind gusts recorded up to 95 km/h, and it’s been extremely windy basically all day, starting before dawn, and still blowing noisily outside now at 9pm. Trees have been swaying wildly. I had to take Scully out for a walk at lunch time, and we passed jacaranda trees which were shedding yellow leaves in huge billowing clouds. No doubt there are some trees that have been blown down by this wind.

Normally the August wind is cold. But today was hot. 28.1°C in the city, up to 29.6°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow will be cooler but the forecast for Friday is 30°C. This would be warm for summer, but it’s still winter! We may even be in with a chance to break the hottest winter day ever recorded.

Today I spent time writing new Darths & Droids strips and sorting out and inventorying more Magic cards. An unfortunate thing happened with my ongoing selling of cards. There are some junky uncommon cards from the Legends expansion of 1994 that were never worth very much – puttering along at resale values around US$5. Until the release of a new card in June which created a powerful combo with these old cards. Suddenly they spiked to over US$80 each briefly before settling into a new stable price around US$50. I decided this would be a good time to sell these old cards and I put half a dozen of them onto eBay last week, expecting to get well over $300 for them.

But yesterday Wizards of the Coast announced a new card ban, banning the new card from tournaments because it was overpowered. So now this combo is no longer legal in tournament decks. With two days left to run on my auctions. I’d been expecting people to bid the cards up to around $50 each in the last day, as is usual for auctions. But now I’m not sure what they’ll make, and I may end up mailing out a bunch of cards that people buy for $10 each – and it will be $21 in postage if anyone overseas buys them (though the buyer also pays postage, but this may just discourage people even further from bidding).

Oh well… they’re bits of cardboard and they’re only ever worth what someone will pay for them.

New content today:

The home is warming up

It feels like winter is at an end. I wore shorts outside for general walking around (not running) for the first time since before winter. And at home I didn’t need to wear my slippers at all for the first time.

I did a 5k run after breakfast, and then cleaned the bathroom before having a shower. I made some sourdough loaf. My starter is starting to develop an acetone smell, which Googling seems to tell me I need to feed it more often. It otherwise seems healthy, so I don’t think there’s a problem there.

We went on a big walk after lunch with Scully. My wife wanted to go to Cammeray and Maggio’s Italian bakery, but the rain radar indicated we might get wet by the time we walked all the way there and back, so we chose the shorter walk around Waverton and The Grumpy Baker, where she got a croissant to eat. We made it home dry, and in fact the rain band swept north of the city so I don’t think it actually rained all afternoon.

Not much else to mention. I sorted and counted some more Magic cards to inventory them before selling. This is a super time consuming task!

New content today: