dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

Scully improving, economy not

Scully is doing better today, not having to poop five times like the past couple of days. Although she did wake me up before 6am for the first one of the day. Her blood test results came back negative for anything nasty, which is good. And she seems to be responding to the antibiotics and probiotic paste.

The other thing I want to comment on today is the insanity of the global tariffs that Donald Trump announced today that the US will impose on almost all other countries. The highlights (or lowlights), for posterity:

The weird magic numbers that they came up with on that chart for “Tariffs charged to the USA” are not actually tariffs in any sense of the word whatsoever. Many people have worked out where the numbers came from: They are the country’s trade deficit with the USA for 2024 divided by the value of US imports from that country.
Countries with a trade surplus with the US (such as Australia, whose calculation as above came out to a whopping -107%) are still getting slapped with a 10% tariff. For no apparent reason, even given Trump’s bizarre (and incorrect) notion that a trade deficit is a “bad thing”.
The list includes some sub-national entities, such as Norfolk Island, a part of Australia, which mysteriously got a contradictory 29% tariff despite Australia getting 10%.
Another part of Australia, the territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, got listed separately, with a tariff of 10%, despite it being uninhabited and having no imports or exports.
They also announced a tariff on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose only population is a joint US/UK military base. So effectively the US has announced a tariff on its own military forces.

There’s only so much bewildered headshaking one can do in response to this madness. And not only is it uneducated and random, it’s going to actively destroy the US economy, as well as having negative effects on everyone else. As one of my friends put it in a group chat today:

It’s a bit like when a bunch of countries [implemented] sanctions to punish Russia so other countries can’t trade with them without penalties, except the US is doing it to itself.

I just have no more words I can add to that.

Scully at the vet again

Scully slept well through the night, but her morning poop had more blood in it. My wife decided to take the day off work and take her into the vet again. They took a blood sample (they tried to do this last night but Scully was too wriggly for them) and did some simple tests right there, and sent the remainder of the sample off for more detailed testing at a pathology lab. They’ve already ruled out giardia infection, or any liver or kidney issues.

They said Scully was a bit dehydrated from blood loss, so they kept her at the vet all afternoon with a drip for rehydration. Now she’s home again for the night, but we have an antibiotic to give her, and also some probiotic paste to restore her gut flora with all the good bacteria. They’ve also given us some special tinned dog food that will be super gentle on her digestive system for the next few days. We’re to give her the medication and monitor her condition and if there’s no improvement in a couple of days they might want to do an ultrasound scan.

Despite all of this, Scully is chipper and shows no signs of discomfort or lethargy or loss of appetite, so that’s good.

Otherwise I spent some time writing up brief outlines for new ethics class topics for the next few weeks. And some comics writing. And I took the opportunity with my wife home and Scully at the vet to go for a 5k run in the afternoon. It was warmer than the mornings, but the humidity was much lower today, so I managed a decent time.

For dinner I made the satay broccolini and tofu with rice that I’d planned for last night, but was interrupted by taking Scully to the vet. It turned out pretty good!

Internet and Scully off

I had an interrupted sleep because Scully woke up about 3am and wanted to go out for a toilet. I had to get dressed and take her out. This is very unusual – normally she sleeps right through the night. She did a poop, and then multiple more throughout today, again unusual. The last couple looked like they had blood in them, so we contacted the vet and took her in for an examination. Apart from that, she’s been energetic and lively as usual, no change in behaviour. So the vet was not terribly concerned and took some blood for a test, but suggested it might resolve without treatment. So hopefully it’s nothing serious.

Also today my Internet service went out just before 9am, and didn’t come back until 4pm. I had two ethics classes in the middle of the day. I cancelled one and then tried the second one using my iPad and a 4G connection. It worked okay, but was considerably more fiddly, and not something I’d want to do again unless I really have to.

So my day has been pretty disrupted, and I still can’t relax because Scully is still at the vet getting the blood test done, and we are waiting to be notified to go pick her up.

I’d planned to cook a special dinner tonight of satay vegetables and tofu with rice, and even specially bought tofu today to go into it. But we had to just quickly make some toast and eat quickly in between getting back from the vet and my evening ethics class starting. So overall not a great day.

Introing to machine learning

Today I was back at the University of Technology Sydney for the ongoing Data Engineering course which I’m helping to teach. Today’s lecture was an introduction to machine learning, which is a fairly advanced topic for an introductory first year course. But there are tools which let people code up machine learning examples and projects without too much difficulty and we want to make sure the students understand the basic principles behind them. Some will probably elect to use this in their assessment project, which they should start working on after next week’s final lecture.

Then we have a two-week mid-semester break. It’s normally one week, but Easter Monday eats up the next week’s lecture slot as well. Then four weeks of tutorial time to help the students as they work on their projects.

On the way home I stoped at my wife’s work and we had a pleasant walk home together with Scully. We were a bit concerned about the weather, as heavy rain was heading our way on the radar, but luckily it never arrived and we made it home dry.

I made pizza for dinner, topping it with very thin slices of one of those gourmet potatoes we bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

And we did some planning for our next trip, which is to Europe in June for the ISO Photography Standards meeting in Berlin. It’s a five-day meeting, so we’ll be there for that long, and then we’re planning to visit some of the central European countries and cities we haven’t been to before. A couple of days in Prague, then we plan to spend a week in Vienna, renting an apartment for the week instead of using a hotel. We’ll do side trips from there to Bratislava and Budapest, before heading to Salzburg to finish up before flying home. We have the itinerary sorted now after deciding on various options this evening. Now to book some accommodation!

A split birthday lunch

Sunday morning, I got I another 5k run. The weather was a bit showery, but not as wet as yesterday.

After showering and changing into dry clothes, we headed off to meet with my wife’s family for a birthday lunch for her sister, at a cafe near her place. They booked an indoor table. But because we couldn’t take Scully inside we also grabbed an outdoor table and my wife and I took it in turns to mind Scully or head inside to chat with the family. We ordered some lunch and it was pretty good. The rain held off. We were under shelter anyway so that wouldn’t have been a big problem, but unfortunately it was pretty windy, which made things a bit uncomfortable outside.

Back home in the afternoon I did some Darths & Droids writing while my wife worked on her watercolour artwork. She’s only been doing it for less than a year, but has decided to enter an amateur art show which will be selling paintings anonymously to raise money for… I forget what exactly.

For dinner I used the leftover roasted vegetables from last night to make a sort of bubble & squeak pasta topper, adding some fried onions and cherry tomatoes and feta. It turned out pretty delicious!

I added emojis to the paragraphs here because we’ve been discussing in my online ethics classes this evening about whether emojis count as a form of writing or not, and in which circumstances they are acceptable or not. I’ve been using the following “sentence” to discuss how well they convey meaning:

Finding a new Path, and Working Carriages

Friday was online games night, and one of my friends was again running a Pathfinder roleplaying game for us. The previous session was a one-shot to test out the virtual tabletop and playing online, but last night was the beginning of an ongoing campaign. I had a fresh first level character, a halfling druid named Osric “Stormy” Mossfoot.

The general setup was that the PCs all came from separate areas around a village and were there for their own purposes. I was investigating a vague feeling that something wasn’t right with the forest. We met our fellow PCs by taking a common interest in assisting a distraught young woman who was lamenting breaking up with her boyfriend, after a night-time tryst in the forest, where they witnessed some mysterious motes of light rising from the forest floor. This seemed to have affected the young man, changing his personality and causing him to ignore the woman.

We investigated his house, which turned out to be the home of his parents, wealthy jewellers, who were almost alarmingly welcoming. They said he’d got up that morning and headed off east. The only building to the east was an abandoned church, which we poked around in enough to determine that the ground floor and cellar were both so dust choked that clearly nobody had been in either for years.

We convinced the young woman to accompany us into the forest and show us their trysting spot, ominously named “Nana’s Grave”. As we approached, we had to fight a few shambling zombie-like creatures, overgrown with vines. And as I used one of my druid spells, we witnessed motes of light rising from the ground! With the zombies defeated we approached nana’s grave itself, only to find a six-foot deep hole in front of the headstone. There were also a couple of other similar combats. The woman mentioned there was an abandoned cottage that belonged to Nana nearby, and we took a look there. There was nothing on the ground floor, but we found a trap door leading down to a dark cellar… And there we paused play for the evening until next session!

Early on Friday I picked up the groceries from the supermarket. Fresh figs were cheap, so I got a pack of those, and when I had some later they were really delicious. And I had four ethics classes during the day before the gaming.

Today the weather forecast was dismal, up to 90 mm of rain, with very heavy falls. I went for a 5k run anyway, in the steady rain around 9am, since I hadn’t done a run for two weeks because we were in New Zealand last weekend. It was cooler than other recent runs, so actually not that bad. Just very wet.

After a shower and changing into dry clothes, my wife and I drove over to Carriageworks Farmers Market, braving the rain with Scully. This market is fairly fancy, with a lot of stalls selling “gourmet” produce and foods. I got a trout and horseradish pie to eat for lunch, and a strawberry cheesecake babka as a sweet treat afterwards. We also bought some vegetables, including some special “Queen May” potatoes for roasting up for dinner tonight.

Along with the potatoes we roasted sweet potato, pumpkin, and some spiced chick peas. And just steamed some broccolini to go with it and provide some greens.

The rain eased off after lunch too, rather than intensifying as we expected. So we managed to take Scully for an evening walk without getting too wet – it was a very light sprinkle by then.

And in other news, the Prime Minister called the next Australian federal election yesterday. We go to the polling stations on 3 May.

Very quick Thursday update

It’s late after my 9-10pm ethics class, so I don’t want to spend too long typing this tonight. THere’s not much to report about today anyway. A bunch of online classes, I ordered groceries online, I made a new Darths & Droids comic, and it rained heavily late morning. I actually had to interrupt a class I was teaching on Zoom to go close windows to avoid the rain coming in. We’re expecting a lot more rain in the next two days too.

Scully’s 7th birthday

Today was a big day. Scully’s 7th birthday!

My wife took her to work with her, because today we also had an electrician in to install our new light fittings. He arrived early at 07:30, and was occupied with working and making clutter with all of the boxes and packaging the light fittings came in. A couple of the lights needed some tricky reconfiguring of screw placements, due to overly large holes cut through the ceiling plasterboard. But he managed to successfully install everything within a couple of hours. And the new fittings look great!

But I had to go out and buy some new light bulbs, because the old fittings were all bayonet style, and three of the new ones are now Edison screw fittings, so the old bulbs don’t fit in the new sockets. So I went to the hardware store to buy some new bulbs, before returning to fit them in place.

My wife worked half a day and had the afternoon off to celebrate Scully’s birthday. I picked her up in the car and we drove over to Lil’ Mix bakery to get some food. My wife really likes it there, but it’s not open on weekends, so we don’t have much chance to go there during the week.

Back home I cleaned up the packing material and took it out to the bins. And kept some of the spare parts in case we need them later. I made fried rice for dinner, and then had three ethics classes in a row. And now I have a yummy cookie form Lil’ Mix for dessert.

NZ trip recovery day

I got a good night’s sleep last night – my first one since leaving home last Friday. I got up just before my wife left for work and took Scully out for a walk to the local grocery store to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables so we have cooking supplies for the next few days until our regular grocery shop.

Today I finished off my critical thinking/ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Written Text”, which is talking about writing and writing systems. The questions for the kids touch on the invention of writing, the effects of writing on civilisation, writing in different languages, and modern developments such as the fact we all type way more than we handwrite these days, and what effects abbreviations and emojis have on writing.

I also made a new Darths & Droids comic. And I copied all my New Zealand photos off my SLR camera and phone onto my computer. I processed some of the SLR bird photos.

Here is a New Zealand fantail:

Variable oystercatchers (which vary from all black to black-and-white pied):

Australasian gannets:

And a house sparrow, which is not that exciting as it’s an introduced species and very common, but at least I got close to it:

For lunch I took Scully for a walk to the pie shop, since I didn’t have any bread at home to make sandwiches. I’m baking a new sourdough loaf and will have fresh bread tomorrow. It was drizzling gently as we walked up. The weather forecast for the next few days is wet, with heavy rain of up to 70 mm predicted for Saturday.

New Zealand, day 4

I had another poor night’s sleep in our hotel room in Auckland, meaning I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since we left home on Friday. So I was very tried this morning. We slept in a little and crawled down to the hotel breakfast buffet where I just had a bowl of muesli with yoghurt.

We packed our luggage and checked out of the hotel, placing our bags in the car until we left later. Then we met up with my in-laws and they showed us around the centre of Auckland a bit, since they’d been here once before and knew the area. While they and my wife grabbed a coffee from one of the good coffee shops, I explored Albert Park and tried to see if I could spot any more interesting birds for the trip. But all I saw were blackbirds, gulls, sparrows, and pigeons.

Rejoining the others, we walked down to the waterfront area to see what it looked like during the day (after last night’s dinner at the restaurant there). My wife checked out a large souvenir shop while I looked for nearby light lunch options. We needed to eat something before leaving for the airport, but it wasn’t really time for a full lunch. I found a place that does focaccia style pizzas by the slice and grabbed a pepperoni slice, while my wife got a toasted bagel with cream cheese from the shop next door.

Then we headed back to the car park to take the car back to the airport and drop it off at the rental place. We navigated first to a petrol station near the airport to fill up the tank before dropping it off. Once dropped off, we used the shuttle bus to get to the terminal.

We went in through security and passport control and then had some time to kill, extended a bit as our flight was delayed by 20 minutes. Boarding was long and slow because the flight was very full, and it was a single aisle Boeing 737. They also took some passengers’ larger carry-on bags and forced them to check them into the cargo hold. Fortunately they didn’t target us, and we managed to find space in the overhead lockers neat our seats for our bags.

The flight was again fairly short. They provided a dinner meal and I watched two more episode of House of the Dragon. I’m enjoying the series, but I won’t have any easy way to watch any more of it, unfortunately.

We landed at 18:01 Sydney time. Luckily there were no queues at customs and immigration, so we were out of the airport and on a train home very quickly, and walked in the front door just after 19:00. We decided to have a light meal before heading off to pick up Scully from our friends’ place, so I fried some eggs to have on toast. Then we drove over to pick up Scully, who was super excited to see us as usual.

Now we’re back home, and I’ve had a shower to freshen up before bed. Hopefully to sleep well tonight!