dangermouse.net – David Morgan-Mar

An extremely windy day

Everything about today was about the wind. It was extremely windy. A bit of rain, overcast and cloudy, but super super windy. I had two incidents. I went for a 5k run in the morning, and leaves were blowing all over the place, and bits of twigs, and one actually got stuck in my shoelaces and I had to stop running briefly to extract it. When I’d finished and was walking back home I passed a broken lamp post, which had suffered a fatal hit from a fallen tree branch.

I took the photo because there’s an app here where you can report incidents like this to the local council, so they know about it and can come fix it.

At lunch I didn’t want to brave the wind and so drove to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. On the way home we stopped off at Maggio’s Bakery where I got a porchetta roll for lunch. This is a thing I’ve been wanting to try for some time, but I usually default to a slice of pizza when I go there. But today they were out of pizza, so I tried the roll. It comes with sliced porchetta, chunks of potato, rosemary, and mayonnaise, and was delicious.

On the way driving home, I turned down a street and ahead of me was a roadblock, with emergency workers in the middle of removing a tree that had fallen across the road. I had to turn around and backtrack and find another route home. (I didn’t get a photo of it since I was driving.) We’re predicted to have similar weather tomorrow, though easing off a bit.

Otherwise, I did my four ethics classes, did a bit of puttering around with comics stuff, and made potato and pesto pasta for dinner. And tonight is board games night online. We just played a couple of games of Codenames, using the dedicated Codenames site rather than Board Game Area since for some weird reason one of my friends can’t load their site.

New content today:

The backwards day

After last night’s storm, the rain continued through the night and cold winds blew in. Today’s maximum temperature was at 1:30 am, at 21.1°C, and it just got colder from there. The minimum temperature was at 1:00 pm, at 18.3°C, and then since then the rain and wind has eased off and the temperature has climbed again! We may set another maximum later this evening. Very weird.

It really was a big storm. By this morning there were still over 100,000 properties without power. This was combined with industrial action by our train drivers here in Sydney, who didn’t exactly strike, but did a go-slow on the train network, so this morning we had heavy rain, a lot of trees and power lines down, and reduced capacity on the train network. So it was pretty miserable for anyone having to commute to work.

After two classes in the morning, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, in the rain. We went up to the pie shop, which has been closed for a few weeks over Christmas, so I haven’t had my regular fix. I like the spicy ones, so chose the butter chicken and Mexican beef ones today.

In the afternoon I processed some more photos from 2023’s trip to Japan, and used some of them to fill in my travel diary page for the day. I really want to get all the photos from that trip sorted before I go to Japan again next month! Here’s an amusing photo that I didn’t put into the diary:

And in other travel news, I’ve managed to book a hotel in Berlin for my June trip. The first hotel never got back to me about the corporate rate, but the second hotel I emailed got back the same day with full details and took my booking when I replied to confirm. So good business to them, and none to the first one that never responded! I can leave that trip for a while now and think about it again after we get back from Japan. I still have some things to organise for our itinerary there first.

New content today:

A big storm

As I’m writing this tonight a severe thunderstorm is lashing the city outside. Two of my friends have lost power at their homes (and are chatting online from their phones). I had three ethics classes in a row this evening and told the kids in the last class that if my power went out and I disconnected from Zoom, then the class will be over for today, and least they’ll know what happened.

Until the storm hit, it was a hot and humid day. But the wind has picked up and the temperatures has dropped dramatically in the last hour, as the rain pounds down and the lightning flashes. I just checked the power outage website and there are over 100 separate outages across Sydney, with over 61,000 buildings affected at the moment. Wind gusts up to 100 km/h have been recorded too. And… wow… we had 30 mm of rain in just half an hour. And it’s still coming down.

The good news is tomorrow and the next few days will be cooler than the past few days, down to around 25°C, although rainy.

Today I had some totally free time in the morning since my wife took Scully to work. I thought about going out somewhere, but in the end I started tidying up my email inbox… and three hours later I realised I still hadn’t gone out. Then I spent some time in the afternoon pricing up some more Magic: the Gathering cards in preparation for selling them. And then did some thinking about planning story stuff for Episode IX in Darths & Droids.

New content today:

Ethics of peer pressure

Today I cycled my ethics class topic for the week, writing a new lesson plan for the topic of Peer Pressure. This is a recycled topic from a few years ago, but I rewrote the examples and added some new questions to keep it fresh. I included some new questions about online pressure, in contrast to pressure from friends.

I assembled a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch I did a couple of weeks ago. Puttered around at random.

Watched a couple of Italian YouTube videos to get some language listening practice. A 4 minute video can take me 20 minutes to watch as I pause it to look up Italian words I don’t know yet. It’s good for my vocabulary. Today I learnt words like filastrocca, meaning “fairy tale”. I knew fila meant “queue” or “row” or “line”, but I looked up strocca and discovered that it’s an adjective meaning “awful” or “sucky” or “crappy”. So a fairy tale is a “crappy row”? I checked an Italian dictionary etymology and it was unclear on the origins of the word, but suggested that it might instead have originated from strocco, which is a noun meaning a type of silk. Which is also a bit bizarre.

I also learnt the word abbozzo, which means a rough draft or sketch. As I was confirming the meaning online, I discovered to my surprise that abbozzo also has a Wiktionary entry for English, with the same meaning, stating the word is borrowed from Italian. The Cambridge Dictionary and Merrian-Webster also agree that abbozzo is used in English. I can only assume that it’s mostly a fine arts jargon word, like sfumato or chiaroscuro.

I also learnt: agrumo (citrus fruit), pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry), and the verb macinare (to grind, as in pepper). Oddly enough, it wasn’t a cooking video; it was a video about Befana, the Italian holiday that occurs on 6 January to mark the end of the Christmas season. There are a bunch of traditional Befana treats that are served on the day.

For dinner tonight I wanted to use up a bunch of sourdough starter discard which I’ve accumulated in the past few days while trying to freshen up my sourdough starter. I mixed it with some extra flour and baking powder and formed it into simple flatbread which I pan fried and served with some lentil dhal, as a sort of substitute naan. It worked pretty well!

The weather was hot today, forecast to be hotter tomorrow, with a late storm to cool things down before a few cool and rainy days filling the rest of the week.

Finally, there’s a hotel in Berlin that really doesn’t want my business. I’ve emailed twice about a conference rate (for the ISO Photography Standards meeting there in June, which I’m planning on attending) that I’ve been told they have, and they haven’t answered. The info from the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) is that you have to book by email to get the conference rate; you can’t just book on the web site. I may have to look at other hotels.

New content today:

A domain registration mystery

This morning I received a strange email message, from someone in Belgium named Piet, saying they were an artist, that they’d noticed I own the domain piet.be, and they wanted to buy it off me to use for their own professional web site. I had never registered such a domain and had no idea why this person thought it might belong to me.

I checked, and sure enough piet.be is currently set up as a redirect to my Piet esoteric programming language page. So that explained one mystery: Why this person thought the domain belonged to me. But raised two other mysteries: Who did own the domain, and why had they set it up to redirect to one of my web pages?

I did some online sleuthing and found that DNS Belgium had a record showing that the domain was registered way back in 2002, and belonged to a company named D Haeze Trading nv, with an address listed in Gavere in Belgium. I looked up D Haeze Trading and discovered that their primary business is listed as “Wholesale of dairy products and eggs”. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now I knew who had registered the domain, but why had a dairy and egg producer registered piet.be and why had they set it up to redirect to my esoteric programming page?

Digging further, I found this company record, which lists the company managers as Piet and Jan D’Haeze. Aha! So possibly the manager of the company decided it would be cool to have the Belgian domain corresponding to his personal name.

But that leaves the main question unanswered: why had he set the domain up to redirect to my website? I mean, obviously my site is relevant to the Piet name, but why would someone named Piet go to the bother of buying the domain name only to redirect it to someone else’s website, owned by a person they don’t know and have never contacted?

Anyway, I replied to the person who wanted to buy the domain off me, and told them this information and that they need to contact D Haeze Trading nv if they want to buy the domain. Later (this evening) they got back to me and thanked me for the information. So, good deed done for the day.

I had 6 ethics classes today, mostly during the day, and two late in the evening. That didn’t give me a lot of time to do much else, besides taking Scully on a couple of walks. I made mushroom pizza for dinner. It’s kind of become our Monday habit to have a home made pizza, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to make the dough.

New content today:

Planning for cherry blossoms

I slept in a bit this morning, but then got up, had breakfast, and embarked on a 5k run. The weather was far too warm and humid, and it was a real struggle today, with a slow time. But at least I have the virtue of doing some exercise regardless.

Last night while I was watching a movie on Netflix (The Dead Don’t Die), I discovered when I tried to turn the TV off that the batteries in the remote had died, apparently mid-movie. I couldn’t turn the TV off! And AFAIK there are no physical controls on the TV. I could have just pulled the plug out, but I was reluctant since it’s plugged into a power board with a bunch of other stuff and it would have been non-trivial to work out which was the correct cord. So I scavenged batteries from another device, and managed to turn the TV off.

Today I went out to the supermarket specifically to buy new batteries. When I got home I opened the remote to install brand new ones, and discovered that one of the emergency batteries Id installed last night had leaked! Urk! So I removed those batteries and stuck them in my battery recycling pile, and cleaned out the leaked chemicals carefully with cotton tips and isopropyl alcohol. before installing the new batteries.

I also spent time sewing up Scully favourite plush toy. Again. She’s ripped holes and extracted stuffing from it about 20 or 30 times, and I keep repairing it because it’s her oldest and most favourite dog toy.

In travel planning, my wife’s sister sent us this article about cherry blossoms in Japan, saying that we’ll be there around the right time to view the early February-blooming flowers in Kawazu, a day trip from Tokyo. I’m keen to go there and see them, because in all the times I’ve visited Japan I’ve never seen more than the odd single tree with blossoms on it—one time in Yokohama in February I was surprised to spot one blooming that early. But it appears the Kawazu variety always blooms so early. So now I want to try to plan our time to fit in a journey there to see them.

New content today:

Losing games and double pizza

Friday morning I did the grocery shopping. The old fashioned way, since I forgot to order online for pickup, so it took about half an hour longer than just going to the supermarket for the pickup. The day was rainy, and I had four ethics classes to teach.

Then it was heading out to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. We went to the place of the guy who recently moved into his newly built house (on the same property as his old house). He has a nice dining table and laid a felt mat on top for gaming on. We started with a game of Notre Dame, which I’ve played before but not for many years.

It’s a worker placement game, and your workers activate various powers, but you are restricted by first having to draft cards related to the placement areas, so you only have a limited choice of zones to place your workers each turn, rather than free choice. I scored a lot of points early on, but got stifled for resources in the late game and everyone else overtook me, so I ended up coming last of five players. A sixth friend arrived about halfway through the game, and we stopped to eat delivered pizzas for dinner. When we resumed we started a six-player game of Ticket to Ride: Asia, which plays as a team game with three teams of two.

In this variant of the classic game, each team has shared racks of tickets and train cards, and also a secret hand which you’re not allowed to share with your teammate. You have separate turns, but are working together to build your routes. It gave an interestingly different dynamic and was a lot of fun. My team leapt to an early lead… but you can guess what happened. We got overtaken and ended up coming last! Oh well, at least we all had fun.

Today was another partly rainy day, with unsettled weather set in here for the next few days. The sky is rapidly changing between sunny and grey clouds that threaten rain.

After a 5k run in the very humid conditions (82% humidity and 24°C) I cleaned the bathroom and then tried to write a Darths & Droids comic strip. I got stuck with writer’s block for a few hours – it was torturously slow going. I managed to finish it off in the afternoon.

For dinner we walked with Scully over the Naremburn, 2 km away, to have a simple meal at the pizzeria there. So I ended up having pizza two nights in a row. Not that I’m complaining.

Tonight we watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie on Netflix: Vengeance Most Fowl. I’ve always liked all the Wallace and Gromit films, and this one was brilliant as always.

New content today:

Finishing this Book

Today was a day busy with ethics classes: two in the morning, and three in the evening. In between I took Scully for a couple of walks and I worked a bit on some comics stuff.

At the moment I’ve started on a couple of books. One is an old one I’ve had for many years, which I’m rereading after a very long time: Comet, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I was inspired to reread this by recently realising that Halley’s Comet—whose 1986 appearance was the inspiration for the release of this book in 1985—passed aphelion last year and is now on its way back towards the inner solar system for its reappearance in 2061.

The other book I’m working on (not merely reading) is Finish This Book, by Keri Smith. I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time, after spotting it in the creativity section of a bookshop some years ago. It’s an interactive book, which encourages you to write and draw in its pages as you progress. I decided to finally start it, and am a few pages in. But…. it’s not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a simple thing where you turn the page and it says “Draw a monkey in this blank space”. And other such exercises to simply get you doing something creative. But no… it seems to be some sort of interactive story/puzzle thing that you work through. There’s a lot of extraneous fictional fluff about how the author “found” some weird manuscript in a park somewhere, and now they want you to help them finish it according to some “rules” that will be revealed later on. And it says you need scissors and glue and stuff. Which I suppose might be interesting, but it’s not what I signed up for. Anyway, I’m going to persevere and see what happens. I’m not flipping ahead to see anything before I work my way through page by page.

In other news, I might finally finish off the last of the leftover Christmas pudding tonight…

New content today:

That La Niña arrived quickly

I just said yesterday that the Bureau of Meteorology reported the formation of La Niña conditions, heralding the possibility of a cooler/wetter next two months of summer, and today it magically seemed to have come true. Today was really chilly, and very wet. The temperature was a minimum of 19.3°C overnight, and rose to only 20.3°C during the late morning, before plummeting down into the 17s for most of the afternoon and evening. We’ve had nearly 30 mm of rain as well, in windy squalls blowing intermittently across the city, which make it seem even colder. It was actually the coldest day in Sydney since mid-October.

I didn’t go out much, but I did get in a 5k run early in the morning. I started in a brief period of no rain, but it began raining on me halfway through the run

My wife took Scully to work and I had to go pick her up at lunchtime, but I drove rather than walking in the heavy rain at the time.

This evening I was really back into my online ethics classes, with three classes in a row. I had a new girl in the first one, who was very sociable and talkative, and engaged with the class questions really well, giving some very well thought-out answers. And after the class she wrote me a note through the Outschool platform to say how much she loved the class and how it made her think about the topic in new ways. That was really nice to receive. So I think I have a new enthusiastic student, which is great!

New content today:

Missed Monday, back to work Tuesday

I just completely forgot to do my blog post yesterday until it was too late. I had a day full of working on comics stuff, and avoiding going outside as much as possible because it was very hot.

However I did have to go out in the morning to drop the car off for an annual service, and then walk home in the heat – it’s about 25 minutes walk away. And then in the afternoon I had to walk back to the service centre to pick the car up again. There was an additional expense as the car needed a new battery installed, but otherwise it’s in good condition.

The heat broke with a cool change overnight, bringing some rain. Today was gloomily overcast all day, much cooler, and threatening rain, although there was barely a sprinkle. The Bureau of Meteorology today issued a report that La Niña conditions had returned, which may indicate increased rainfall for the remainder of the summer. I’d been enjoying the relatively dry conditions for the past few weeks, after the rain-soaked and very humid summers of the past four years.

Today I did some more comics stuff, making the first strip of Episode IX for Darths & Droids. I ran out of things to make lunch with at home, so had to go out and decided to get some pies. But when I got there the pie shop was closed! Probably still on a Christmas break. I ended up getting some Vietnamese rice paper rolls instead. Then I caught the Metro to my wife’s work to pick up Scully and walk home from there with her.

Tonight I restarted my online ethics classes, after two weeks break for Christmas and New Year. The new topic this week is Journalism. With questions such as:

Is it generally more important for news to be reported quickly, or accurately?
What purpose does journalism serve in our society? Why does it exist?
How can we tell if the news we see is really true?
Has the Internet made journalism better or worse?

It should be an interesting week!

New content yesterday:

New content today: