A walk in Lane Cove National Park

This morning I had some free time, and my wife took Scully to work so I could use the opportunity to travel somewhere where dogs aren’t allowed. I decided to hop on the Metro and take a train to Lane Cove National Park.

This is a tiny national park entirely within the metropolitan area of Sydney. In fact, I only had to ride the train two stops to get there. It follows the banks of the Lane Cove River, one of the tributaries of Sydney Harbour. I know the main entrance area and thought I could walk there down the main road from the train station, but about half way there the road narrowed and the footpath disappeared, and there was no way I could continue without risking being hit by cars, so I had to backtrack and use an alternative route into the park.

But once there, I was greeted by the river, with forested banks on either side.

Lane Cove River

I’d taken my dSLR camera with a 100-400m lens for shooting birds. I wasn’t disappointed. There were many around, and some fearless. Here’s a suplhur-crested cockatoo:

Sulphur-crested cockatoo

This Australian brushturkey came right up to me. I took this photo with my phone, not the SLR.

Australian brushturkey

An Australasian darter:

Australasian darter

Australian golden whistler:

Australian golden whistler

And I think the photo of the day, a superb fairywren:

Superb fairywren

I also got photos of a white-throated treecreeper and a brown gerygone, two species I’ve never photographed before, which was good, but unfortunately both photos were a bit blurry and far away, so not really worth showing off. These little birds move so fast it’s ridiculously hard getting a camera aimed at them before they move.

I emerged from another part of the park and walked to a different station to get a train back. I actually stopped on the way to the station to get lunch at a Thai place – the same premises where I used to get lunch when I was working for Canon, but they’ve changed owners and name and now the food is different. But still pretty good.

Here’s a map of the walk, as recorded on Strava.

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A big spring clean chore done

Tuesday mornings are when I work on my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics class. This week we’re talking about Robots. Some questions:

  • How would you feel if your teacher or sports coach was a robot?
  • Are there any jobs that should never be done by robots?
  • If robots start doing lots of work, what will humans do?
  • Should we program robots to have feelings, or would it be better to keep them as emotionless machines?
  • If robots become as smart as people, should they ever be given rights such as voting or freedom to do what they want?
  • If we didn’t give smart robots rights to freedom and voting, would that be slavery?

After completing the lesson plan, I made a new Darths & Droids comic. Then took Scully out for a walk. The day was surprisingly cold up to that point. A chilly southerly breeze actually made things colder at midday than it was at 6:30 in the morning. But the sun came out around lunch time and warmed things up.

This afternoon I tackled a major spring cleaning chore. I removed all the sliding window panes (sequentially) and washed them in the bathroom. Then removed the flyscreens and washed those. Then washed the fixed panes, then replaced the screens and sliding panes. We have laminated glass in most of the windows so the panes are very heavy and it’s tricky getting them in and out and carrying them through to the bathroom. I also had to brush away a lot of spiderwebs from the outsides of the windows. And washing the exteriors of the fixed panes is tricky because we’re above ground level and I have to lean out with a long-handled squeegee. Then I also cleaned the flyscreen door and glass of the balcony doors. All this took a few hours, but now we have sparkly clean windows that look like they’re almost not there at all.

Doing that, somewhere along the way I gave myself a nasty bruise on the sole of my left foot, up near the middle toe. I probably stood on something hard while trying to heft a heavy window pane in or out. I noticed while walking around afterwards and it’s quite sore.

Tonight I had the first Robots class. I think this is going to be a fun one this week!

Oh, I think I mentioned a few days ago that we had our dining chairs reupholstered. Here are before and after photos, to show what they looked like, and how they are now.

Old and new upholstery

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Planning up to Christmas

Yes, it’s that time of year already. I’ve been making plans to go visit my mother for a pre-Christmas lunch. She lives over an hour’s drive away, so I don’t get over there to see her very much. I’ve invited my brother along too, but it’s a long trip for him as well, so I’m not sure if he’ll make it or not.

I also spent some time today planning future ethics class topics for the weeks in December, leading up to a break which I plan on taking over Christmas and New Year. I’ve had special Christmas/holiday themed lessons at the end of the past few years, but I think I’ve run out of related topics, so this year I’m planning a fun hypothetical lesson, getting the kids to imagine what the world would be like if various strange scenarios happened. For example: What if likes could be used as money? What if people had wings? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was?

Otherwise my day was busy with lots of online ethics classes. I’m really enjoying this current week’s topic on Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities, which ends today.

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Phantom pet (carried over)

I titled yesterday’s post “New board games and a phantom pet” and then I completely forgot to mention the phantom pet!

My wife keeps getting emails from the vet about some mystery pet we apparently have named Scout. She got one yesterday, since yesterday was Scout’s birthday. A big congratulatory email, and some reminders that Scout may be due for a check-up. She said this has been going on for years, and also that whenever she phones the vet for anything do do with Scully, our actual dog, the person on the line always asks, “Is this about Scout or Scully?”

She said she’s asked them multiple times to have this mysterious Scout removed from our records, but they never seem to do it. I suggested that she call the vet and pretend to be crying and say she was upset to receive the birthday email because Scout got hit by a car and was no longer with us.

Anyway, she did phone them, but made a slightly more polite request. She also learnt that apparently Scout is a cat. I was thinking it’d be funny if Scout turned out to be a tortoise or something. But hopefully they’ve finally got the message and she won’t have to put up with Scout being mentioned constantly in the future. The only remaining mystery is how this happened in the first place.

Today I did my usual 5k run in the morning. But after yesterday’s extended 7.5k effort, my muscles were still a bit tired and also with the weather being 22°C and 80% humidity at 8:30 am when I started, I went pretty slowly.

It was warm and humid today, and in the evening we had a huge thunderstorm roll in, about 7:30 pm, in the middle of one of my online classes. I had to tell the kids that if I lost power the lesson might end abruptly.

I’m looking forward to the coming week. I’ll have more free time after finishing all the university marking last week!

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New board games and a phantom pet

Friday night was board games night, hosted at a friend’s place. During the day I did my usual ethics classes. This current topic of Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities is really good, and I think the kids are enjoying it a lot more than they expect when they hear the topic title!

I had to do a bit of tidying up some issues with university assessment marking, after consulting with the professor about them yesterday. And I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning, and at lunch took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip shop, where I had a chicken burger for lunch.

After the evening ethics classes, I took Scully over to my friend’s place for games night, since my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We had six people and split up into two groups of three. The others played Thunderstone Advance: Towers of Ruin, while my group of three played Concordia, an old game from 2013 that I haven’t tried before. It’s a game of the Roman Empire, with each player in charge of a family aiming to settle and build towns across the Mediterranean. You have a hand of cards and each turn play a card to choose an action, such as moving colonists and building towns, gaining money and/or resources, or buying extra cards to add to your hand. The extra cards both give you more options and also the cards are used to score points at the end of the game, so there’s a lot of inter-relationship between the different things you can do. It was fun, and I ended up coming second of three, behind the guy who had played before and explained the rules, so I was happy with that.

Next all six of us played a game of The Gang. This is a new game and is, weirdly, a fully cooperative version of Texas Hold’Em poker. Everyone has a poker hand built up using Texas Hold’Em rules, and at each “betting ” phase you instead take a numbered chip (from 1 to the number of players) based on your estimation of how good your hand is. If you think your hand is likely the worst, you grab the 1, if you think it’s the best, you grab the 6 in this case (with 6 players). People might disagree – if someone else takes the 1 chip but you think your hand is probably even worse, you can take the chip off them. You’re not allowed to talk about your hands, you just take the chips. If you get your chip taken off you, you can take it back, or you can settle for a different chip. In this way, people sort of jostle and evaluate how confident the other players are, and may settle for different chips than they initially thought. This phase only ends when everyone is happy (more or less) with the chip they have.

Then you reveal some cards (Texas Hold’Em style), and have another phase of chip grabbing. The chips for the first round stay there, there are new sets of chips each betting phase. The fourth of these phases is the final one. At the end of this, everyone has their final chip – the older chips are disregarded at this stage and only serve to remind people during the grabbing phases what people thought their hands were like at the time. Once the final chips are settled, everyone reveals their hands. If they rank in exactly the same order as the final chips, the players win the round. If there’s any mistake, the players lose. The goal of the game is to cooperate and win three rounds before you lose three rounds.

It took a bit of getting used to, and we lost three rounds in a row, but I think by that time we had a better grasp of how to play and judge each other’s chip grabbing. I would have been good to try a second game, but the others wanted to move on to something else.

We then played Platypus, a cooperative party game where you need to give clues using a hand of cards to let the other players identify a mystery thing from a set of eight. That was kind of fun, a bit like a Codenames-light. That ended the evening.

This morning I had to go get a blood sample taken for some testing. I thought I had to fast overnight, so went first thing when the pathology place opened at 08:30. And then the woman who took the sample said my doctor had ordered a basic test that didn’t require fasting!

I was home by 9 o’clock and had my delayed breakfast, then went for a run. I decided to push myself and do 7.5k instead of my normal 5k. I took it fairly easy and found the distance fine without getting too worn out. It wasn’t as fast as the previous times I’ve extended to 7.5k, but that was okay.

After having a shower and cleaning the bathroom and shower stall, I settled into making some comics. I also spent some time cleaning and polishing our dining chairs. We just had them reupholstered because the seat padding was getting flat and hard, and a couple of them had the seats falling off the frames due to loose screws that couldn’t be tightened due to stripping the plywood screwholes. So we decided instead of discarding them and buying new chairs, we’d get them reupholstered with new fabric and stuffing. I found a place not far from us, and they picked the chairs up on Tuesday, and were done and ready to bring them back by Friday! I’d hoped that they’d clean off the wooden frames, which were a bit dusty, but they came back with the same dust still on them! So I cleaned them up carefully and rubbed some furniture polish into them.

For dinner tonight my wife and I went up to Organica, an Italian/Greek kind of restaurant near us (which I’ve probably mentioned before). Tonight I tried the lamb shank, in red wine and tomato sauce, with mashed potato. It was really good, the meat tender and falling off the bone.

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Finished marking. Nearly.

Today I tackled the last of the video assignments from the university image processing class. I had some… interesting… issues to deal with. I shouldn’t say too much about them, but a few students had done bad things and I had to consult with the professor to determine how to handle comments and marking.

I also had an interesting online ethics class this morning. The topic is still Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities, and the first class I had with older 13-15 age group kids kept getting sidetracked into them bringing up a certain recent election and a certain previous President who is set to be President again as examples. I had to keep reminding them we weren’t there to talk about politics. Fortunately all the kids were pretty unanimous in their opinions (negative!), so there were no arguments.

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Video assessments

Today I got stuck into the individual video reports from the masters students in the image processing course. I had 17 to view and mark. I managed to get through 12 of them today. I would have done more, but I had a moment of horrific realisation when I reached the second group of students and had the suspicion that the paper subject they were talking about had nothing to do with their group project report.

I checked, and discovered to my shock that I had accidentally downloaded the report of the wrong student team and marked that yesterday! So I had to scrap that work, download the correct report, and spend a couple of hours reading through and marking that before I could get back to viewing the videos. That was pretty awful.

By 5pm I was wasted on marking and had a bit of time away from the screen to relax my eyes before launching into three consecutive ethics classes. Apart from a lunch break and that time, I was working essentially 9am to 9pm today.

So I’m going to take a well deserved break and watch the second half of my current movie on Netflix. A quite fun horror film called Abigail. No spoilers, but it’s playful and amusing.

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Is marking assignments a right, a privilege, or a responsibility?

Lots of teaching related stuff today. I started by writing my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic of “Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities”. I got that done fairly quickly, and I think I have plenty of material.

Then I got stuck into marking more image processing final reports. I wanted to power through the final three written reports today, leaving me with just the 16 individual paper review videos to do. I managed it, and then entered all the marks so far into the university system. I found a faster way to do it than I’ve been doing the past three years. Instead of sequentially pasting remarks into each individual student’s page, having to copy/paste the same remarks 6 times for each member of the team, I opened all six team members at once in different browser tabs and pasted each remark 6 times with just one copy. It saved a significant amount of tedium.

In between I took Scully for a walk up the street to the shops and got some sushi for lunch. Scully was off her food today with a tummy upset, but seems better this evening.

Tonight I had the first class with the ethics topic. After going through some questions on the differences between rights, privileges, and responsibilities, I had a triangle diagram with one at each corner and asked where the kids thought things like “medical care” or “driving a car” or “voting” are. The voting one was very polarising. One kid said it was halfway between a privilege and a responsibility, but not a right. One said it was dead in the middle of all three. And the third kid said it was all the way in the “right” corner – he said everyone over the age of seven (!) should be allowed to vote and nobody should have that right taken from them.

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Photo dump

Today was my usual busy Monday, with many online classes to teach. So I thought I’d dump some photos I took over the last few days which I haven’t had a chance to share.

We’ll start with a jacaranda tree. November is the most beautiful month of the year in Sydney, with these large trees in vivid purple flowers all over the city.

November Jacaranda

Last Friday when I took Scully out for lunch, we walked home via a park, where I let her off the lead to run around. I took my eyes off her for one second to glance at my phone, and she was off to the swing set and the surrounding bark chip mulch that is there to provide a soft surface for kids. She loves rolling in this stuff, and it’s nigh on impossible to get out of her fur. It sticks like velcro and you have to tease every single piece out individually.

Scully in bark chips

It took me maybe an hour of tedious grooming afterwards to get her looking respectable again. Fortunately she had a professional groom and haircut the next day.

On Sunday after my 5k run I spotted this butterfly on the ground and it stayed still long enough for me to get a close photo.

Australian painted lady

It’s an Australian painted lady, which has the awesome species name of Vanessa kershawi.

Finally, a photo I took today, of four tawny frogmouths. The two adults on each end are protecting the young in the middle.

Frogmouth family

This family have taken up a spot on a tree branch in the park across the street. It’s in a creek gully, and I took the photo from a bridge above, thus the overhead perspective.

The only other thing to report today is that my wife and I got our latest COVID vaccinations, since it’s been a year since our last ones. We booked in at a local pharmacy for after my wife got home from work, and they did it quickly with no fuss.

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