The main differences from yesterday:
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It’s a bit repetitive, but today was somewhat similar to yesterday. I did a 2.5k run. I had online ethics classes at 11am, 6pm, and one to come shortly at 9pm.
I’m really loving this time travel topic in my classes. At one point I go through a series of scenarios for how you might make money if you invented a time machine.
And the weather… yes, it’s been thunderstorming again this afternoon. The morning however was fine and sunny. A very rare occurrence lately – I don’t know exactly but it feels like we’ve only had two or three days where the sun has broken through the overcast in the last 3 weeks or so. We’re supposed to get more rain and storms tomorrow, but then the weekend might actually be rain-free. Let’s wait and see.
The annoying thing is everything is just so humid, all the time. I hate it when you dry off after a shower, and then when you have another shower 24 hours later, your towel is still damp. Ugh.
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This morning it was time to do another 5k run. I missed the 5k last week, so wanted to make sure I did one this week. I did it at the oval, running laps on flat ground, because last time I did it on the streets and the hills nearly killed me. I recorded a surprisingly good time of 27:49, which was a big improvement on my previous oval run of 29:42. I guess the daily 2.5k runs are really building up my stamina.
I wrote the new ethics class topic for the week. This week we’re doing a fun one before I take a break for Christmas, on the ethics of time travel. And I had the first three classes of kids this evening. The last one was really fun, with the kids laughing at the various hypothetical situations I proposed and their various answers. I proposed the following:
A future version of you appears. They show you a tattoo, and insist that you go out and get it done now. You don’t want a tattoo. But your future self apparently does, and thinks it’s important enough that they have to convince you to do it today. What should you do?
One girl said, “Yeah, that sounds like fun, I always wanted a tattoo!” Another girl said, “If I got a tattoo, I’ve probably turned evil or something, so I’d avoid doing it at all costs.”
And, yes, there was more stormy weather today. We had some moderate rain with a little thunder around 4pm, which cleared up enough for me to take Scully out for a walk without getting too wet. But then after 5pm a bigger and heavier storm rolled in, with some really loud thunder and heavy rain. We may be in for more of the same again tomorrow.
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I had a busy day. I got stuck into photographing the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips first thing this morning, straight after breakfast. It usually takes me to lunch time, but today I had an online meeting at 11:30, so I was racing to see if I could finish in time. I made it, just.
The meeting was with the lecturer of the image processing course I helped tutor recently, to discuss our ongoing work in revamping his data engineering course for first semester next year. We had a third participant, the woman from the university curriculum assistance team (I can’t remember what the actual title of the department is) who is helping us to make sure we hit a bunch of higher level learning goals.
For instance, she asked us if we have any exercises in reflection in the coursework – tasks where the students need to look back on what they’ve learnt and assess their own learning practices, how effective they’ve been, and which ones they should modify. It’s a sort of meta-learning skill, and the university tries to make sure that several such skills are integrated into the coursework along with the technical skills that the students learn. We came up with some ideas. The tricky thing is that you kind of have to do these meta-learning things by stealth, because the students themselves often see little point to them and simply won’t do them unless there’s a more compelling reason, such as it being part of an assessment task that they have to do.
Anyway, we have a good structure and good ideas for integrating the course into the wider university experience. The main issue we have is the amount of work to be done and the fact that the university doesn’t have budget to pay for additional people to work on it. The lecturer has a busy time schedule, while I have some spare time and desire to work on it, but he doesn’t want me to do work on it without compensation. He did indicate that he might be able to get some additional funding from the faculty, so that would be good if that works out.
This afternoon I worked on assembling some of the comics I’d photographed this morning. And we had a huge thunderstorm. The sky went black about 4pm, and there was intense thunder and lightning, as well as torrential rain. The storm passed in about an hour though, and the sky cleared up a bit afterwards. Apparently this pattern is due to repeat for the next couple of days.
This evening… I have no classes to teach! And for the first time in ages my wife has no outstanding dog bandana orders to fill, so she can relax from the sewing for an evening. So we might just be able to sit back and do nothing for a bit. Phew!
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It’s time for the annual service fo our car, so I took it up to the service centre first thing this morning. Fortunately this is walking distance from home, so I walked home after leaving the car there.
I did a 2.5k run, and then had the last two classes of the current ethics topic on organ donation. After lunch I went to pick up Scully from my wife’s work, and the car place called while I was walking up to say the car was ready to be collected. Which was good timing, because it’s in the same direction so I walked with Scully to collect the car. It’s all good, but we’re going to have to get some tyres replaced within the next few months as the tread is wearing down and is very close to the legal limit.
This afternoon I worked furiously on completing the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, so I can photograph them tomorrow morning. I just finished, in time to wind down for the night.
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Five days into summer, and the weather today was very wintry. The maximum temperature was only 19.2°C, which would be perfectly normal for the middle of winter. And it was rainy and gloomy. It was similar yesterday, but colder today. And… we have rain forecast every day for the next week too, up to about 75 mm in total. This is a really weird weather pattern for this time of year, certainly under the influence of La Niña. I keep waiting for the day when suddenly the clouds and rain will vanish and the temperatures will soar into the 30s for the remainder of summer, but it shows no signs of happening yet.
My wife had a video thing on today, so I took Scully out for a long walk over lunch time so she could do it without interruptions. We walked out to the new bakery at Naremburn, where I grabbed some lunch – a vegetarian mushroom pie and a custard tart. It rained intermittently and I had to put my umbrella up and down about a dozen times before we got back home again.
This afternoon I worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I need to get those photographed on Tuesday morning when I have some spare time, so I need to get all the scripts written by then.
Oh, I also took Scully for a short drive over to the hardware store to get some craft supplies for my wife. She’s going to try using some of the leftover scrap material from her dog bandana sewing to make decoupage bangles.
For dinner I was going to make Thai red curry vegetables with rice, but I discovered that we’re almost out of red curry paste, so I switched at the last minute to green curry instead. I wonder if I should add some yellow curry paste to the shopping list as well…
And this evening I had two ethics classes. The topic this week is organ donation, and it’s been a really good topic. There are lots of tricky questions that are obviously getting the kids thinking, and their answers span the range of possibilities, which is always more interesting than when they all agree with one another. There’s a strong divide on the following question:
Imagine someone is in a hospital and desperately needs a heart transplant. A car accident victim is brought in. Doctors try to save them, but unfortunately they die. Their heart could save the person who needs a transplant. If the dead person’s driver’s licence says they do not consent to be an organ donor, should the doctors respect that wish, even if it means letting the heart patient die?
I’m getting roughly half the kids saying that you have to save the heart patient’s life, even if it means disrespecting the dead person’s wishes – because saving a life is imperative and the dead person isn’t going to know anyway. And roughly half the kids saying that you must respect the dead person’s wishes – because it may be really important to them what happens to their body, and why even bother recording a donor status if doctors are going to ignore it anyway? And there are a few other questions that are just as divisive. The good thing is this is exposing the kids to different opinions, as well as the reasons why people hold those opinions (as I get each of them to explain why they answer the way they do). I also get the kids to try to provide reasons supporting the other side of the argument.
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My wife and I got our COVID test results from last night’s test this morning: negative. So that’s good!
I spent most of today working on Darths & Droids writing and comic production. Interrupted by taking Scully for a long walk, and getting in my 2.5k run for the day. The weather was cool and overcast all day, though it hasn’t rained at all. We are supposed to get some rain tomorrow, and throughout the next week.
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I had a busy day. I started by going to the supermarket to pick up the grocery shopping. I ordered online, but I’ve moved to only ordering items not including fresh fruit and vegetables, since I haven’t been happy with the selections we’ve been getting. Instead I quickly go through the fruit and vegetable section and grab my own selections, then pick up my pre-ordered groceries. It still saves a significant amount of time, and I get fruit and vegetables that I know I’ll be happy with.
When I got home I did some prep work for a Zoom meeting for the Standards Australia committee on photography, which began at 11am. This is the Australian committee follow-up to the international ISO standards meeting held in October. As the chair, I present a report on what happened at the international meeting for the benefit of the Australian members, and we deal with any other business that comes up regarding Australian standards. We have some ISO standards that have been adopted as Australian standards, which ISO has since updated with new versions, so we need to go through a process to update those. And we need to consider whether new ISO standards recently published would make sense for Australian industry.
After the meeting I grabbed some quick lunch and then picked Scully up from my wife’s work. We did some ball chasing in the park on the way home, and then at home I worked on some Darths & Droids comics for a bit.
Then I had two ethics classes online. My plans were to finish those and then head straight over to a friend’s place for Friday board games night. This plan was not to come to fruition. Instead, due to an alert from the government that affected me I spent the evening going up to the hospital with my wife so we could both get COVID tests. I had to inform my friends that I would not be attending games night, due to risk of spreading COVID. I believe the risk is actually very low that I’ve been exposed, but with the new omicron variant going around and apparently infecting people who are double vaccinated, I don’t want to be taking any risks whatsoever.
So that kind of scotched the evening. We ordered some Indian food in and enjoyed a good meal together at least. I expect by tomorrow morning we’ll have received negative COVID notification and all will be well, but it’s kind of disrupted this evening.
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Tonight for dinner I wanted to use up a big batch of mushrooms that I’d bought in the last grocery shop. I asked my wife and she suggested calzones….
So I made them. I sautéed the mushrooms with onions and garlic, added some tomato paste – and no water because I didn’t want the filling to be too liquid. I added some shredded mozzarella cheese before sealing up the dough and baking. They turned out really good – I think better than the ones I did a while back with ricotta.
What else did I do…? I did a 2.5k run, despite the warmer weather and humidity. I went out with my wife and had fish & chips for lunch. Did some comics stuff… not much really!
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I forgot to mention yesterday, but I completed a November of (almost) no days without exercise. I actually only started on 2 November, because that was when I saw the concept of a “no zero month”, so it was too late to start exercising on the 1st. But I’ve been doing a run of at least 2.5 km and sets of push-ups and sit-ups – and I managed to go the entire (rest of the) month without skipping a single day. I did have one day when I didn’t run because of the torrential rain all day, but I did the push-ups and sit-ups. And there were two days when I missed those, but did the run.
But the point is I did some exercise every single day, which is a very new thing for me. I’ve never been consistently into exercising, and especially not at this activity level. I’ve had some runs of many months where I’ve done a 1000 metre swim once a week or something like that, but never anything at the level of every day. And having been going for a month now, I feel good about it. I feel fitter, and it’s starting to feel like a habit, rather than something I need to force myself to do every day.
I track my moving distances on Strava. Each month I join the challenge to move at least 100 km. Most months I make it, but sometimes I struggle. But this month with all the extra running, I’ve clocked up 195 km!
Also, this morning I had an appointment with my doctor, just to refill a prescription. He checked my weight, and since my last visit I’ve dropped 6 kilograms. He said last time that I could afford to lose a few kilos, and today he was very happy with the result. And so was I – I wasn’t expecting to have lost that much. I don’t really feel like I have. But wow, this exercise thing really works.
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