Month: April 2023

Finally a run again

This morning I did a 2.5k run – the first one in a week. I had no chance on the weekend with all of the other activities happening. I did a better time than last week, as I was still having a few lingering issues with COVID last week and this week I feel 100% again.

I had to work today on my lesson plan for the older ethics students, whose topic this week is Virtual Reality. The first class is first thing tomorrow morning, so I had to get it done today. I think I have plenty of material, and it should be interesting.

At lunch my wife and I took Scully for a walk to the Cornucopia Bakery at Naremburn. I had a Mexican pie, and they had little pecan pie tarts which I haven’t seen there before. They’re always changing their cake/pastry offerings and coming out with new things. Being a fan of pecan pie, I had to try it. It was a little different to what I consider a usual pecan pie, with the filling cooked a bit more, with a more toasty and slightly bitter charred flavour, which was actually nice to cut through the sweetness a bit.

The day was lovely, warm and sunny without being too hot. A perfect autumn day, in between the heat of summer and cold of winter. Leaves are starting to turn on the deciduous trees. It’s a very nice time of the year.

New content today:

Science fiction cloning

This morning I wrote my lesson plan for this weeks new topic of “Science fiction cloning”. And tonight I’ve run the first three lesson, which were a lot of fun. It’s a good topic for getting the kids engaged and interested, and there were some very interesting and diverse opinions on some of the questions. Some of the questions include:

  • Would you like it if there was another copy of you, who looked the same and had the same personality and memories?
  • If it were possible to create a copy of someone like this, would that be okay? Under what circumstances?
  • Should we clone people as backups (“extra lives”) before sending them into dangerous situations?
  • Would you feel okay taking a risk that could end up in your death if there was a perfect clone of you who could take your place if you died?
  • In a world where cloning was common, should originals and clones be treated the same, or differently?

The first one was very polarising. Some kids said it would be creepy and they wouldn’t like it at all. Others said it would be cool, they’d have someone like a new brother/sister to play with, and they’d like all the same things, so it would be great!

At lunch I took Scully for a long walk – she was really tired by the time we got home. Which was good, as she slept for much of the afternoon.

For dinner tonight I was inspired by a friend who made a roasted pumpkin, coconut, and ginger soup the other day. I improvised my own version, and it turned out very nice!

New content today:

Board game shopping!

Monday morning, after the daylight saving change, and I have three ethics classes beginning at 8am now for the winter. I was barely awake for the first one! These classes finished off the “Trusting Experts” topic I’ve been doing for the past week. Tomorrow we start a new topic on “Science Fiction Cloning” – for which I need to write the lesson plan tomorrow.

After the classes, I had lunch and then went into the city early. I had tutoring at the university from 3pm, but my wife suggested I go in early and browse around the bookshops and stuff, which I haven’t done for ages. So I did that. I checked out a couple of my favourite bookshops, and then went to a game shop. I have some store credit here from when I sold them some old Magic: the Gathering cards a while back, so I had that to spend.

I took some time browsing around, and looking up interesting looking games on my phone to check reviews. Then I used Discord to contact my friends and ask if any of them had the games I was looking at – because there’s relatively little point buying a game that someone in our group already owns. Good news! All three games I had my eye on were up for grabs, so I got all of them!

The one that I really expected someone must already have was Root, which I’d heard of and is fairly well known for having excellent reviews. I also found Brew and Evergreen, which also look intriguing, have good reviews, and importantly play times under 90 minutes, and support 2 players so I can play these games with my wife when not sharing them with my friends. This chewed up a nice wad of my store credit, though I still have a bit left.

So I’ll be looking forward in the next few weeks to trying these new games out, both with my wife, and also with a larger group of my friends.

In the afternoon and early evening we had the last lecture of the Data Engineering course, and introduction to the assessment project which the students need to do over the next four weeks. I went around and asked some of the groups what they were thinking of working on. One group is planning to look for connections between potential risk factors and diabetes from a public dataset of patient data. Another is going to search among a very broad range of possible data sources for correlations with phases of the moon! They asked if this would really be a sensible thing to work on (it’s actually one of the suggestions in our list of potential project ideas), and I said yes, as long as you cast a wide enough net – look at human physical/psychological data like crime rates or hospital admissions, geological data such as wave heights or earthquakes or rainfall, and biological data such as nocturnal animal activity or bird migrations or stuff like that. It’s basically a big data project to try and study a very wide range of phenomena and look for any surprising correlations.

New content today:

Board game design starting again

I slept in a bit this morning after yesterday’s busy day. But not too long, because I had a new class starting at 10am – another iteration of my 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving: Let’s Design a Game. This time I have three students enrolled, which makes a nice change from the past two times I ran it, each with just one student.

Then I had three ethics classes this afternoon, so there wasn’t a lot of time to do much else. After lunch I washed the car – it needed it after yesterday’s road trip, and the fact that I hadn’t done it for a long while.

New content today:

Day trip to Berry

Today we went on a road trip, south to the town of Berry. My wife and I took Scully in the car for the drive south down the coast. We left just after 9am, intending to arrive at Berry in time for lunch. We stopped once along the way at a rest stop to stretch our legs and let Scully relieve herself, and arrived in Berry just before midday.

We went to The Garden, a cafe/restaurant with outdoor seating where we could eat with Scully. I’d tried to book it online, but they only take bookings for tables of 6 or more people, so we just had to show up and hope they had a table for us. I expected it to be busy with day trippers and school holiday vacationers. The main street of Berry was indeed very busy, but we were early enough to beat the lunch rush and got a table right away. I had the chicken cotoletta, and my wife had the pear and walnut salad with grilled haloumi. It was pretty good. And after that we had a couple of scones with jam and cream for dessert.

We took Scully for a walk over to The Treat Factory, a place that makes chocolates, other sweets, and also jams, sauces, chutneys, mustards, pickles, and similar sorts of stuff. It’s a pleasant walk a bit over a kilometre out from the centre of the town. I grabbed packs of liquorice allsorts, jelly snakes, mint dark chocolate rocky road, and a jar of pear and vanilla jam and a bottle of “red hot” chilli sauce.

After a leisurely walk back to the car we headed off home again. We took a more scenic route home, along the coast rather than the inland freeway, and got home just after 6pm. Here’s a map of the route, pretty much 300 km there and back. A good day out!

Map of trip to Berry

New content today:

COVID completely better

In good news, it appears that the lingering COVID cough I’ve had the past few weeks has completely gone. I was still coughing a little a couple of days ago, but today I’m completely free. So that’s great!

Good timing too, as I had 4 ethics classes today, starting at 9am, and then three in a row in the afternoon. In between I picked up the groceries from the supermarket, and took Scully for a couple of walks. The weather was very unsettled again today, with intermittent sunshine and heavy rain showers. I managed to avoid getting caught in any rain though, unlike yesterday.

In other weather news, Cyclone Ilsa made landfall last night in Western Australia, and preliminary measurements are suggesting it set a new sustained wind speed record for Australia. So it’s possibly the strongest tropical storm to hit Australia in recorded history. Fortunately the region it hit was very sparsely populated and there are no reports of deaths yet. The Bureau of Meteorology is saying the remnants will likely combine with a cold front and bring heavy rain to south-eastern Australia, where I live. We’ll see in the next few days.

In other random news, today I learnt that the word “polecat” is not a synonym for “skunk”. Apparently it’s a completely different animal. I don’t know where I got the idea form that a polecat is the same thing as a skunk, but I’d been convinced of that fact for decades.

Tonight is online board games night with my friends. I’m playing games right now as I type, doing this in the down time between turns. We’ve played some Jump Drive, Ticket to Ride, and are now doing Just One.

New content today:

Cyclone Ilsa

While here in Sydney we had intermittent heavy showers today, the region around Port Hedland in northern Western Australia is bracing for Tropical Cyclone Ilsa, which I mentioned a couple of days ago. The storm has slowed down over the ocean and thus strengthened to a category 5 storm, with winds up to 315 km/h. It’s expected to make landfall tonight, close enough to Port Hedland (population 14,000) to be very dangerous. There are smaller towns more directly in the path, and it’s going to be a terrible night for anyone who hasn’t evacuated.

As I said here it was showery. There was strong sunshine, but a lot of dark clouds around, and the rainy periods were very heavy. I took Scully for a walk this afternoon, thinking it would be fine. We walked about 2.5 km, and made it to about 100 metres from home, probably even a bit less, when the rain hit. By the time we got home I had to change all my clothes because there were soaked.

My first ethics class this morning was at 8am, moved another hour earlier due to daylight saving changes. I had the older students and we talked about Age Limits, both legal limits and ones imposed by parents, discussing why they exist and whether they’re fair and reasonable. We talked about differences in various limits between cultures and countries, and whether some limits should be changed. It was a pretty cool discussion.

New content today:

Almost over COVID?

Last night during my ethics classes I was still coughing a little bit. I had three more classes tonight, and I don’t think I coughed once during them. It’s slowly been improving day by day, but has always been worse later in the day, and also when I’m talking a lot. So to get through classes in the evening without having a coughing fit was really good, and I’m taking it as a good sign. I do still feel a little clogged in the sinuses though and slightly muzzy-headed, which makes it a little difficult to concentrate on things, but I think that’s also improving.

Today I went out with my wife and Scully for lunch. We did a bit of a drive across a few suburbs to a nice park where Scully can run around. It’s usually empty on a weekday at lunchtime, when I’ve taken her there before, but I forgot it’s school holidays and there were several kids playing various types of football and basketball and also exercising dogs. Scully’s always a bit nervous around strange dogs, but they were far away enough that she could chase a ball and not get too close, so she got some good exercise.

Apart from that I’ve really just done a bit of comics work and taken it easy kind of goofing off and browsing stuff on the net in a time-wastey sort of way.

New content today:

The ethics of experts

It was chilly again today. We had a very sudden flip from hot summery weather to cold wintery weather in the space of about a week. Today really felt more like a winter day than autumn. There’s already been snow on the mountains. But at the same time we have a tropical cyclone threatening to hit Western Australia as a category 4 storm some time tomorrow. (That’s a very very long way from me, thankfully, and in a mostly uninhabited part of the country.)

Today was my first day back at teaching ethics online, after my COVID and Easter break. I still have a bit of a cough but it’s improving daily, and didn’t affect my classes too much this evening. Although it is definitely more of a problem when I’m speaking, rather than just sitting quietly. The topic for this week is “Trusting Experts”, and we examine the idea of what makes someone an expert and should we trust experts more than average people, and why. And also ponder why in some cases people, or governments especially, don’t trust expert advice.

I also spent some time doing part 2 of cleaning the kitchen, involving moving stuff around and cleaning underneath things, and so on. It’s all done now, and I feel much better abut it because it was long overdue, especially judging by some of the dust I found!

New content today:

Hot cross buns and fixed email

My email was still not working when I got up this morning. I checked the support request I submitted last night, and found that they’d responded with a very generic “Tell us more about your problem” message. It really looked like an automated message and nobody had read my original support request at all. I wonder if a lot of support centres have an automated response to every initial request like this, to weed out people who don’t really need help, and it’s only if your persist and respond with “more information” that anyone actually looks at your request.

I supplied a tiny bit more info, but honestly any competent support person could have diagnosed my problem from the original message. Within 10 minutes of sending the “more info”, a support person had determined that there was a configuration problem on my email account, and pushed an update which instantly fixed it. If someone had just read my initial message they would have been able to do the same thing last night.

Anyway. It was another cold day today. We’re having a real wintery snap here. Today I had to wear my slippers in the house for the first time since last winter. And wore trousers when going for a walk outside, rather than shorts.

For lunch my wife and I walked with Scully over to the Naremburn bakery, after phoning to check if they were open on the public holiday Monday. They were open, but said they’d be closing early at 1pm, so we went a bit earlier than we’d planned, and had lunch there. They had a new chilli con carne pie, which I tried, and it was pretty good. We bought a half dozen hot cross buns to bring home, only our second batch after getting a first half dozen just a few days ago. These are hand-made specialty ones, which are very dense and stuffed with sultanas, and glazed with a very sticky glaze that has a distinct fruit flavour. Very nice. A bit later tonight I’m going to try heating one up with some chocolate inside…

I also did some cleaning up this afternoon, cleaning the kitchen benchtops and the exterior of the fridge and going through a pile of stuff at my desk from last year’s Primary Ethics which I’m not using any more. And made some Darths & Droids comics. I’m building up a buffer ahead of my trip to Japan in June, and almost have the two weeks I need.

New content today: