April 2023 – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Easter lunch and no email

This morning we took Scully for a walk, and then I made a salad to take to my wife’s family lunch for Easter Sunday. Her mother requested I make rocket and pear salad again, as she likes it so much.

I diced beurre bosc pears, drizzled them with a mix of orange and lemon juice to stop them browning and to give some flavour, put them onto rocket leaves, added crumbled blue cheese and walnuts and some extra virgin olive oil. We took it over to lunch and it was a it. We also had roast chicken and vegetables, a scalloped potato bake, and pane di casa bread. And then there was a chocolate raspberry cake for dessert, and of course Easter chocolates, which my brother-in-law gets from a chocolatier near his place. There were Easter bilbies and small eggs filled with various flavours.

When we got home this afternoon I discovered my email wasn’t working. Two different clients (Thunderbird on MacOS ad Apple Mail on iOS) both reported errors connecting to my imap server. I tried webmail on my web and mail host’s domain, but it also reported an error message (“Server Error: STATUS: Internal error occurred.”) and didn’t show me any of my email at all. I double checked the server settings, encryption, and port numbers, and they’re all correct.

But the status page for my webhost says that both imap and webmail are both operational. So I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve submitted a support ticket saying I can’t access either imap or webmail, over 2 hours ago, but no response yet. I’m just going to go to sleep tonight and hope that it’s all fixed in the morning. Otherwise I don’t know what else to do.

New content today:

Great Western Trail

Yesterday was board games night at a friend’s place. But because it was Good Friday and school holidays, several of the other guys had family things on, or were travelling, so there were only three of us present.

We began with a game of Great Western Trail: Argentina. This is a long game which the owner has been playing solo and wanting us to try multi-player for a while. It’s fairly complex and took some serious rules explanation, but easy enough to pick up once we got going, as every turn is short and while there are strategic decisions to be made the choices aren’t overwhelming.

You can essentially mix and match four different strategies:

Hiring cowboys (or gauchos, I suppose) and acquiring better cattle (worth more money during the game and points at the end of the game).
Hiring builders and building buildings, which give you extra abilities, plus tolls when other players move past them.
Hiring train drivers and developing your train track to provide a shorter route to get your cattle to market, as well as other benefits.
Hiring farmers and using them to grow grain, which allows you to ship your cattle to more prestigious ports, earning higher points.

I went heavy on the cowboys and cattle, with a little bit of farming. One other player went heavily into the train, while the other concentrated on building. It was fairly close in the end, but I managed to win with my prestigious collected herd of cows!

Then we played some quick games of Jump Drive, and an abstract strategy game that one of the guys had picked up from a gaming club that he attends.

Today I did a 2.5k run in the morning, and then picked up the grocery order at lunch time. I couldn’t get the groceries yesterday because of the Good Friday holiday (with the supermarket being closed). Today it was super busy there – I haven’t seen that many people in the supermarket for a long time. Of course everyone was doing their shopping today, given yesterday and tomorrow the supermarkets are all closed for the Easter public holidays.

The other notable thing was the weather – yesterday it was very rainy, with heavy falls at times. And today it was pleasantly sunny, but cool, and in the afternoon it became very windy. The wind is so strong they’ve closed Sydney Airport’s runways and don’t expect them to open again for several hours. The forecast for tomorrow is also very windy.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Cough is still very annoying

This post-COVID cough is really lingering and being annoying. It’s better in the mornings but gets worse in the evening. A neighbour was telling me this evening that he and his partner had coughs for weeks afterwards.

I went for another 2.5k run today, hoping to improve my time from yesterday, but I ended up recording exactly the same time. Which is a good 15-20 seconds slower than what I was doing before COVID. I feel like it would have been difficult to do much better in my current state. Hopefully things will improve as I shake off the lingering remnants.

Other than that I worked on building up more buffer for Darths & Droids today. And I decided we should go out for dinner to the local pizza place – our first dinner out since having COVID – since it’s the night before the Easter long weekend, and nothing will be open tomorrow.

New content today:

Big lunch and little dinner

This morning I did a 2.5k run, for the first time since last Wednesday. Last weekend I felt more like just resting and trying to get over this lingering COVID cough, but I thought this morning that I should get some exercise. I took it a little easy, but wanted to go a bit faster than last time, which I managed okay.

It was my wife’s day off work and we took a long walk with Scully, stopping at a cafe to have a nice lunch. I ordered a chicken schnitzel burger, which turned out to be enormous, bigger than I’d expected. And it was really delicious too! But very filling. My wife’s haloumi and avocado toasted sandwich was similarly generous.

Even though that was around midday, we decided a light dinner would suffice. I made some salad with falafels and a tahini dressing.

This afternoon I made more of that recent batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed last week. Apart from that I kind of didn’t achieve very much. Oh, I did some overdue website updates – boring technical stuff mostly. I had to change the links from Irregular Webcomic! to the Fantasy and Cliffhangers books sold by TopatoCo, because they’re no longer available there. I had them send me some of the leftover stock and recycle the rest, so now the only way to get any of the few remaining books is to contact me directly.

New content today:

Anaesthetic-free dentistry

I had an appointment with my dentist first thing this morning. I had a tooth filled back in January because it was giving me some pain when eating. The dentist then said that one of the old fillings was flexing, and he replaced it. It was fine up until last week when I chipped the tooth while eating, so I made the appointment for this morning. I thought it might have been the filling again, but the dentist took one look and said with relief, “Oh! It’s not my filling, it’s the tooth that broke! I feel a lot better now!”

Then he said he’d try to repair the chipped area without anaesthesia, and to just let him know if it hurt. Then he started drilling. In fairness, there wasn’t much drilling and indeed it didn’t hurt much – there were a couple of quick twinges, but nothing horrible. The whole thing only took about 5 or 6 minutes. So overall, avoiding having an anaesthetic was a plus. And as a bonus he didn’t charge me for the quick repair work since it was a follow-up on a tooth he’d fixed recently.

From the dentist’s office, I walked over to my wife’s work to pick up Scully and take her home. We went a long way, doing a 6 km loop via the Naremburn bakery, where I grabbed a croissant for energy to walk home again.

With no teaching today, I concentrated on writing and making Darths & Droids comics. At lunch time I took Scully for a drive, to the Drummoyne Bakehouse, which is not too far and has nice meat pies. I had a chicken bourguignon and a Mexican beef pie, and a small ricotta tart as a dessert. I got Scully to run around the park near the bakery for a bit before we drove home. She had a lot of exercise today and slept much of the rest of the afternoon.

Here’s a photo!

For dinner tonight I made calzones, filled with spinach and ricotta, with a hot tomato sauce to pour over the top.

New content today:

Last teaching day for a week

Today I finished off the extended topic of Photography with my last groups of ethics students. This was the topic interrupted by a week off in the middle for me to recover from COVID. I’d planned to have a week off after this for the Easter break, so that will give me a bit more time to get over this lingering cough. It’s been tricky to do Zoom classes with kids without collapsing into coughing fits now and then.

I did a COVID test again this morning and it came up negative, so I could go into the university this afternoon for the next lecture of Data Engineering. Today was a guest lecture by a person from Mathworks, talking about how to use MatLab to do machine learning and deep learning for data analysis and classification. I find this a bit of a hard core turn from the more introductory level material of previous weeks, and I wonder how easy it is for the students who suddenly find themselves in the deep end of data analysis techniques.

For that course I also have a week off, since next Monday is the Easter Monday public holiday, and there are no lectures at the university. So I have a full week off from all teaching commitments! I should be able to relax a bit, and maybe get a head with some comics writing.

New content today:

A lot of rain and cold

March was the hottest March ever recorded here in Sydney – a bit of a change after the relatively mild summer we had with the tail end of La Niña. But in March the weather really heated up and we had several days that were hotter than anything we had during the summer.

But having done that, the weather cooled down dramatically a couple of days ago. Yesterday we had 90 mm of rain, and today another 20 mm so far, and the temperature only barely reached 20°C both yesterday and today. The overnight temperature, which has been at least 19°C for the past month, dropped suddenly to less than 15°C. So it’s felt very wintery these past two days.

This morning I photographed that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote yesterday. And then spent some time assembling some of them for the coming week. I also remembered to change the website configuration to go back to new strips rather than reruns every day. (Last time I did this I forgot to change the configuration and ended up with a mess of the wrong comics being published which I had to sort out manually.)

I did three ethics classes this evening, and I’m still coughing a bit from leftover COVID which is making it a little difficult and annoying. But I want to do the classes rather than cancel more of them – which would lose me income and potentially enrolments. I’m really hoping the coughing clears up soon. I’ve heard in some cases it can last for several weeks, which would be really awful.

New content today:

Back into teaching and comics

Friday night was online board games night with friends, so I skipped my daily update. After missing last week’s face-to-face games due to COVID, it was nice to get together online and play some games.

My Friday was very busy. I had my first ethics classes since cancelling a week’s worth while I got over COVID. I had one at 9am, which I’d moved an hour earlier because at 10am I had a Standards Australia meeting (also via Zoom), to follow-up from the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in February. We had the usual administrative business, and I went through the technical report I wrote summarising the discussions and events of the international meeting. It went okay, although I had to pause a few times for coughing, which is still an issue as I recover from the illness.

At lunch I went to pick up a weekly grocery shop from the supermarket. And then in the afternoon I had three ethics classes in a row. I managed okay, but again, needing to pause to cough a few times. The cough is really quite annoying. It comes and goes throughout the day – sometimes I have a long period of coughing and feel awful, and then I it settles down a bit and doesn’t bother me for a while.

Today was similar, with the coughing fading in and out during the day. I went for a walk with my wife and Scully to the Naremburn bakery and had a cinnamon scroll for morning tea, which was really delicious. On the way home it rained, and became fairly heavy. We’d taken umbrellas, but forgotten Scully’s raincoat, so she got soaked, and when we got home we had to towel her off and give her a blow dry.

I spent much of today writing new comics for Irregular Webcomic! I’ve had two weeks of no new strips after the buffer rain out a couple of weeks ago, but now I’m planning to photograph this new batch tomorrow morning and have them ready for Monday.

I made Thai red curry vegetables and rice for dinner tonight – which is the first proper dinner for both of us that we’ve had for some time, as my wife hasn’t felt up to eating much since she got COVID as well, but she’s feeling better now.

New content yesterday:

New content today: