May 2023 – Page 3 – dangermouse.net

Data project marking – lots of work

Today I had two ethics classes first thing, one with the new Creativity topic for older kids. That was a really fun class. The older kids are good because the class progresses more like an organic conversation abut the topic, rather than me leading the class and asking questions so much, as with the younger kids.

The rest of the day I dedicated to marking the Data Engineering project planning reports. I had five reports to read through and mark on a bunch of specified criteria. As usual, some were better than others. I wrote comprehensive comments for all of them, to assist the students with the second half of their projects, now underway. And then I have to paste them all in one at a time into the university marking system, for each student in each team – so something like 30 students, with 6 separate fields for each student, and then enter the marks as well for each section… so it’s something like 180 copy/paste operations plus 180 instances of typing numbers into fields, being super careful not to make a typo anywhere, as that could result in a student getting the wrong grade.

I took a break for lunch, to take Scully for a walk. I managed to get a table at a cafe and had a seafood pie. This is a really nice pie, with chunks of salmon and white fish, prawns, and I think maybe scallops, in a creamy sauce.

The afternoon was finishing off the marking. Then I made some pasta for dinner, and after that tried to work on writing some Darths & Droids comics, since I’ve reduced the buffer to zero again thanks to being so busy this week. Phew!

New content today:

Eye check-up day

I did health stuff today! I got up, ate muesli with fruit and yoghurt, then went for a 2.5k run. I had to work on my ethics lesson for the older students (13-15) for the class tomorrow morning, but in between I did a couple of other things.

I went with my wife to our optometrist for an annual vision and eye health check-up. We both wear reading glasses these days, and we’re a bit competitive about the eyesight tests. I won the distance vision battle handily, blowing away the optometrist, who was impressed that I could read a certain line of the eye chart. And then she said, “Just see if you can try the next line”, and I amazed her by reading off the letters flawlessly. My reading prescription hadn’t changed since last time, so I don’t need to update my lenses, which is good. The optometrist did fundus camera shots, a glaucoma test, and also had me do a visual field test to check my peripheral vision, which she said was a precaution because of my family history (my mother has macular degeneration). I passed that with flying colours, which was good to know.

Later in the afternoon we went up to a local doctor to get flu shots, in preparation for the impending southern flu season. Indications are the the flu season here will be a bad one, so we wanted to make sure we got our shots.

After three ethics classes this evening (younger kids), I finished off the older kids’ topic on Creativity, ready for first thing tomorrow morning. Phew!

New content today:

Ethics of sports fans

It’s new ethics topic day, and this week the younger kids are doing the topic of Sports Fans. There are questions about how sports fans should behave, and whether it’s okay to follow teams just because they win more, or if you should be loyal to your home team, and about athletes being role models, and other stuff like that.

The weather is still chilly like winter, though should warm up a bit as the week goes by. I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and had sushi for lunch for the first time in ages.

On the way back, I dropped in on a furniture store nearby, one that specialises in ergonomic furniture for back posture. My current desk stool is breaking and I ned a replacement. I got it at this same shop many years ago, and it’s been brilliant. The base is convex, so it doesn’t sit still on the floor – it constantly wobbles and you need to use your core muscles to sit steadily. And there’s no backrest, so it’s impossible to slouch. It’s been great for my posture and I wanted a similar replacement. I tried looking on their website on the weekend, but all the wobble stools that I found were too tall – the lowest adjusted height was significantly higher than my current stool. So I wanted to ask in the showroom if they had anything else that might suit me.

And when I went in I found one of these, a Leo Perching Stool. I tried it out and adjusted the height, and it was perfect. And feels really good. Maybe even better than my current old stool. The guy there told me it came in a wide range of colours and I could select them from the website and order it to be picked up from the store, to avoid delivery fees. So I came home and found it on their website and ordered one.

It came with a range of fabric types and colours. One of the types was a premium fabric, and it said it would add the premium charge at the shipping stage. I selected a premium fabric and went to the checkout to see what the extra cost would be… and it didn’t add anything! I liked the colour I’d selected, so I purchased it with that. Hopefully I’ll get it with the premium fabric at no extra cost! 😀

OOPS! I saved a draft of this post on Tuesday night, and then neglected to actually post it. But that gives me time on Wednesday morning to add this photo I took yesterday of a kookaburra.

Yes, that’s with my phone. Sometimes kookaburras are tame enough to get within a metre or so.

New content today:

Second last Data class

Monday is my busiest day. Ethics online from 8am to midday. Then taking Scully out for a quick walk, before returning home to shower and change for the afternoon’s tutorial session at the University. I take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on the train, and arrive just in time to grab some salted caramel cookies to sustain me during the session.

The project planning report was in for each team and I skimmed through all of the ones I’m assigned to mark, so I could talk to the students and give them any advice for the experimental work they are planning on doing in the next two weeks. A few of the teams look in control but some were clearly floundering a little, and I spent time with a couple of the teams going over their experiment plans, and the statistical methods they should be using. I forget sometimes that this is a first year course, so the students are less than a year out of high school. I talk to them about Fourier transforms and stuff and then when they look at me blankly I realise they don’t even know what those are.

There was another odd issue which popped up. One student was obviously a native French speaker, and using French software on their laptop. They were exporting data from Excel in CSV format and trying to import into Matlab. But the numbers were coming across all wrong. After scratching my head for a minute I realised it’s because French Excel exports decimal numbers with commas instead of decimal points (and uses semicolons instead of commas to separate the fields, but Matlab handled that okay).

Next Monday is the last tutorial session, and the final project report is due on Friday next week. Then I’m free again on Monday afternoons! Then in semester two I’ll be doing the Image Processing course again on Thursday evenings.

New content today:

Winter blast

Today was the first real hit of the impending winter. Yesterday we had a pleasant 22.3°C in Sydney. Overnight a cold change came through from the south, bringing chilly air and cold rain. We only reached 15.8°C, and much of the day was hovering closer to 12°C.

This morning I did lesson 4 in the current game design course, and all three students showed up today. We developed the idea we had last time for a game based around a ninja grandma. I presented an idea I had for a worker placement mechanic to train your ninjas in Grandma’s ninja academy castle, perhaps followed by a battle for supremacy. They all liked that, so that’s the basic mechanic we’re going to start with. I need to put a draft game together in the next few days and post it for them to playtest before next Sunday.

After the lesson, I tried to go for a run. I looked outside and it was sunny, so I opened the windows for some fresh air and went out. I got about 100 metres down the road and saw the speed and dark grey shade of the clouds coming in, and decided to abort and run straight home. It was a good decision, because within 5 minutes the rain was coming down, and I’d shut the windows to prevent it coming in. I did manage to go for a run later in the afternoon, when the rain had passed.

Another thing I need to do in the next few days is marking of the university Data Engineering reports for the first assignment – the planning report for the student team experimental projects. I need to get this done quickly so they can use feedback for the follow-up experimental report, due in two weeks. So I’m going to be busy for the next few days!

New content today:

Games night and Coronation Day

Yesterday I was busy with 4 ethics classes, and squeezing in a 2.5k run, as well as picking up Scully from my wife’s work and taking her out for lunch. Well, my lunch, anyway. We went to my favourite Italian bakery and I had a slice of pizza, and they had a special chocolate-orange snail pastry – i.e. pain aux raisins, only no raisins, and with chocolate and candied orange. I like chocolate and orange together, so I had to try it, and it was delicious.

In the evening was in-person games night at a friend’s place. I took my new game—Brew—hoping to play it. But we had five players, and it only supports up to four. So we played a couple of other games instead.

Factory Funner, which involves building whimsical factories by connecting supplies, machines, and storage vats together with pipes. Each turn you add a machine and try to reconnect your pipes to make sure everything keeps working. It costs money to connect pipes, and the machines give you money, so the goal is accumulate the most. It was fun and puzzling.

And then I wanted to get home early because I had to be up early today, so I asked for a short game. We started Lovecraft Letter, a Cthulhu-mythos themed variant of Love Letter (which we’ve played many times before). It adds some cool new features. But one of them is that you can either win the game sane, or insane. To win sane, you need to collect two sane tokens, to win insane you need to collect three insane tokens (they are a bit easier to get). Unfortunately for my desire to leave early, we ended up with each of five players collecting multiple tokens, taking over ten rounds for someone to actually collect enough to win. But it was a lot of fun!

This morning I got up early to drive my wife to the Surry Hills Market, where she was doing another stall to sell her dog bandanas. She wanted to get there at 7am! On the way home I drove along Crown Street in the city – appropriate for today being the coronation of King Charles III. Back home, I took Scully for a walk, cleaned the bathroom/shower, and worked on some Darths & Droids comics.

This evening we want out for dinner to an Indian restaurant. This one is about 3 km walk away, which was pleasant in the cool evening air. I had a house specialty dish I hadn’t tried before: almond pumpkin lamb, which was really nice. Here’s a bit of a view walking towards the restaurant:

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Quitting before the end

This morning I had a new student in one of my ethics classes. I was halfway through teaching the class when I got an email notification, and I could see part of my mail client in another window behind the Zoom window, and saw enough of the subject to know that it was a student unenrolling notice from Outschool. Curious to know who it was, I clicked it and saw that it was the new student I was in the middle of talking to, and the reason given for unenrolling was “don’t like the class”. With over 200 students so far going through my classes, I’ve seen reasons mostly like “parent has a schedule conflict” or “student has a schedule conflict” or “taking a break” or whatever – this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone say they didn’t like the class.

And I still had to teach this kid for another 20 minutes! I thought it had been going well, with the kid answering questions and giving good explanations. I wonder if it was more the subject matter this week (“getting even”), and they would have liked it more in a different week.

We reached the end of the class, still with no sign from the kid that they hadn’t enjoyed it. I decided to just do my regular end of lesson summary for new students, in which I suggest they can discuss the class with their parents and use it to start a family discussion on the topic. And at that point in the Zoom video I saw this kid shake their head quite vigorously, clearly indicating they were not going to do that.

I’m guessing the kid didn’t make the call. Often on first lessons a parent sits next to them out of the Zoom video, to supervise, and I’m thinking the parent decided and made the cancellation. Oh well. I have hundreds of happy kids and parents. I suppose it had to happen eventually that one just didn’t like it!

For lunch I took Scully for a drive to the Allambie Pie Shop. I tried their pumpkin and feta pie today, which was really nice. Im glad I found this place – they make really good pies, and it’s closer than the Collaroy pie shop for a mid-week lunch drive. And there’s a soccer field a short walk away, where I can let Scully run around and chase a ball for a while to get some energy out.

This afternoon I worked on writing more Darths & Droids strips. I was over a week ahead a few weeks back, but the buffer has been burnt away with the fact that I’ve been busy on other stuff recently. I need to build it back up again before our trip to Japan next month.

For dinner tonight I had Brussels sprouts which I’d bought last grocery shop, and I wondered what to make with them. For the evening walk, I took Scully past the nearest supermarket, and popped in quickly to grab a couple of potatoes. I made chilli-miso sprouts, accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes.

New content today:

Planning about city planning

Today was pretty busy. I started with a 5k run after breakfast. 5k really feels significantly tougher than my more usual 2.5k distance, and especially on the street route that I prefer for the variety and the views, compared to the oval laps I did last time. The weather is getting cooler and less humid, which makes it a bit more pleasant though.

I made a few Lego comics using the photos I shot yesterday, since I needed them to see out publications for this week. Then I got stuck into writing a lesson plan for this week’s older kids’ ethics topic: Cities. I’ve got some questions on the growth of cities and urbanisation across the world through history, and what advantages and disadvantages city living brings to people. And questions about impacts of cities on the environment – is it more or less than the same number of people spread out across rural land? And how do we deal with wildlife in cities? And development issues such as redevelopment of historic districts, gentrification, and so on.

Add a walk with my wife and Scully around the harbour shore and three classes with the younger kids (on getting even), and that filled up my entire day.

New content today:

An overdue chicken schnitzel

This morning I got stuck into photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I took Scully for an early walk, and it was really chilly today. Then I got the Lego stuff out and spent the rest of the morning building and arranging the sets and taking photos. I finished the batch around 11am, then relaxed a bit before deciding what to do for lunch.

I decided to walk Scully up to the local shops and have lunch at one of the outside tables at one of the pubs. They have delicious chicken schnitzel, and it’s been a long while since Ive had one, so that’s what I ordered. Scully wanted to sit on my lap because it was still a bit chilly and windy, and she gave the schnitzel a good stare. But she’s pretty good and doesn’t try to grab food off plates. And it was as delicious as I remembered, so that was good!

This afternoon I finished up class notes for this week’s new ethics topic: Getting Even. This is a topic I did a couple of years ago, and I had plenty of good questions from then, so it wasn’t much work revising it. I had three classes this evening.

For one question I asked what the kids would do if another kid deliberately stepped on their foot, causing some pain. One girl said she’d feel angry an give them her “angry look”. She said she wouldn’t do it now (over the Zoom video) because it would scare me too much. I laughed and said I really wanted to see it now. So she did it, and yes it looked pretty angry, but in the current context it was really quite funny. I love it when the kids do interesting things and we can have a fun class.

New content today:

Big teaching day – animals and machine learning

I finished off the week of the current ethics topic with my last three classes of kids this morning. I got some interestingly diverse answers on whether our general reaction to cockroaches would change from “yuk; kill!” if they could speak with us. One kid said they might be really interesting to talk to and we could make friend with them. Another said she’d still kill them, but she’d feel more guilty about it.

After that I did a quick walk with Scully, then returned home to shower and change quickly before heading in to the university for this afternoon’s Data Engineering session. The professor liked the slides on machine learning I prepared on Saturday and let me present them to the students. It only took about 15 minutes, and they seemed to get a lot out of it, as a late introduction of context and motivation for the machine learning lecture they had a few weeks ago.

It was another busy session after that, walking around the tables and chatting with several groups about the progress of their projects, and answering various questions for them. Some teams seem to be doing well, while… others needed a bit of guidance.

Back home tonight, I made pizza for dinner using dough that my wife made when she got home from work. Pumpkin, feta, and walnuts, on a pesto sauce base. And now I can relax, after my week’s busy day!

New content today: