Month: October 2023

Kids around the world

Thursday’s my busy day, with 5 ethics classes. And I’m also trying to get my comics buffers filled up for my trip to Europe next month, so I spent much of the in-between time working on those. After lunch I took Scully for a walk up to the main shops nearby and got myself a caramel tart for a treat, which was pretty good.

In one of my classes tonight there was a new kid. I normally ask what country they’re in, because I’m curious and like to know. He said he was in Israel. And… he said his father had just been called up to serve in the army. 😳

On my list of countries that I’ve had kids join my classes from I’m now up to 46 different countries. The last one I added was Zambia, a couple of weeks ago. And Bulgaria a few weeks before that. It’s really quite amazing when you stop to think about it, that technology allows us to do this sort of thing. I’ve had kids from every continent, except South America (and Antarctica).

New content today:

More marking; and Success and Failure

I finished off my marking for the image processing course today. As in previous semesters, this was followed by a tedious hour or so of pasting all the marks and comments into the university online interface – 10 separate entries for each of the 54 students I’d been assigned. I was very glad once I got that finished!

This evening I had the first three classes on my new ethics topic: Success and Failure. I think they went pretty well. This topic has less of me talking and more questions for the students to answer than the previous one I did on Dinosaurs, so it feels a lot more interactive, which is good.

This afternoon I read an article on the ABC News site about pears falling out of favour with Australian consumers relative to other fruits, with the result that a lot of pear farmers are finding the crop to be no longer commercially viable, and are removing pear orchards. This prompted two things:

Firstly, a conversation on with my friends on Discord in which two of them revealed that they never realised that pears are sold in supermarkets in an unripe state and that they ripen and soften over several days in the home. Both of them said they never thought much of pears, as they were too hard, crunchy, and bland compared to apples. I was amazed that they’d apparently never experienced the fact that pears soften considerably as they ripen, nor had the pleasure of eating a nicely ripe pear.

Secondly, I resolved to go out and buy some pears! When I went out with Scully for a walk after lunch I popped into the local grocery store and grabbed four nice Packham pears. Which are very firm now, but will ripen and soften nicely in the next few days. And one of my pear-incredulous friends also went out and bought himself some pears today as well, to experiment and try to experience this phenomenon of ripe pears himself.

I don’t know if it’ll be enough to convince the farmers to keep growing pears, but I certainly hope they don’t end up disappearing from our supermarket fruit sections.

New content today:

Marking, marking, lecturing

Today was full of work for the university image processing course. I spent much of the day marking student reports. Then late in the afternoon I took Scully up to my wife’s work and played tag team, so she could take her home while I hopped on a train into the city.

I continued my quest to have dinner at a different place every week, this time trying a random Chinese place that I found by wandering around. It had a bunch of barbecue ducks hanging in the front window, and a room of empty tables since it was pretty early to eat dinner. An old Chinese woman took my oder, but I don’t think she understood any English, and she tried to ask me a question in Chinese that I didn’t understand. But I got the meal I wanted, just a simple dish of fried noodles with some mixed seafood. It was okay, but nothing special.

At the university I gave the guest lecture tonight on Human Vision and Colour Perception. This is jus a special informative lecture for the students, non-assessable, but related to the work they’re studying on computer image processing. I think the students found it interesting, and a few said afterwards they liked it, and had some questions about it.

New content today:

Starting project marking; rampant e-bikes

This morning I finished off the Dinosaurs topic with my last three ethics classes. I had to move one class an hour earlier, filling in the gap between it and the previous class, because I had an appointment at lunch time with a doctor. Fortunately the students all said last week they could make it an hour earlier. Next week it’ll be back to the normal time.

After lunch I was walking with Scully and I came out of a narrow pedestrian path perpendicular to a main road, stepped out past the corner of the building, and nearly got hit by a food delivery e-bike speeding along the footpath. I had to step back to avoid being hit. And then I heard a screech as the driver put the brakes on hard, and when I turned to look, he’d only barely managed to stop in time to avoid hitting an old man, maybe late 60s. The old man gave the rider an earful!

These food delivery e-bikes have become a menace in many parts of Sydney. They’re not legally allowed to ride on pedestrian footpaths, but they all do it. Some are reasonably careful, but others are real cowboys and just try to go as fast as they can, dodging precariously between pedestrians. There have been several serious accidents in the past year or so. I wonder if police will crack down on them at some point – because at the moment there seems to be no enforcement of the law.

This afternoon I began marking the first student project reports from the current university image processing course. The first one I grabbed was a real treat – probably the best report I’ve read in my three years of teaching this course. Though it might be all downhill from here!

Later tonight I have the last lesson in my current Creative Thinking and Game Design course. It’ll be good to wrap another one of those up!

New content today:

My first 10k run

I ran 10k today! It’s my first time running 10k, probably in my life.

I set out planning to do 7.5k, and when I approached the end I felt pretty good still, so I decided to take a slight detour and tack on another lap of the 2.5k loop that I do to extend 5k into 7.5k. I wanted to see if I could complete the 10k in under an hour, and I managed to record a time of 57:23. So I’m pretty happy with that!

I felt a little tired during the rest of the day, but not too bad. No real aches or pains or anything. I think my body is getting used to running. Which a few years ago I would have said was crazy.

For lunch, my wife talked me into taking a long walk to the bakery at Naremburn, which I treated myself to a mushroom pie and a small lemon poppy seed cake as a reward.

This afternoon I worked on my lesson plan for the coming week of ethics classes, beginning on Tuesday. The topic is “Success and Failure” (for both age groups). I wanted to get this done today because from tomorrow I’ll need to spend a lot of time marking student assignments for the university image processing course. The first report was due on Friday, and I expect the professor will be sending them to the tutors to mark on Monday morning. We need to do a quick turnaround on these because it’s the planning report for the remainder of the project, so the students can get feedback before submitting their final reports.

New content today:

Referendum and D&D

A quick one tonight because I’m home late after running Dungeons & Dragons up at the local science toy shop this evening. I ran a one-shot adventure using a puzzle dungeon themed around eyesight, and had a total of four players, with a teenage brother and sister and their mother playing, along with the guy who was in the game last time I DMed there. They had a blast figuring out the clues and working out clever ways to defeat the monsters and avoid the dangers.

The other main thing today was gong to vote in the referendum on the proposal to amend the Australian Constitution to establish an indigenous committee to advise Parliament on matters of importance to indigenous Australians. Unfortunately the proposal has been soundly defeated. But at least voting was east – we walked up to the nearest polling station and there was literally no queue at all. We were in and out in about 3 minutes. But alas that polling station had no democracy sausage barbecue going, so I didn’t get my sausage for voting.

New content today:

These flies!

One thing about the early hot spring weather is that flies have multiplied and are already being a menace. Walking around outside, it has that summer feeling of constantly having to brush flies off your face. I don’t remember having this problem in the last few years with the La Niña weather, but now it’s an El Niño summer, here they are again.

I made a small batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips today, just 5 new ones to cover next week, because I won’t have time to make and buffer up a large batch in the next few days.

For dinner we went out to the local pizza place. I tried a pizza on their menu that I’ve never had before. I usually stick to a few of the options that I like, but today I tried to “Sydney” pizza. Several of the pizza menu options are named after places: Italian ones like Roma, Lipari, Salina, Filicudi. But then there are others such as Java (satay chicken, snow peas, cashews), Phuket (chicken, feta, cashews, mint yoghurt), and Sydney (chicken, bacon, mushroom, onion). I always choose to add a touch of chilli as well, to spice things up.

And after the pizzas my wife suggested we have some dessert. They do a Nutella pizza, topped with vanilla gelato. It’s normally a dessert serving for four people, but the owners do a special small version for two just for us.

Tonight is online games night. We’ve been playing a new game which a friend implemented on his Discord bot, a variant of a new word game on Board Game Arena called Perfect Words. And we’re doing more Heat: Pedal to the Metal, which is our new favourite.

New content today:

A Kickstarter windfall?

This afternoon I got an email from an Australian distributor, saying they have my copy of a Kickstarter game that I backed, and will be shipping it to me soon. I kind of expected this, because this campaign sent updates saying that they had sent a crate of games to their Australian distributor to ship – this arrangement saves on international shipping and makes it more feasible to back something from Australia. Kickstarters that don’t do this are often something like back the project for $50, and then pay $80 extra for shipping it to Australia.

And then I got three more emails in quick succession saying the exact same thing about three other games… game that I never backed and didn’t even know about. Obviously it’s some sort of notification error, but I’m quietly hoping I get all four games!

The most exciting thing I did today was make a trip to the liquor store to restock our supplies of wine and a few other random things. I needed a new bottle of vodka, which I use to preserve fresh ginger so that it lasts as long as I need to use it up without it rotting. I took Scully and was browsing around the shop with her (since they allow dogs inside), and a few people came up and said how cute she was.

It was a warm day, 33°C. But we had a cool change come through in the mid-evening, with thunder and heavy rain, and tomorrow should be cooler.

New content today:

Ethics of dinosaurs

I spent much of today writing my lesson plans for this week’s topics for my ethics classes: Dinosaurs for the younger kids and the closely related but more general Paleontology for the older kids. I get to overlap many of the questions by doing this, so it should have taken me less time than usual to prepare the lesson plans, but I was a bit lethargic today and ended up frittering away a good chunk of time.

I also need to revise my slides for the class on Colour and Human Vision, because I volunteered to give a guest lecture to the university students next week, during their project period. This isn’t part of the coursework, but the lecturer has liked to have someone do a bonus lecture on tangentially related material to the image processing course. Last year I did one on the Science and Engineering of Photography. I was hoping to revise the slides today, but didn’t get to it. Maybe tomorrow!

I made vegetable soup for dinner, so we can have the leftover converted into minestrone tomorrow. And after my three classes in a row this evening I’ve just made myself some sticky rice with banana and cinnamon for dessert, since the soup wasn’t super filling.

New content today:

Monday/Tuesday combined again

It’s tricky doing a Monday evening post now that I have an extra ethics class scheduled, and the current Creative Thinking class has moved an hour later due to daylight saving time. By the time I’m finished my classes it’s 10pm and I don’t feel like blogging anything. So, yesterday I didn’t do much of interest anyway, with three classes taught in the morning, taking Scully for a couple of walks, and failing to get much else done.

I was a bit distracted by a noisy miner chick, which is inhabiting a nest just outside my kitchen window. It was cheeping at a rate of about twice per second, non-stop, for hours. And it’s doing it again today. Ah, spring…

There are also channel-billed cuckoos around again, having returned from their winter migration north. They’re very loud, with a grating raucous call, but thankfully I haven’t heard them too much yet. And the brushturkeys are busy building nesting mounds, scraping huge piles of leaf litter and mulch together, and scattering material all over footpaths and other adjacent areas as well. There are several places where I walk that are covered in layers of leaf litter because of the messiness of these birds.

Today, Tuesday, I have tutoring for image processing at the university in the evening. Before then, I’m making some comics and revising the crystal ball game for the Creative Thinking class after workshopping it last night with the students.

Oh, there’s a weird thing happening at a place that I walk past regularly. It’s an old house which has looked abandoned and run-down for years, with no windows and small trees growing in the copious leaf litter on the roof. It looks like it should be torn down, and has looked that way for the past decade or so. But now there are workers there, and they seem to be building additional alls and rooms directly onto the old building without removing anything. They’re even leaving the mess on the roof. It almost defies belief that they are adding to the existing building rather than tearing it down. I guess we’ll see what happens to it.

New content yesterday:

New content today: