August 2024 – dangermouse.net

Almost no-games night, and an exhausting Saturday

On Friday I had my usual online teaching classes, and in between took Scully for a walk. The weather was hot, up to 29°C in the city, and reached 31.6°C at the airport, which set a new record for highest temperature ever recorded in the Sydney suburban area during winter. It was nice, but everyone is dreading the summer to come.

We went out to our local pizza place for dinner. They do a Nutella pizza served with vanilla gelato for dessert, which we occasionally get if we’re in the mood and not too full, and we felt like it last night. Really nice.

I logged into our online board games night, not quite in time to join in a game of Codechains, which is a game one friend invented and implemented on our Discord bot. It’s a word association game a bit like Codenames, but different and fully cooperative between all players.

Then we started a game of Distilled, which one player had read the rules for and taught us all how to play. It seemed like a good game, but we got annoyed by the Board Game Arena UI, which forced us to do actions sequentially when we could easily have performed them simultaneously, so it dragged on and after getting about 2/3 of the way through the game in 2 hours or so we decided to quit and play something else.

So, after about two and a half hours of doing stuff with my friends I still hadn’t played a full game of anything! We moved on to Just One (which we completed), then Can’t Stop Express before calling it a night.

This morning I got up a bit earlier than usual. The sun is rising earlier as we head towards the spring equinox, and the warmer weather is definitely making it easier to get out of bed. I did a 7.5k run today, pushing myself beyond the routine 5k. I felt like I took it a bit easy, but managed to record 42:32, my best time for 7.5k.

Then it was a busy day of housework, cleaning chores, and more inventorying of Magic cards. And in the afternoon a longish walk with Scully. The weather today was cooler and very windy, but it’s supposed to get back up close to 30°C again for a few days next week.

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Pancakes for dinner

I’ve been trying to feed my sourdough starter a bit more frequently to get it in a healthier condition, so I’ve been generating some starter discard. And so I’ve been looking for ways to use it. Tonight my wife went to a painting class, so I made diner for myself, and decided to use the discard as the basis of a pancake batter. I just added an egg, a splash of milk, and some baking powder, and it came to the right consistency. I had the pancakes with ricotta, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

They turned out really nice! It’s a little strange having a sweet dinner, but it can be fun every now and then.

Today was the fourth lecture of the image processing course, with the professor back after I filled i for last week’s lecture. he reminded me that it wasn’t actually my first official coursework lecture – I did lecture 4 (today’s topic) last year when he was away! I wrote about it back then. He read my blog and pointed out how I was now Wrong On The Internet, so I feel duty bound to correct it. 😀

I decided after the lecture to head home on the normal train rather than the new Metro, since the best walking route home fro the Metro stop is still messed up by work on the pedestrian crossing lights, necessitating a significant detour. I think the old train is quicker overall at the moment.

I also went ot the post office this morning to mail some more Magic cards to a buyer. And while there I hopped over to Moon Phase (the croissant place) and tried one of the char siu buns. I’ve wanted one for a while, but they’ve been sold out the last couple of times. But today I got one. And wow, it’s amazing. It’s a next level steamed pork bun (char siu bao). Instead of the steamed doughy bun, it’s light flaky croissant pastry with a super crispy top. It was so good.

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The winds of August

Everyone who lives in Sydney knows that August is the windy month. But this year it’s been an unusual August, with not much wind and unusually high temperatures. Until today, when the wind hit with a fury.

We’ve had wind gusts recorded up to 95 km/h, and it’s been extremely windy basically all day, starting before dawn, and still blowing noisily outside now at 9pm. Trees have been swaying wildly. I had to take Scully out for a walk at lunch time, and we passed jacaranda trees which were shedding yellow leaves in huge billowing clouds. No doubt there are some trees that have been blown down by this wind.

Normally the August wind is cold. But today was hot. 28.1°C in the city, up to 29.6°C in some suburbs. Tomorrow will be cooler but the forecast for Friday is 30°C. This would be warm for summer, but it’s still winter! We may even be in with a chance to break the hottest winter day ever recorded.

Today I spent time writing new Darths & Droids strips and sorting out and inventorying more Magic cards. An unfortunate thing happened with my ongoing selling of cards. There are some junky uncommon cards from the Legends expansion of 1994 that were never worth very much – puttering along at resale values around US$5. Until the release of a new card in June which created a powerful combo with these old cards. Suddenly they spiked to over US$80 each briefly before settling into a new stable price around US$50. I decided this would be a good time to sell these old cards and I put half a dozen of them onto eBay last week, expecting to get well over $300 for them.

But yesterday Wizards of the Coast announced a new card ban, banning the new card from tournaments because it was overpowered. So now this combo is no longer legal in tournament decks. With two days left to run on my auctions. I’d been expecting people to bid the cards up to around $50 each in the last day, as is usual for auctions. But now I’m not sure what they’ll make, and I may end up mailing out a bunch of cards that people buy for $10 each – and it will be $21 in postage if anyone overseas buys them (though the buyer also pays postage, but this may just discourage people even further from bidding).

Oh well… they’re bits of cardboard and they’re only ever worth what someone will pay for them.

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Starting mega-engineering

This morning I wrote up the lesson plan for the new week’s ethics classes, on the topic of “Mega-Engineering”. I start with potential technological solutions to climate change, such as large scale carbon capture, stratospheric aerosols, or space mirrors. Then I move on to an existing mega-project: the Three Gorges Dam. And ask about good and bad things about these things. Then go on to speculative future things like arcologies, space elevators, and Dyson spheres.

I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well. It was only one student, and she was returning after a long break. She was surprised that I remembered her!

I took Scully on a longish walk at lunch. I had a sausage roll at The Grumpy Baker. They used to be delicious, but they’ve changed the recipe and now the meat is dry and gristly and rather unpleasant. It’s been this way the last few times I tried one, hoping that it would be back to how they used to be. I think I’ll have to remember to just never buy them again. Very disappointing.

One of the LED light bulbs in the bathroom blew again today. This is the third time in about a year. I think there must be something wrong with the wiring… LED bulbs should last much longer than that as I understand it. The weird thing is: There are two sockets in the oyster light fitting. I install one daylight colour temperature bulb and one warm colour temperature bulb, so we get a pleasant mix of colour temperature. The warm one blew the first two times. Last time I switched the sockets and put the daylight one in the suspect socket. But now it’s the new warm bulb that’s blown again. The daylight one has been fine for like 3 or 4 years. Warm ones keep blowing every few months. Despite swapping sockets. A friend thinks it’s most likely humidity from hot showers getting into the fitting and messing with the voltage step-down circuitry, blowing that before the actual LED itself.

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Sourdough pizza experiment

Monday is always very busy with online classes. It’s the last day of the “Sayings” topic, which has been a bit different and interesting, but I think I’ll be happy to move on. It took a bit of extra encouragement to get some of the kids talking about possible meanings of some more obscure sayings.

For dinner I experimented and used some sourdough starter discard in my pizza dough. I measured out about 120 grams of discard and adjusted the amounts of water and flour to compensate. The dough was a bit crumbly at first but after kneading it turned out fairly normal. It baked well and tasted pretty good, so that’s good!

Weather continues to be warm and spring-like. We have 28°C and 29°C days to look forward to later in the week, and it’s still winter! I wonder if this forebodes a hot summer.

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The home is warming up

It feels like winter is at an end. I wore shorts outside for general walking around (not running) for the first time since before winter. And at home I didn’t need to wear my slippers at all for the first time.

I did a 5k run after breakfast, and then cleaned the bathroom before having a shower. I made some sourdough loaf. My starter is starting to develop an acetone smell, which Googling seems to tell me I need to feed it more often. It otherwise seems healthy, so I don’t think there’s a problem there.

We went on a big walk after lunch with Scully. My wife wanted to go to Cammeray and Maggio’s Italian bakery, but the rain radar indicated we might get wet by the time we walked all the way there and back, so we chose the shorter walk around Waverton and The Grumpy Baker, where she got a croissant to eat. We made it home dry, and in fact the rain band swept north of the city so I don’t think it actually rained all afternoon.

Not much else to mention. I sorted and counted some more Magic cards to inventory them before selling. This is a super time consuming task!

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I totally forgot to make a comic

Oops. Yesterday I was so busy with other things that I completely forgot to make a new Irregular Webcomic! strip. I had a script and the photos were taken ages ago. I just had to assemble it and upload it into the buffer. But I was busy with ethics classes, and in between I had to work on some other Outschool admin stuff, and I also put some lots of Magic cards into eBay. And I took Scully for a walk. And after my last class had a shower and got ready to go out for board games night at a friend’s place.

And making the comic just slipped my mind. And because I was playing board games into the night and went straight to bed when I got home, I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten until I woke up this morning and had multiple emails and forum messages and Discord chat messages telling me and wondering if something terrible had happened to me.

No, I just totally forgot.

So today I made the new comic and buffered it up to replace Saturday’s usual rerun strip. I feel like I need to take a week’s break making new strips though, because I’ve been run off my feet doing other things and I really don’t want to spend all this weekend writing a new batch of strips when I have other things I need and want to do.

Anyway, at last night’s games night we started with The Shipwreck Arcana, a cooperative deduction game which I described once four years ago. Then we moved on to Heat: Pedal to the Metal with 6 players. We played the USA track, and one of the guys tried a risky move on the first turn, double upshifting to third gear and using a stress card to try to get a quick start, and ended up drawing high and overshooting the first corner, thus spinning out on the very first move! It was hilarious and he spent the rest of the game trying to recover and catch up to everyone else who were at least a turn ahead.

After this we played a new game: On Tour. Each player is in charge of a band, planning a tour around the US (there’s also a Europe board in the game). It’s kind of like a travelling salesman problem, except that you roll two 10-sided dice to assign numbers—representing the day of the tour—to each node (the nodes correspond to either a large state, or a group of small states like on the east coast). You can put the numbers where you like, with some constraints specified by random cards that everyone must follow – for example you can only place numbers in the southern half, or western third of the country. The goal is to form a connected route through monotonically increasing numbers, showing how your tour progresses as the days go by, and visit as many states as possible.

It gets hard because the dice are unkind. You might have a node with 15 and a node with 20, separated by an empty node and be hoping the dice roll a 15-20 so you can fill it. (You can do multiple concerts on a single day.) When the dice betray you, inevitably, you end up having to cut off chunks of your optimistically planned grand tour. It was a right mess! When you roll doubles on the dice you get a wildcard number which you can fill in as a star on your board, which would have helped immensely, but nobody rolled doubles for the entire game!! You also get a wild star if the three region cards are identical, which also never happened! We ended the game with no wild stars at all. So my grand 40-state planned tour ended up only visiting about 12. But it was fun and interesting.

Today my wife went into the city to see a matinee performance of Sister Act, the musical. Meanwhile I took Scully for a walk to get some fish and chips for lunch, and spent the afternoon working on Darths & Droids strips. In the morning I did the grocery shopping and a 5k run.

I met my wife at the new Metro station near us after 5pm and we went straight to Salmon & Bear restaurant for dinner. I had a nice fish pie, with vegetables and mashed potatoes. Very filling!

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My first second university coursework lecture!

Today I gave my ~~first~~ second lecture of regular coursework for a university course, as I’ve mentioned preparing for over the last few days. The professor had an important meeting and asked me to give the lecture for him. I’ve done “guest lectures” before for this image processing course, during the project work period, on topics that weren’t strictly covered by the course, but this is the ~~first~~ second lecture I’ve done that was actual course material. (Edited after the professor reminded me I in fact did one last year!)

In the morning I did a couple of critical thinking classes. Then I had to get ready for the trip to the university. I would normally leave at 12:30 and walk Scully down to my wife’s work to drop off there and then catch a train in. But I ran out of some ingredients for my usual home lunch fixings (falafels and tortilla wraps), so I decided to walk up to the shops and get some sushi. I didn’t really have time to walk back home again so we went straight from there to my wife’s work and arrived a little early.

After dropping Scully off, I rode on the new Metro train from there in to the university. This train line only opened on Monday, and it’s a significant change from the style of train lines Sydney has always had. Our old train network is heavily interlinked, with many lines diverging and converging, so the train traffic has to be carefully regulated to avoid collisions between trains on different lines merging into one. The Metro is designed on the principle of a single line with no branches or merges, so the trains can run more frequently and faster while still being safe. From my place to Central Station (the closest station to the university) takes 16 minutes on the old line, but only 12 on the new Metro line.

Being a brand new rail line, the stations are gorgeous and clean, with impressive architecture. Here are some photos: Victoria Cross Station.

I arrived in good time for my lecture. It was about image processing operations like binary morphology, cross-correlation, segmentation, and so on. It’s material I know pretty well and the lecture went smoothly. I made sure to try and give context and motivation for every algorithm that I covered, and explain it in simple terms. Afterwards, a couple of students came up and told me they enjoyed the lecture and thought I explained things well. So that was good!

And another Metro photo: Central Station, on the way back home:

Tonight for dinner I made lemon pasta with broccolini, garlic, black pepper, and Parmigiano Reggiano. I used a fresh lemon that I picked up for free from a crate of lemons out the front of someone’s place. Presumably they have a lemon tree out the back and had ridiculous numbers of lemons so wanted to give them away. It was super juicy and the pasta turned out delicious.

I’d use fresh lemons more, but I always feel like paying $1 or whatever for a lemon from a supermarket is bad. It just fells like lemons are a thing that should be free.

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Ticking off many tasks

I had several things I wanted/needed to get done today. I started making a Darths & Droids comic, from a script we worked on last night (with my friends online), ready for tomorrow’s update. Then I made Irregular Webcomic! strips for tonight and tomorrow.

With those out of the way, I had some tasks to do for photography standards work. I went through the list of currently open ballots for international standards, recommending voting positions for the Australian committee, and emailing the committee members about those.

Then I had to do some mandatory training exercises for the university, so that they will pay me for the lecturing and tutoring work I’m doing. I had four new courses to complete, about data security, fraud, corruption, and remote working. One course said it took 10 minutes to complete, but it had about 5 or 6 videos to watch, each of them three minutes long! It took me 25 minutes to complete that one. The others had more reasonable time estimates. Overall I spent about an hour and a half on them.

I kind of wonder, has anyone in the world ever done a mandatory training course and then failed the quiz at the end so many times that they actually had to resign or be dismissed because they couldn’t complete the mandatory course?

After that I went through the lecture material for tomorrow’s image processing lecture, to make sure I knew all the work and could explain it to the students. I had to refresh myself on the Canny edge detection algorithm, for about the tenth time in my life. But having to lecture about it to students tomorrow will hopefully mean that I never forget the details of the algorithm again!

This evening I had three ethics classes in a row. We’re having fun discussing Sayings. a friend of mine suggested using some foreign sayings and found a good one in Swedish:

Att glida på en räkmacka.

Translated literally into English, this means:

To slide in on a shrimp sandwich.

I told the kids this and then asked them to guess what the saying meant metaphorically. I got some wildly varied answers, including:

To do something dangerous, like sliding on something slippery
To be lucky
To make something delicious
To be lazy, like sliding off your couch
To do something ridiculous

My own guess, before I knew the correct answer was “to make an unwelcome appearance”. But it turns out the real meaning in Swedish metaphor is “to succeed without having to work at it”. This is a really fun topic, at least with kids who get into the spirit of it. I had one class where they were all a bit reserved, and nobody wanted to guess in case they got it wrong.

Oh, my wife got to ride the new Metro train today, from the station near her work to the one near our home. A day before I get to try it to go to the university tomorrow!

And the weather today was absolutely gorgeous! We got up to 26°C. I don’t think this winter has any real cold left in it. It’ll be a touch cooler the next few days, but then next week we’re forecast to have a run of 25°C, 28°C, and 26°C. It was so nice going out today without a jumper or jacket on.

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A nice day for a lunch out

This morning I finished off my lesson plan for this week’s new critical thinking/ethics topic of “Sayings”. I found some interesting medieval and foreign sayings that modern English speakers aren’t familiar with, to give to the kids to let them try to puzzle them out.

For lunch I drove with Scully over to Two Chaps at Marrickville, where I met my old friend Lisa. We grabbed a table out on the footpath, under a large umbrella to keep the sun off, and had a nice meal. I had the “corned beet” Reuben sandwich, which I’ve had before and really enjoyed. We had a big catch up conversation. She’s started working a part time job—for the first time since raising her kids—doing aged care home visits. She used to be a nurse, so has relevant experience.

After lunch I drove back home, made a comic for tonight’s update, and did the first class with the Sayings topic. Only one student, who was returning after a long break, but it was a lot of fun.

For dinner I made mushroom risotto. I’m just now trying to write some new Darths & Droids material. I need to get a new comic made tomorrow, but I’ll also be busy revising the image processing lecture material to make sure I’m ready to deliver the lecture on Thursday.

The lecture is on image segmentation and image analysis, covering topics such as thresholding, edge detection, pixel morphology operations (erosion, dilation, skeletonisation, etc), geometric property measurement, and convolution and cross-correlation. Should be a fun lecture! (This is serious, not sarcastic, in case that wasn’t obvious. 😀)

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