August 2024 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

A new Metro line

Today was a big day here in Sydney. The new Sydney Metro line opened, connecting suburbs in the north through the city centre to suburbs in the south. It’s the first train line to run underneath Sydney Harbour. And one of the new stations is walking distance from my home!

I didn’t actually ride on the Metro today, but I will be using the new line for the first time on Thursday when I go into the university to do my image processing lecture. My wife’s work is right across the street from another of the new stations, and I can hop on there very conveniently after dropping off Scully at her work. The new line takes me to Central station where I normally get off.

One of my friends spent time today riding the new train and taking photos of all the new stations. It’s pretty big news here and there were thousands of people keen to try out the service. Hopefully by Thursday it will have calmed down a little!

For me it was a day of finishing off the Video Games topic in my ethics classes, with 6 classes during the day. I also started work on the next week’s topic, which is “Sayings”. We’re going to examine a bunch of English sayings, work out their figurative meanings, and discuss if they are sensible or bad advice.

New content today:

Getting into Italian videos

So I’ve been watching more Italian YouTube videos to improve my listening skills and get exposed to more vocabulary. Yesterday I watched one of the videos from a channel I follow, where the guy suggested putting on Italian stuff in the background while doing other things, just to have the sounds enter your head, even while you’re not concentrating on them. He said the best YouTube channel for this is QVC Italia, which is an Italian home shopping network!

He said it’s great because (1) they are speaking standard Italian with no regional dialect or accent, or slang words, (2) what they are saying is very descriptive, they’re talking about a particular thing, and (3) the thing they’re talking about is shown on the screen. This makes it a lot better than, say, watching in Italian movie, where the people will usually be talking about stuff that isn’t visible on the screen. And you can play games with it such as trying to figure out what they’re talking about without looking, and then confirm by taking a glance at the video. So I started watching a few of the QVC Italia videos and they’re quite fun actually. They have some cooking segments which are cool to watch.

Today I didn’t do much particularly interesting. A 5k run, for which I tried to go a bit faster than yesterday, which I managed, but it was a bit of a struggle. I wonder if it’s the slightly warmer weather that’s making it tougher.

Because it’s really feeling like spring now. There are cherry blossoms out everywhere, and the magnolias are losing their flowers and starting to sprout new green leaves. Azaleas are blooming everywhere. And birds are starting to nest and produce young. The brushturkeys in particular have started making huge messes of leaf litter everywhere.

New content today:

Games night and a warm day

Friday was online board games night with my friends. I had four ethics classes during the day. I had an amusing answer from one kid when I asked what was good about video games, and she said they were good because parents can use them to keep their kids occupied so they can have some quiet time.

Scully had her grooming and haircut in the afternoon. Last regular grooming my wife decided not to have her har cut, since it was cut pretty short the last time, and it’s winter so she figured she can grow her hair a bit longer. By yesterday Scully was very woolly. But after her grooming she looks very svelte and sleek.

We went straight from picking her up at the groomer to grab some dinner at Organica, the new place we’ve tried a couple of times. I had a chicken parmigiana which was pretty good, and grabbed a slice of carrot cake to take home for dessert while playing games.

We played King of Tokyo, then 7 Wonders, then some Just One, and Scattergories. We had an epic moment in Just One, when five people gave clues, but four of them duplicated and so were eliminated, and the guesser only got one clue: solstice. And he correctly guessed the answer was “winter”.

This morning I went for a 5k run. I don’t know why, but it felt like very hard going today and my time was not great. I guess some days your body is just not ready for it.

I made a Darths & Droids comic, and went for a long walk with my wife and Scully. We walked past the two cafes that closed recently over at Waverton to see what was up with them. Botanica is just shuttered up and looks dead and abandoned, with no signs of anything happening there. But the old Waterview Cafe which closed more recently is almost open again, with signs up proclaiming it to now be Bay Brew. The inside is new and shiny, with new counters, tables, chairs, and a huge new coffee machine. It looks like it could open any day.

In other opening news, the delayed ew Sydney Metro line that was supposed to open on 4 August is now scheduled to open on Monday 19th. So I might get to try it out on Thursday when I travel into the city for the next image processing lecture at the university.

Today was pretty warm, getting up to 21°C. It feels like winter is ending. It should be getting even warming during the next week.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Image processing lecture 2

Today was busy, with two online ethics classes for kids in the morning, then a short break before heading into the city for this afternoon’s university lecture on image processing. It’s a really big class this year and as I was walking around to help students during the tutorial exercises I noticed some tables sized for 6 people had 8 or 9 people squashed in around them, and there was not much room between all the people to squeeze between the tables.

The lecture used the full three hour time slot and I got home with less than half an hour to spare before my next ethics class. I had a quick snack, some brie and crackers, before the class. After that I made some actual dinner – ramen noodles with broccoli and sesame sauce. And had a shower and then it was another ethics class!

And that was pretty much the day.

New content today:

Some new language learning

It rained for most of today, though not heavily. I had to take Scully out in it a few times and the bathroom is full of wet umbrellas, shoes, and her doggy raincoat.

The morning I spent making a new Darths & Droids strip. Then after lunch I sorted out some more Magic: the Gathering cards, ready for selling online. I’m up to going through huge stacks of common cards form the expansions and sets I bought back in the 90s, when I was trying to collect full sets of cards. This meant buying a lot to get all the rare cards, resulting in having piles and piles of the common cards. They’re not worth much each, but if you can find someone to buy hundreds of them they add up. Finding those someones requires doing a proper inventory so I can list the cards properly.

Also today I started a new Italian learning regime. Duolingo isn’t really doing much for me any more as I’ve completed its Italian course, and now it only ever gives me the option of “revision” and it seems bugged in that it just repeats the same very small pool of exercises over and over again, rather than sampling its entire set.

I found an Italian learning channel on YouTube a while back and kept meaning to watch more of the videos, but now I’m going to make an effort to watch something in Italian every day. The channel is here: Italy Made Easy. Today I watched this short video about how to wash dishes, narrated in Italian! I like this guy; his videos are amusing and fun.

New content today:

Ethics of video games

It threatened rain all day today, but I don’t think it ever actually happened. I took Scully for a drive to get pies for lunch and also fill up the car with petrol. I have this petrol price monitoring app and it’s amazing how the price fluctuates over the weeks. Thankfully we don’t drive enough to have to refill weekly, so I can wait a few weeks for the price to come down. The difference can be 30-40 cents a litre these days, if you just wait a couple of weeks for the prices to cycle, which is insane.

I spent much of the day writing a class plan for a topic on Video Games. Some questions:

Why do you think video games are so popular among both kids and adults today?
Do you think playing video games is any better or worse than traditional hobbies?
What do you think about in-game purchases?
What do you think about people making a career out of playing video games or esports?
Are video games an important part of modern culture? In what ways?
Are old video games worth preserving for future generations?

I also planned ahead for future topics in the next few weeks on Mega-Engineering, and Hospitality. Which should be interesting subjects!

New content today:

Rain and garden sprinklers

It rained overnight. I took Scully out for her bedtime toilet a bit after 10:30 and I wasn’t expecting it to be raining, but it was. So I hadn’t brought an umbrella and we got a bit wet before she’d finished her business and we came back inside. It got heavier and rained throughout the night.

It had cleared by morning, but there was another spell of heavy showers around midday. Then when I went out with my wife to walk Scully in the early evening, we noticed that the garden sprinklers were on. We hardly ever see them on – in fact I don’t recall seeing them on any time in the past month or so, when we’ve been having nice fine weather. But as soon as we get some heavy rain, they seem to come on. It’s not the first time I’ve notice this either. No garden sprinklers for a few weeks of fine weather, then as soon as it rains they come on.

Today wasn’t too exciting. A bunch of ethics classes in the morning, then I took Scully for a walk after lunch. I bought a bag of “peanut butter and jam” cookies. They’re nice, but I’m not sure about the “jam” part – it appears to just be dried cranberries or something similar. It does give me an idea to try baking something a bit like this, though.

Oh! I also made this week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! strips. And pizza for dinner.

New content today:

Another day out: Scully’s buddy and Ryde markets

Today after my morning 5k run, we went for a drive over to Meadowbank to visit Scully’s best friend, Luna, the poodle who used to live next door to us. My wife and I met her owners too, and we all walked together over to the Ryde Wharf Markets. This is a small local market; it had a lot of food stalls, but only a dozen or so other types of stalls, selling jewellery, knick-knacks, clothing, etc. I got a couple of jars of fig jam from one stall, one sweet with cinnamon and ginger, and one more savoury, with rosemary and balsamic vinegar. I tried them both but couldn’t choose between them, so got a jar of each. I’m a sucker for fig jam!

I grabbed a hot snack from one of the food stalls, a spinach, cheese, and minced beef boureka. After looking around a bit we retreated to a nearby cafe to have drinks and sit for a bit to catch up. Here’s Scully (left) and Luna (right):

After this we drove back home and I had to finish making some sourdough bread and work on some comics and then get ready for online classes in the evening. For dinner I made omelettes.

New content today:

The Temple of Swords and a big day out

Friday was Dungeons & Dragons night at my place. During the day I had my usual ethics classes to teach, and in between I had to clean up the house ready for friends to come over. I did vacuum cleaning and had to clean off all the Magic cards off the dining table, so we had space to play.

We continued our adventure from last time, with the PCs exploring the Temple of Spathio, a local god of swords. They’d found a nest of snake men last time, and now explored cautiously, reaching a few new rooms which presented interesting problems. They’ve been finding magically glowing swords that have numerical runes engraved on them, and are trying to assemble a collection of all the numbers 1 to 9. One sword was spotted glowing near the top of a huge 20-foot high precarious conical tower of swords They considered playing sword Jenga, but decided they had to collapse the tower to reach the glowing sword, and did so with ropes, to avoid being on the bottom of a pile of falling swords. The collapse created a huge noise, which attracted more snake men from another room to attack them.

Last time they found two of the numbered swords, and this time I think they added three more. I won’t go into more details right now, but it was a lot of fun and the players did some incredibly clever and fun puzzle solving to get those swords. I think this is a great way to design an adventure: create a goal that the players can’t help but wanting, and place that goal inside a difficult situation that presents as a puzzle for them to work out how to get the thing. The watch them get creative with the resources and skills they have.

Today I got up and did a 5k run early, then had a shower to get ready for a day out. My wife dropped Scully off at the doggy day care place and then we headed into the city for a day of exploring together.

There’s been a lot of new development in parts of the city and my wife hadn’t seen some of it yet. We started at Central Station and walked around the University of Technology, so I could show her where I do my lecture classes, and where I’ve been eating lunches and dinners on the days when I’m in there. Then we walked through part of Chinatown and towards Darling Harbour. We stopped for a snack at Harajuku Gyoza Beer Stadium, a Japanese brewery and gyoza place that has some good food.

Then we walked through Darling Harbour and all the new development there, past the new convention centre, which replaced the old one that they tore down a few years ago. It was pretty busy with people, and mostly locals, with not too many obvious tourists, which was nice. A bit further on we hit the real tourist areas, around Cockle Bay Wharf. We continued around the Aquarium to Barangaroo – this is a new walkway that was inaccessible previously, as the area was formerly a wasteland of industrial docks. But with the recent redevelopment the area is pretty nice now.

We continued north to the new park at Barangaroo Reserve, and then cut across inland to The Rocks, where we walked through The Rocks Market. This was extremely busy, with many tourists in the area. We stopped at The Rocks Discovery Museum, a small historical museum about the neighbourhood, which we had never been in before. This is a small museum which has some displays and artefacts describing the history of The Rocks from before European arrival in 1788 to the 20th century. We were almost playing tourists in our own city, really.

From here we walked back into the heart of the city and stopped for another snack at a cafe near Wynyard. They did full lunch dishes, but I just chose a four-cheese toastie (toasted sandwich), which was amazingly good.

Then we continued south to the shopping areas, where we split up briefly -my wife went o buy some clothing while I checked out the game shop. We met in Kinokuniya book shop and after browsing around a bit we headed to Town Hall to catch a train home.

After picking up Scully from day care we were a bit exhausted. I didn’t fancy cooking dinner so suggested we go get Thai food for dinner. We drove over to Castle Cove where there’s a nice suburban Thai place with an outdoor table where we can sit with Scully. The food was good – a great way to round off a very busy day. And Scully is super tired because she’s been playing with other dogs all day.

New content today:

Start of a new Image Processing semester

Today I went into the university to begin my work of tutoring for the new semester of the image processing course that my associate runs. This year the class runs from 2pm to 5pm on Thursdays, a welcome change from last year when it ran 6-9pm (on Tuesdays). And the class is huge, close to 300 students! We’re in a big lecture room and it was very full.

The first lecture is an introductory overview of image processing, and context for why it’s useful and what it’s used for, plus some administrative stuff about the course content and assessment, and a demonstration of Matlab, the software we use for teaching the practical components. It ended a bit early, but there were dozens of students waiting around afterwards to ask the professor questions. Some of them came over to ask me instead, since I’d introduced myself as a tutor early in the lecture. The most inevitable question is people asking if they can change their assigned project team group to be on a team with their friends. We always tell them no, the groups are assigned randomly to give them experience at working with strangers, which is important for future employment, and nobody can change teams. Some of them really don’t want to hear that answer!

I made it home with plenty of time for my evening ethics classes. I had to do a tough thing today and write a message to a parent telling them I can’t teach their kid any more. The kid is outside the listed age range of the class by 2 years, on the young side. Although the kid (I’m not going to use a gender-revealing pronoun) is very smart and able to converse on the topics, the kid is really not mature enough to engage in a group discussion without constantly interrupting and not letting anyone else get a word in, either me or the other students. I gave this kid two weeks and that was enough. I was almost tearing my hair out by the end of the second class, and decided I just couldn’t cope with it any more. The kid was also extremely pedantic and not willing to engage with the premises of the questions as intended.

For example, in this week’s topic on Shapeshifters I asked: “If everyone could turn into animals, would that be good or bad?”

The kid replied with, “People can’t turn into animals.”

When I pressed and said, “Yes, but imagine if we could. Would it be good or bad?”

And the kid responded, “People don’t need to turn into animals. We’re superior.” And this is just one example – there were several other questions where I couldn’t get a straight, non-pedantic answer that took the question in the intended spirit.

Maybe the kid is neurodivergent, but I didn’t honestly get that impression more than just a lack of maturity. I have other kids I know are neurodivergent and I can handle them fine, but this kid was just too much for me. I felt it was better for both of us that this kid not take my classes any more, at least for another year or two. I’ve never had a problem kid like this before.

Also today I mailed off another package of Magic: the Gathering cards. Nearly 1000 cards from the Fallen Empires set. Most of these cards are worth almost nothing on the secondary market, so I was glad someone wanted to buy a bulk lot of them and I can get them off my hands.

New content today: