March 2025 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Last preps for NZ

Today I took care of final preparations for my trip to New Zealand tomorrow. Our flight leaves at 07:00 am, so we need to get up at 04:00, throw on clothes, and dash out the door to get to the airport! So we need to completely packed tonight.

I filled out my New Zealand Traveller Declaration form. It asked if I’d been to any other countries in the past 30 days, and for the first time in my life filling out one of these forms I had to say yes, since we only got back from Japan less than 3 weeks ago.

Because this trip is only three days long, I’m taking a lot less luggage than usual. As I was thinking where to put the toiletries, I had the sudden thought that I’d need to make sure I could access them easily on the plane. Because—and this is an automatic thought for an Australian traveller—of course I’d want to brush my teeth during the flight. Only after thinking this did I remember the flight is barely three hours long, and no, I don’t actually have to brush my teeth during it. When flying from Australia to almost anywhere else in the world, you definitely do need to brush your teeth, because you’re in transit for 12-24 hours or more.

In fact, we’re picking up a car at Auckland Airport and driving up to the Bay of Islands in the afternoon. The drive is going to be longer than the flight!

For lunch today I drove with Scully up to Allambie to get pies from the pie shop there. We haven’t been there for a while, and Scully likes to run around on the soccer field next to where I sit on a bench to eat. And this afternoon we met my wife right after work to drive over to a friends’ place to drop Scully off for dogsitting. We wanted to do this early to get home and have dinner and then get to bed early before our pre-dawn start tomorrow.

Next blog entry will be from New Zealand!

Reporting on Japan, preparing for New Zealand

This morning I worked on my report for Standards Australia on the recent ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Japan. I have to summarise all of the relevant technical and administrative discussions and resolutions of the meeting, which means going through my own notes, the official minutes, and about 50 separate reports on all of the work that was done at the meeting and since the last meeting (in Sydney back in October last year). It takes a good three hours or so to work through all of that and complete the document, and then submit it to SA.

I’d thought about taking a long drive with Scully for lunch, to get out of the house a bit since I don’t have any ethics classes today. But I still had some rye sourdough loaf at home and decided to use that up for my lunch instead.

I took Scully for a walk instead, around the harbour shore and past Bay Brew where I tried another of their sweet treats, this time a coconut rough slice. It was okay, but not as good as the caramel slice I had last week.

After we got home I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic, and then started preparing for our trip to New Zealand on Friday. I checked out the NZ Traveller Declaration site online, which is a form we need to fill out prior to arrival. But it says you are only allowed to start filling it out within 24 hours of your departure, so we couldn’t do it today and will have to do it tomorrow. We need the address of our accommodation in NZ, but I don’t know where we’re staying. My wife’s sister booked accommodation for the whole family, so I actually have no idea where it is. But my wife got the info so we can fill in the form tomorrow.

I also prepared my bird-watching apps, Merlin ID and eBird, by downloading and installing bird data packs for New Zealand. I neglected to do this before leaving for Japan, which meant they defaulted to generic common birds, making some IDs difficult when we were over there.

Lastly, I formatted my Japan travel diary into web pages on my site. These are essentially the same text as the daily posts I posted here while in Japan, but I’ve added a lot of extra photos for the first two days so far, and will add more as I get through processing them. Id hoped to have this completed by the time we leave for NZ, but I’ve run out of time!

A Roman Holiday in a pastry

Today I had my last two ethics classes before taking a week off from them because of this weekend’s upcoming trip to New Zealand. After those, at midday and 1pm, I took Scully for a walk to the patisserie Moon Phase to celebrate.

The last few times I’ve been there I’ve seen a new special pastry called a “Roman Holiday”, which I really wanted to try, but those times I was after a small sweet treat, not a large savoury. But today they had it again, and I decided I had to try it.

It’s a base of flaky pastry topped with a ring of sliced cherry tomatoes around the edge and a mini burrata cheese plonked in the middle, decorated with basil leaves. The pastry is also filled with some tomato and pesto and I think there was some other ingredient in there but I didn’t identify it. Anyway, it was really really good, as have been most of the pastries I’ve had from this place.

Tonight I’m planning to relax and then get an early night, since I don’t have any online classes as I usually do. The goal is to get used to getting up an hour or two earlier by Friday when we fly out to New Zealand. Since the time zone there is two hours east of us, so we’ll have to be getting up earlier there.

Cooler after hot weekend

Not much to talk about today. Thankfully that cool change came through after midnight and dropped the temperature a lot. Today was much more pleasant and comfortable.

I did some ethics classes online in the morning, then headed into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was about data presentation, including tables and graphs.

While there I saw posters up on noticeboards about an anti-Donald-Trump protest rally to be held at the university on Thursday. I don’t know how many people in the USA are aware of this, but people in other countries are organising anti-Trump protests – that’s how awful him and his actions as US President are. And I’ve got to say, a lot of us are wondering where are the protests in the USA? Why aren’t there millions of people cramming the streets? Why haven’t New York and Washington and Los Angeles ground to a halt? Because from here it looks like Americans are okay with the destruction of democracy and society there.

I know a lot of Americans aren’t okay with it. In fact probably all of you who might be reading this. But, like, why isn’t anything happening about it? We’re over here in Australia boycotting US goods and organising protests, and the USA is just radio silence.

The clutching tendrils of summer

We should be getting cooler weather with autumn progressing here, but today was one of the last gasps of summer. Overnight we had the highest March minimum ever recorded in Sydney, 25.9°C. We slept with the air conditioning on all night, which is a rare thing. I don’t imagine we’d have got much sleep without it.

By the time I had my 5k run this morning it was almost 28°C, making it another slow and exhausting one. And by mid afternoon we approached 37°C. There’s supposed to be a cold front change coming through after midnight, but until then it’s supposed to still be almost 30°C at midnight. Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be much cooler. But the Bureau of Meteorology says this isn’t the end of summery conditions, and we’re going to have more hot spells throughout autumn.

In the middle of the heat I went to the lighting showroom to pick up our new light fixtures, which we’d ordered last weekend. I got a message yesterday that they were in from the warehouse, so I drove down to get them.

Some of the new light fittings say that they are DIY installation, not requiring an electrician. I checked and they involved simply unscrewing the existing light battens, fitting the lightshade over it, and screwing the thing back in. No need to touch anything electrical at all. However when I tried to do this, the shade didn’t fit over the existing batten base. So I think new smaller battens need to be installed, which is indeed a job for an electrician. I’ll call one tomorrow to make an appointment for them to come around and install all the lights.

DIY electrical work is simply not an option in Australia. I know that in some countries you can do your own electrical wiring work if it’s not too complicated, and honestly I feel confident that I could most probably do this job of changing the light fixtures. But here it’s illegal to do so. Anything that touches electrical wiring must be done by a licensed electrician. Otherwise you’ll void your home insurance and be liable for fines up to $40,000. So absolutely not something I want to mess with.

Three more ethics classes this evening, and some Indian curry vegetables with rice for dinner.

And some more Japan photos! Takeshita Street in Harajuku:

Okonomiyaki, before self-cooking:

And after:

In the restaurant Sakura-Tei:

Followed by dessert from a crepe place on the street:

More photos from Tokyo: Shibuya

Friday night was online games night, so I didn’t write up a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning. I order non-perishable stuff online for pick-up since it’s quicker, but I select fruit and vegetables by hand when I’m doing the pickup after some bad experiences with the produce that the supermarket picked for me the first few times.

Anyway, I normally buy an orange every week to go into a fruit salad that I use to top my breakfast muesli. But oranges are seasonal and when they’re not in season here in the southern hemisphere, like now, Australia imports oranges from the USA. But with all of the recent stupid/evil things that the Trump administration is doing over there, I decided it would be a good idea not to buy anything from the USA where I can avoid it. I’ve been keeping up with the news especially about Canada, how Trump threatened to annex Canada, and the resulting widespread disaffection with the US and boycotting of US goods by Canadians.

Trump hasn’t threatened Australia as directly, but he did in the past week initiate high tariffs on Australian imports. Which in economic terms makes no sense whatsoever, since Australia has a fairly large trade deficit with the USA, so any reduction in trade is only going to hurt the USA more than it hurts us. Probably exacerbated by the fact that politically savvy Australians like me will boycott American products, and because of the imbalance in trade even a small percentage reduction in Australian imports will have a much larger relative effect on the US than the relatively small amount of exports we make to the US. Most of our exports are to Asia, so Trump’s tariffs aren’t even really going to hurt us very much. It’s just crazy that he’s bullying a much smaller economy in a way that actually hurts the US more than us.

But hey, the more countries that stand up to this monster, hopefully the faster we’ll get to whatever action it will be that eventually stops this freight train to madness and starts returning the USA to a normal country.

At lunch on Friday I took Scully for a walk and got some fish & chips. It was a warm day, but thankfully my favourite lunch spot overlooking the harbour now has new tree growth near the seating to provide some shade.

After some ethics classes I had dinner with my wife up at the local Greek restaurant. It was a sultry evening, and dining al fresco is kind of nice, though honestly it would have been nice if it was a little cooler. We’re having a mini-heatwave covering Friday and the weekend. Overnight minimum temperatures are around 24°C, with high humidity around 90%. Today we had 32°C maximum, and tomorrow is forecast to be 37°C.

This meant my 5k run this morning was pretty awful. It was 25°C and 82% humidity at 9am, and my running was really sluggish. I recorded the slowest time I’ve run since 2021! I fear tomorrow morning will be even worse.

Today I stayed inside as much as possible, working on Darths & Droids, and some more photos from my trip to Japan. For dinner I made fusilli alla norma, with roasted eggplant cubes and a tomato sauce.

Today I processed photos from Shibuya on Tokyo. The famous Shibuya scramble corssing:

Shibuya Scramble Square, the building on the top of which is the Shibuya Sky observation platform:

A view of Tokyo from the top:

Looking north to the centre of Tokyo with the sun going down:

Starting on post-ISO meeting work

Today I did some comics stuff for Darths & Droids, and I also started work on follow-up things for the ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended in Tokyo. I had to download and look through a huge bunch of documents – all of the presentations that were made during the meetings in Tokyo, summary files, and so on. It’s something like about 50 PDF files. The next task is summarising them all for my report to Standards Australia, which I’ll try to get done in the next few days.

Speaking of Tokyo, here are some more photos from my trip, which I processed and uploaded yesterday. These are all from the first two days.

Flying out of Sydney. It’s a pretty good view of the city from the take-off flight path. This is an edited version of the photo I posted while I was over there in Tokyo (straightening the horizon and improving the colour and contrast).

View from my hotel room in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

Sake barrels sent to the Meiji Jingu shrine from manufacturers all over Japan.

Torii gate at Meiji Jingu.

A procession of monks for the Emperor’s Birthday.

Inside the Meiji Jingu shrine.

Saga of a door

Our new front door was supposed to be painted today. The workman arrived in the morning, but then vanished for a few hours. When he returned he said that he’d been driving around to different hardware stores looking for the specific moulding style and size that is on all of the other apartment front doors, so that he could install matching moulding on ours before painting. But he’d been unable to find it anywhere.

So he asked if I’d be around next week and said he’d go further afield and try to find the matching moulding, and then come back to affix and paint next week. So we have another week with an unpainted wooden door.

After lunch I took Scully for a long walk, around the harbour shore. I stopped at the Grumpy Baker in an attempt to get a snack, but after waiting a few minutes with nobody serving me (I was the only one waiting to be served), I gave up and left. This bakery used to be really good, but their service has always been slow, and I’ve soured on them a bit recently. Instead I went to the nearby cafe which opened recently and decided to see what they had. There were a few muffins and small cakes, and they had a caramel slice that looked good, so I got one of those. It turned out to be delicious, with chewy caramel, which is not usual in a caramel slice. Really good. So I’m glad I went there!

Down by the water we met a woman with a small caramel-coloured dog, and as she approached she picked up her dog and carried her past. I said hello and she explained her dog was very shy. I said Scully was a bit too, and she stopped and carefully put her dog down. It was named Indy. The two dogs both approached one another very carefully and slowly, and eventually had a close sniff and hello. Scully is very gentle with other dogs and the woman was happy that Indy seemed to be friendly with her. She said it would be good for Indy to have positive experiences with other dogs. So I stayed there for several minutes as the two of them got used to each other and relaxed. It did seem that Indy was more shy than Scully. The woman seemed very happy with this, so that was good.

This evening I made a new experimental pasta sauce, using half a left over sweet potato from last night’s couscous dish. I boiled it up and then pureed it with semi-dried tomatoes and paprika to make a pasta sauce, served over fusilli, with chopped almonds for some crunch. It was pretty good.

Ethics of Migration

Today I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week of online ethics topics for the kids. The topic this week is “Migration” – as in human migration, not animals. A few kids last week when I announced this week’s topic assumed I meant animal migration!

Then I was doing the first class tonight with two kids, a brother and sister, who are American, but currently living on Crete in Greece. I think their father works on a US base there. So they have first-hand experience of what it’s like to move from one country to another. They were saying how the Greek people assume they are tourists, and are reasonably nice to them, but when they say no, they live there, the locals change manner and become more rude to them. I’m not sure why, but maybe because the locals then think they can’t make as much money off them?

I didn’t really go out today. It was raining steadily for most of the day, as we finally caught the tail end of Cyclone Alfred. It was cool too, but should warm up again later in the week.

Last night I finished watching Saving Private Ryan, the first time I’ve seen this film. It’s been on my Netflix to-watch list for ages, but given I have to break even 1:30 movies into two parts to watch over two nights, starting a 3-hour movie always felt difficult. But I bit the bullet when I saw it was leaving Netflix soon, and managed to fit it into three nights of viewing. I can see why it’s so highly regarded. A very powerful and gripping film.

Now to decide what to watch tonight…

Summarising data and learning Japanese

Beginning this morning, my morning classes moved an hour earlier, because of the USA going on to daylight saving time on the weekend. Since most of my students in the morning classes are kids in the USA doing classes in the evening, I adjust the class time so it stays the same for them, which results in them moving an hour earlier for me. Then in a few weeks when Australia goes off DST, the times become another hour earlier for me. So classes that began at 10am in summer will be starting at 8am in winter (for me). But for now they’re at 9am.

After two classes I got ready to head into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was summarising data – basically how to calculate simple statistics like the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, quartiles, etc., plus how to compare and interpret them. There’s also some background material on probability distributions and statistical sampling, and the differences between populations and samples. So it sounds simple, but it’s quite detailed and is one of the longer lectures in the course.

I got home and made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had potato and rosemary.

My usual daily Japanese lesson on Duolingo today was notable for one answer in which I had to type in four different writing systems: hiragana, Roman, katakana, and kanji scripts. It was a listening exercise and the correct answer that I had to type in was:

このTシャツは五百円ですか

Which is said: “kono T-shatsu-wa go hyaku en desu ka”, and which means: “Is this T-shirt five hundred yen?”

I’ve been learning some of the simpler kanji as part of this course. I brought a few business cards back from my recent trip to Japan, from restaurants/bars that I liked. And yesterday when I looked through them I realised I could read 田中 as “Tanaka”, the name of the proprietor.

Pretty cool!