David Morgan-Mar – dangermouse.net

Taking Scully’s prints

It was the usual busy Monday with plenty of online classes today. I didn’t do much else of note, except for one thing this evening.

My wife found a jewellery maker that does silver castings of custom wax moulds that you make. They suggest doing fingerprints of yourself or loved ones, or nose or paw prints of pets. So my wife decided to get one and make a wax impression from Scully. We did it together, heating up the small wax balls supplied by the jeweller with a hair dryer, then squashing them down and then getting an imprint by pressing them onto Scully’s nose and paw. They give you two wax balls and you send them both back, labelled in order of preference, and they decide if the first preference is okay to use, otherwise they use the backup.

She’ll send them back tomorrow and I guess she’ll have a Scully imprint bit of jewellery within a few weeks. I’ll see if I remember to take a photo to share when it arrives.

New content today:

Exploring Summer Hill

This morning I did a 5k run. I wanted to beat 28 minutes and put an extra effort in and ended up recording 26:46, which I was very pleased with.

Afterwards, my wife and I went for a drive over to the suburb of Summer Hill. She had proposed we go there to look around as it’s a place we’ve never been before. We wandered around several of the streets, checking out the shopping area and some residential streets. We found an amazingly good patisserie, called simply the Summer Hill Village Patisserie. While we were looking hungrily at the pastries in the window, the woman inside stuck a note on the window right in front of our noses: “Special: 3 items, $3 off; 4 items, $4 off”.

So we had to go in and get three items! My wife got a croissant, while I decided to make this lunch and got a cherry danish, and a sfogliatella filled with ricotta and candied orange peel (top right in above photo). We sat in the small square across the street to eat them, and they were delicious!

Walking around, we admired the architecture: a mix of Victorian terrace houses:

Victorian/Federation hybrids:

Federation Free with classical columns:

Art Deco:

And modern murals:

It was a fun and interesting slice of Sydney history.

Back home I had three classes this evening, punctuated by an hour break in which I made Thai red curry Brussels sprouts with rice for dinner.

New content today:

An easy Saturday and a closed restaurant

I was glad that I did a 5k run yesterday, because this morning’s weather was miserable. Cold and rainy and still very, very windy. But the awful weather eased up today and the sun finally came out in the afternoon, heating things up and releasing a ton of humidity into the air.

I basically took it easy, doing some comics stuff and random puttering around. I took Scully for a walk at lunch without my wife, and we got fish and chips for lunch. We planned to stay in for dinner again, but my wife got a hankering for dinner at Organica restaurant, so we walked up there with Scully early in the evening. This has become her new favourite restaurant, after the closure of some of our other favourites over the years.

But when we got there, it had closed down! The furniture and signage had all been removed! My wife checked online and sure enough, it’s listed as permanently closed. So that was a big disappointment. We walked over to Green Gourmet, the vegetarian place that last time said we were welcome to bring Scully inside. So we popped in and they confirmed Scully was welcome. I actually don’t think this is technically legal in New South Wales – dogs are allowed in commercial outdoor dining areas, but not indoors. But it’s on them, so we were happy to enjoy a nice meal there. Another couple came in with a dog too while we were there, and they looked like regulars, as the staff greeted them and knew the dog by name.

Not much else to say about today.

New content today:

An extremely windy day

Everything about today was about the wind. It was extremely windy. A bit of rain, overcast and cloudy, but super super windy. I had two incidents. I went for a 5k run in the morning, and leaves were blowing all over the place, and bits of twigs, and one actually got stuck in my shoelaces and I had to stop running briefly to extract it. When I’d finished and was walking back home I passed a broken lamp post, which had suffered a fatal hit from a fallen tree branch.

I took the photo because there’s an app here where you can report incidents like this to the local council, so they know about it and can come fix it.

At lunch I didn’t want to brave the wind and so drove to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. On the way home we stopped off at Maggio’s Bakery where I got a porchetta roll for lunch. This is a thing I’ve been wanting to try for some time, but I usually default to a slice of pizza when I go there. But today they were out of pizza, so I tried the roll. It comes with sliced porchetta, chunks of potato, rosemary, and mayonnaise, and was delicious.

On the way driving home, I turned down a street and ahead of me was a roadblock, with emergency workers in the middle of removing a tree that had fallen across the road. I had to turn around and backtrack and find another route home. (I didn’t get a photo of it since I was driving.) We’re predicted to have similar weather tomorrow, though easing off a bit.

Otherwise, I did my four ethics classes, did a bit of puttering around with comics stuff, and made potato and pesto pasta for dinner. And tonight is board games night online. We just played a couple of games of Codenames, using the dedicated Codenames site rather than Board Game Area since for some weird reason one of my friends can’t load their site.

New content today:

The backwards day

After last night’s storm, the rain continued through the night and cold winds blew in. Today’s maximum temperature was at 1:30 am, at 21.1°C, and it just got colder from there. The minimum temperature was at 1:00 pm, at 18.3°C, and then since then the rain and wind has eased off and the temperature has climbed again! We may set another maximum later this evening. Very weird.

It really was a big storm. By this morning there were still over 100,000 properties without power. This was combined with industrial action by our train drivers here in Sydney, who didn’t exactly strike, but did a go-slow on the train network, so this morning we had heavy rain, a lot of trees and power lines down, and reduced capacity on the train network. So it was pretty miserable for anyone having to commute to work.

After two classes in the morning, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, in the rain. We went up to the pie shop, which has been closed for a few weeks over Christmas, so I haven’t had my regular fix. I like the spicy ones, so chose the butter chicken and Mexican beef ones today.

In the afternoon I processed some more photos from 2023’s trip to Japan, and used some of them to fill in my travel diary page for the day. I really want to get all the photos from that trip sorted before I go to Japan again next month! Here’s an amusing photo that I didn’t put into the diary:

And in other travel news, I’ve managed to book a hotel in Berlin for my June trip. The first hotel never got back to me about the corporate rate, but the second hotel I emailed got back the same day with full details and took my booking when I replied to confirm. So good business to them, and none to the first one that never responded! I can leave that trip for a while now and think about it again after we get back from Japan. I still have some things to organise for our itinerary there first.

New content today:

A big storm

As I’m writing this tonight a severe thunderstorm is lashing the city outside. Two of my friends have lost power at their homes (and are chatting online from their phones). I had three ethics classes in a row this evening and told the kids in the last class that if my power went out and I disconnected from Zoom, then the class will be over for today, and least they’ll know what happened.

Until the storm hit, it was a hot and humid day. But the wind has picked up and the temperatures has dropped dramatically in the last hour, as the rain pounds down and the lightning flashes. I just checked the power outage website and there are over 100 separate outages across Sydney, with over 61,000 buildings affected at the moment. Wind gusts up to 100 km/h have been recorded too. And… wow… we had 30 mm of rain in just half an hour. And it’s still coming down.

The good news is tomorrow and the next few days will be cooler than the past few days, down to around 25°C, although rainy.

Today I had some totally free time in the morning since my wife took Scully to work. I thought about going out somewhere, but in the end I started tidying up my email inbox… and three hours later I realised I still hadn’t gone out. Then I spent some time in the afternoon pricing up some more Magic: the Gathering cards in preparation for selling them. And then did some thinking about planning story stuff for Episode IX in Darths & Droids.

New content today:

Ethics of peer pressure

Today I cycled my ethics class topic for the week, writing a new lesson plan for the topic of Peer Pressure. This is a recycled topic from a few years ago, but I rewrote the examples and added some new questions to keep it fresh. I included some new questions about online pressure, in contrast to pressure from friends.

I assembled a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch I did a couple of weeks ago. Puttered around at random.

Watched a couple of Italian YouTube videos to get some language listening practice. A 4 minute video can take me 20 minutes to watch as I pause it to look up Italian words I don’t know yet. It’s good for my vocabulary. Today I learnt words like filastrocca, meaning “fairy tale”. I knew fila meant “queue” or “row” or “line”, but I looked up strocca and discovered that it’s an adjective meaning “awful” or “sucky” or “crappy”. So a fairy tale is a “crappy row”? I checked an Italian dictionary etymology and it was unclear on the origins of the word, but suggested that it might instead have originated from strocco, which is a noun meaning a type of silk. Which is also a bit bizarre.

I also learnt the word abbozzo, which means a rough draft or sketch. As I was confirming the meaning online, I discovered to my surprise that abbozzo also has a Wiktionary entry for English, with the same meaning, stating the word is borrowed from Italian. The Cambridge Dictionary and Merrian-Webster also agree that abbozzo is used in English. I can only assume that it’s mostly a fine arts jargon word, like sfumato or chiaroscuro.

I also learnt: agrumo (citrus fruit), pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry), and the verb macinare (to grind, as in pepper). Oddly enough, it wasn’t a cooking video; it was a video about Befana, the Italian holiday that occurs on 6 January to mark the end of the Christmas season. There are a bunch of traditional Befana treats that are served on the day.

For dinner tonight I wanted to use up a bunch of sourdough starter discard which I’ve accumulated in the past few days while trying to freshen up my sourdough starter. I mixed it with some extra flour and baking powder and formed it into simple flatbread which I pan fried and served with some lentil dhal, as a sort of substitute naan. It worked pretty well!

The weather was hot today, forecast to be hotter tomorrow, with a late storm to cool things down before a few cool and rainy days filling the rest of the week.

Finally, there’s a hotel in Berlin that really doesn’t want my business. I’ve emailed twice about a conference rate (for the ISO Photography Standards meeting there in June, which I’m planning on attending) that I’ve been told they have, and they haven’t answered. The info from the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) is that you have to book by email to get the conference rate; you can’t just book on the web site. I may have to look at other hotels.

New content today:

A domain registration mystery

This morning I received a strange email message, from someone in Belgium named Piet, saying they were an artist, that they’d noticed I own the domain piet.be, and they wanted to buy it off me to use for their own professional web site. I had never registered such a domain and had no idea why this person thought it might belong to me.

I checked, and sure enough piet.be is currently set up as a redirect to my Piet esoteric programming language page. So that explained one mystery: Why this person thought the domain belonged to me. But raised two other mysteries: Who did own the domain, and why had they set it up to redirect to one of my web pages?

I did some online sleuthing and found that DNS Belgium had a record showing that the domain was registered way back in 2002, and belonged to a company named D Haeze Trading nv, with an address listed in Gavere in Belgium. I looked up D Haeze Trading and discovered that their primary business is listed as “Wholesale of dairy products and eggs”. Curiouser and curiouser.

Now I knew who had registered the domain, but why had a dairy and egg producer registered piet.be and why had they set it up to redirect to my esoteric programming page?

Digging further, I found this company record, which lists the company managers as Piet and Jan D’Haeze. Aha! So possibly the manager of the company decided it would be cool to have the Belgian domain corresponding to his personal name.

But that leaves the main question unanswered: why had he set the domain up to redirect to my website? I mean, obviously my site is relevant to the Piet name, but why would someone named Piet go to the bother of buying the domain name only to redirect it to someone else’s website, owned by a person they don’t know and have never contacted?

Anyway, I replied to the person who wanted to buy the domain off me, and told them this information and that they need to contact D Haeze Trading nv if they want to buy the domain. Later (this evening) they got back to me and thanked me for the information. So, good deed done for the day.

I had 6 ethics classes today, mostly during the day, and two late in the evening. That didn’t give me a lot of time to do much else, besides taking Scully on a couple of walks. I made mushroom pizza for dinner. It’s kind of become our Monday habit to have a home made pizza, now that I’ve discovered how easy it is to make the dough.

New content today:

Planning for cherry blossoms

I slept in a bit this morning, but then got up, had breakfast, and embarked on a 5k run. The weather was far too warm and humid, and it was a real struggle today, with a slow time. But at least I have the virtue of doing some exercise regardless.

Last night while I was watching a movie on Netflix (The Dead Don’t Die), I discovered when I tried to turn the TV off that the batteries in the remote had died, apparently mid-movie. I couldn’t turn the TV off! And AFAIK there are no physical controls on the TV. I could have just pulled the plug out, but I was reluctant since it’s plugged into a power board with a bunch of other stuff and it would have been non-trivial to work out which was the correct cord. So I scavenged batteries from another device, and managed to turn the TV off.

Today I went out to the supermarket specifically to buy new batteries. When I got home I opened the remote to install brand new ones, and discovered that one of the emergency batteries Id installed last night had leaked! Urk! So I removed those batteries and stuck them in my battery recycling pile, and cleaned out the leaked chemicals carefully with cotton tips and isopropyl alcohol. before installing the new batteries.

I also spent time sewing up Scully favourite plush toy. Again. She’s ripped holes and extracted stuffing from it about 20 or 30 times, and I keep repairing it because it’s her oldest and most favourite dog toy.

In travel planning, my wife’s sister sent us this article about cherry blossoms in Japan, saying that we’ll be there around the right time to view the early February-blooming flowers in Kawazu, a day trip from Tokyo. I’m keen to go there and see them, because in all the times I’ve visited Japan I’ve never seen more than the odd single tree with blossoms on it—one time in Yokohama in February I was surprised to spot one blooming that early. But it appears the Kawazu variety always blooms so early. So now I want to try to plan our time to fit in a journey there to see them.

New content today:

Losing games and double pizza

Friday morning I did the grocery shopping. The old fashioned way, since I forgot to order online for pickup, so it took about half an hour longer than just going to the supermarket for the pickup. The day was rainy, and I had four ethics classes to teach.

Then it was heading out to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. We went to the place of the guy who recently moved into his newly built house (on the same property as his old house). He has a nice dining table and laid a felt mat on top for gaming on. We started with a game of Notre Dame, which I’ve played before but not for many years.

It’s a worker placement game, and your workers activate various powers, but you are restricted by first having to draft cards related to the placement areas, so you only have a limited choice of zones to place your workers each turn, rather than free choice. I scored a lot of points early on, but got stifled for resources in the late game and everyone else overtook me, so I ended up coming last of five players. A sixth friend arrived about halfway through the game, and we stopped to eat delivered pizzas for dinner. When we resumed we started a six-player game of Ticket to Ride: Asia, which plays as a team game with three teams of two.

In this variant of the classic game, each team has shared racks of tickets and train cards, and also a secret hand which you’re not allowed to share with your teammate. You have separate turns, but are working together to build your routes. It gave an interestingly different dynamic and was a lot of fun. My team leapt to an early lead… but you can guess what happened. We got overtaken and ended up coming last! Oh well, at least we all had fun.

Today was another partly rainy day, with unsettled weather set in here for the next few days. The sky is rapidly changing between sunny and grey clouds that threaten rain.

After a 5k run in the very humid conditions (82% humidity and 24°C) I cleaned the bathroom and then tried to write a Darths & Droids comic strip. I got stuck with writer’s block for a few hours – it was torturously slow going. I managed to finish it off in the afternoon.

For dinner we walked with Scully over the Naremburn, 2 km away, to have a simple meal at the pizzeria there. So I ended up having pizza two nights in a row. Not that I’m complaining.

Tonight we watched the new Wallace and Gromit movie on Netflix: Vengeance Most Fowl. I’ve always liked all the Wallace and Gromit films, and this one was brilliant as always.

New content today: