Daily update – Page 175 – dangermouse.net

Job interview, round 1

This morning I had a first interview for a casual job I’ve applied for. Primary Ethics, the non-profit organisation that organises the children’s ethics classes that I volunteer to teach, is looking for people to train new volunteer teachers. I’m qualified because I’ve been teaching ethics for 3 years now, and I have relevant experience in training adults, and satisfy all the other requirements (ability to work weekends and sometimes weekdays, and willingness to travel to regional towns within NSW). I put my application in a couple of weeks ago, and they arranged an initial phone interview.

My phone rang at the appointed time. The first thing the interviewer said to me was: “You attached your cover letter and CV as [MacOS] Pages files, and we couldn’t open them, so I know nothing about you.”

Ooops. Not a great start.

But it didn’t seem to be a deal breaker, and I think I made a good impression in the interview. I sent my CV and letter in PDF format as soon as the half-hour conversation ended. They’re looking for three people, and at this point I’m pretty confident that I’ll be called in for a face-to-face evaluation. That will involve doing a roleplay in which I demonstrate training someone, and then they’ll decide from there. Given next week is Christmas, they’ll let me know some time in January.

Also today I went for a short walk to test out some video capturing stuff. I have a small video project planned, and wanted to test out some different methods of camera stabilisation. While I was walking, I came across a brushturkey, and got close enough for this video:

This is an Australian brushturkey (Alectura lathami), and they’ve become very common across Sydney in the past decade or two. Before then they were never seen in the city, but they’ve expanded their habitat and can now be found practically everywhere in the city. This individual is tagged (#038), as part of a research project into their movements.

Tonight my wife and I played a game of Azul: Summer Pavilion. It was a hard fought game, and she beat me 92 points to 91. I’m having real trouble beating her at any of the Azul series of games. I must practise more…

New content today:

Dental

I had a dental appointment today, for a clean. The hygienist reported everything looks good, so that’s always good news. My appointment was shortly before lunch, not far from my wife’s office, and she finished early today, so we met up to have lunch at a place nearby that does dim sum, and had a nice meal together, before heading home.

The other thing I’ve done today is put the finishing touches on my new photography website, which I’ve set up as part of my effort to generate some income through my photography. I’m planning to sell framed prints of some of my photos, and am currently doing some research into suitable printing and framing companies where I can get them made. I also have a new Instagram account dedicated to the sort of high quality photos that I’ll be selling – please follow it if you’re interested! (I also have a more general Instagram account, with more casual day-to-day photos on it.)

Oh, I also did some Standards work, follow-up tasks from the meeting I had a week and a bit ago. I’m in the process of organising to host an international photography standards meeting in Sydney in early 2021. There are people to contact and things to book and agreements to get signed.

And gosh, it’s only Tuesday! It’s going to be a full week by the time it’s over.

New content today:

Golf and chores

I left home early this morning for a round of golf at the Lane Cove course I’ve played before. I think I’m getting a bit better slowly, but I messed up some long putts today and didn’t score much better. I did at least manage to finish with the same ball I started with, rather than losing several balls like last time, so that’s something!

At one point I caught up to a group of 4 players, and they invited me to tee off with them and play through. Under the pressure of them watching me, I flubbed my tee shot badly, ending up in thick brush about 10 metres left of the tee. One of them joked that he was happy to see a shot worse than his. They helped me look for my ball a minute, before heading off to play their own, leaving me lagging behind again. I did find my ball a couple of minutes later, but had to take a drop to make it playable.

After finishing, I went home and then walked up to the supermarket to get some food supplies. And when I got home I turned to some chores that needed doing. I’ve been putting off calling a plumber for a noisy, vibrating bathroom tap for ages. I thought maybe it needed reseating and asked a friend I know who is much more of a handyman then I am how difficult a job this is, and if he thought I could manage it. He suggested that the vibration I described was more likely caused by the type of valve/washer I’d installed last time I replaced the washer, and to try a traditional flat washer instead. So I did that, changing the washer… and lo… the vibration problem vanished! However, my friend suggested I should probably also get a reseating tool and use that on the tap to ensure no leaking. So I’ll do that another day.

I also did some other general housecleaning, and I emptied the damp collecting tubs in the wardrobes and closets and replaced the absorbing crystals. Normally I have to do this every couple of weeks because Sydney is generally a bit humid, but it’s been so dry lately that it’s been a couple of months since I did it last.

New content today:

Family lunch

Today I took a road trip with my wife and Scully, up the coast an hour and a bit to visit my mother for lunch. We went to a nice cafe, which is attached to a local art gallery. I don’t see my mother very often, so it was good to catch up and share stories from my recent travels and what I’ve been doing lately.

We got home late afternoon, and were all pretty exhausted from the day and all the driving, so it’s been a lazy evening, watching a Harry Potter movie (Goblet of Fire, perhaps the worst one, but it’s what we’re up to in a full rewatch).

New content today:

Hard Coding

It’s Saturday, normally a day of relaxation, but today I spent most of the day in a partner debugging session with Andrew, my collaborator on the mezzacotta Generators project. Gory details follow (feel free to skip if you’re not interested in boring computer programming stuff):

We started by updating our code to use Python version 3, rather than the old Version 2.7 that it had been running on. This required some code changes, which then had to be tested. And there was a strange bug that caused some of the generators, but not all of them, to intermittently fail when run by loading them from a web browser, but they all worked fine without failing when the same code was run from the web server command line.

After several hours of testing, we determined that the bug was being caused by a stray non-ASCII character in an input file. But it was only causing a problem when run by the web server, because it was operating in a different environment, and the default I/O encoding environment variable was set to ASCII on the web server, but UTF-8 on the command line. Setting that variable to UTF-8 in the wrapping PHP fixed it!

Anyway, we can now show off the Band Name Generator. If you have a garage band you need a name for (or even if you don’t), give it a try!

New content today:

Dog party!

Somehow I got stuck with the job of baking a ham for Christmas lunch with my wife’s family. So this morning I ventured out to acquire a ham. When I got to the supermarket, I found a section with Christmas hams… they were about $20 a kilogram, and all huge slabs of meat weighing 4, 5, 6+ kilos each. Christmas lunch will be for about 8 people… I really don’t think we could get through $100 worth of ham. So I wandered off to get some other groceries, wondering what to do. But then I ran across another section of the store where they had baby hams, closer to 1 kilo. Perfect!

Ham acquired, I bought some other stuff and went home. On the way, I popped into my dentist, as I was walking past and it reminded me that I’m overdue for a teeth clean. The receptionist wasn’t at the desk, so I had to wait a couple of minutes to make my appointment, and I looked over at the coffee table covered in magazines for waiting patients to read. And I spotted something interesting:

Well it’s good to see that my dentist is up on all of the latest techniques and practices! There was even a chapter on how to alloy gold for use in a filling or for a false tooth!

The rest of the morning I spent cataloguing all the bird photos I took yesterday, extracting photo metadata (date, time, GPS coordinates, etc), matching it to species IDs, and then importing the lot into my bird photo database. (You can browse this database, but it’s still under construction – I have to go back and import all my historical bird photos. At the moment it only has photos I took this year, so many of the birds click through to an empty page. For one with several photos, try the New Holland honeyeater.)

This afternoon, we had another Christmas party that Scully was invited to – this time at her dog park that we go to a couple of times a week. It was just organised by the group of regulars there, who invited everyone and their dogs to show up with a plate of food. We arrived early, to go for the usual walk along the shore with the group of dogs that Scully has become familiar with. By the time we got back from the walk there were maybe 20-30 dogs plus their owners there, enjoying plenty of food and drink.

As you can see, Scully was wearing her festive kiwifruit bandana. We stayed for a couple of hours, until about 6pm, when we left to go in search of dinner (the food we ate there was really more of an appetiser than a meal). We ended up at an Italian place, walking a large circuit from our place via the dog park. In total it was almost 8 km we walked this evening. Scully should sleep well tonight, as hopefully will I!

New content today:

School presentation and birds

This morning was the end of year Presentation Day assembly at the primary school where I do my volunteer science teaching stuff. As in the last few years, the school invited me to present the Science Award to the best science student. I get a reserved parking spot, and a seat on the stage with other special guests – it’s pretty cool. They present a whole bunch of academic, sports, and community awards to students, and “graduation” awards to the departing Year 6 class, going on to high school next year. This was the last time I’ll visit the school before the new year starts, and I wished the kids I saw from my Science Club a good Christmas holidays.

Afterwards, I decided to take advantage of being up on the northern beaches and took a walk for about an hour and a half around the Long Reef headland, which is a good spot to do some bird watching. I opened my account today with a crested pigeon:

I got a good shot of a red wattlebird (the bird isn’t red, it has red wattles, below the eyes):

And I managed to get a decent shot of a bird I hadn’t photographed before, a nankeen kestrel. It was flying overhead and I couldn’t tell what it was, silhouetted against the sky. I boosted the exposure and shot wildly, trying to follow it across the sky:

I could go on, but rather than post all the photos here, I’ve stuck them in an Imgur album with species IDs, which you can check at your leisure if interested. (They’re also in my Flickr stream, link below.)

I had some lunch nearby, and then drove a few minutes to Warriewood Wetlands, which is another bird hostspot, and photographed some more birds (also in the album). I got home just in time to take Scully out to the park for afternoon exercise. And then I spent the rest of the evening processing and uploading bird photos. 🙂

New content today:

Final Ethics of the year

This morning was my last Ethics class of the school year. I walked to the school (3.1 km away) because the weather was cool and winds had blown yesterday’s smoke away, thankfully.

In this class we didn’t discuss ethical questions, but instead reflected on the year gone past and what the students learnt. I asked them what topics they enjoyed most, which ones made them think when other students expressed different opinions, and which, if any, changed their minds. We had a really good discussion, and the kids’ behaviour was excellent. Towards the end of the lesson I handed out completion certificates to each child. I told them I wished them well as they begin high school next year, and said I would miss them, as this would probably be the last time we ever see each other.

I genuinely will miss (most of) them, and it makes me a bit sad to think that I really won’t ever see any of them again. However when the bell went, they basically just got up, waved bye, and filed out the door. I think at their age it doesn’t really hit them when they have to say goodbye to someone forever. Come February I’ll have a brand new class with new names to learn, and no doubt I’ll grow fond of the new kids as well.

I decided to walk home through the Lane Cove Bushland Park, which is more or less an alternate “shortest” route home. The track passes through some dense bush, and it would be very difficult to go cross-country off the established walking track. I should have emerged back into a street near my place, but when I was almost there I found a fence blocking the track, with signs indicating that it was undergoing repairs and was closed for safety due to heavy equipment being used. The idea of jumping a safety fence and incurring the wrath of construction workers didn’t appeal, so I had to backtrack through much of the park and emerge an extra kilometre of so away from home, adding maybe 2 km to my journey.

On the way though, I went down some streets I’ve never walked down before, and found a lovely old estate house on a big block of land:

Back home, I didn’t have much time before picking up my wife and Scully to take them to their very first job as a Delta Dogs therapy dog team! This was an event held at Macquarie University for international students who won’t be travelling home to see family over Christmas, with the dogs there to give them some good cheer. They had a team of seven dogs there today, with Scully among them. Normally she’ll be working solely with my wife on hospital visits, but occasionally they have other sorts of events like this as well. Here’s Scully in her Delta uniform:

While I waited to pick them up I had lunch at a nearby friend’s place, and we played a game of Wingspan (the same game I played last Friday games night), which I won handily. Then I picked up Scully and my wife to head home.

I spent this afternoon and evening doing some coding work on the mezzacotta generators, adding some stuff to a new band name generator which we’ve been collaborating on.

Oh, and last night I made a batch of eggnog, using Jamie Oliver’s recipe. It had to refrigerate overnight, so I didn’t taste it until tonight. Actually, I had some commercially produced eggnog at my friend’s place at lunch today, to compare it against. It was the first time in my life I’ve ever had eggnog. The commercial stuff tasted okay, but honestly not something I’d buy.

But then I had my own home-made eggnog tonight… and it was delicious! A much nicer drink than what I’d had at lunchtime.

Yummo! I’ll definitely be making more of this some time.

New content today:

Smoky day

When I woke up this morning the smoke had blown in over the city. It was really terrible, even worse than last Thursday. I drove my wife and Scully to work so they didn’t have to walk out in the smoke.

I planned to spend the day writing a new 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe, but I kept interrupting myself by trawling the news for updates on the weather and the smoke. It got worse as the morning wore on, getting so thick that I couldn’t see some of the buildings in the distance that I can normally see out the windows. At one point the Air Quality Index (a measure of gas and particulate pollution levels) reached a score of 2200 in my location, and as high as 2550 in other parts of Sydney. For reference, the scale is as follows:

0-33: Very good
34-66: Good
67-99: Fair
100-149: Poor
150-199: Very Poor
200+: Hazardous

So yes, we were over 12 times the amount needed to qualify as “hazardous” level. I stayed indoors with all the windows closed, but the smell of the smoke permeated the house. Around midday, my wife messaged me, saying that the fire alarm in her office building had been set off by the smoke, and they had to evacuate. I drove up to pick up Scully, because my wife didn’t want her sitting outdoors in that smoke for too long – she’s only a small dog. When I got there, the office buildings of the area were mostly obscured by the smoke in the air:

When I got back home, there was news that the smoke was setting off fire alarms all over the city – it said that over a hundred office buildings had been evacuated because of smoke alarms going off. And according to fire regulations, each building has to be inspected by the fire brigade before they can turn the alarm off and let people back inside. But there were so many going off at once that the fire brigade were stretched beyond capacity, and some buildings ended up abandoned with the alarms going off for hours before they could be attended.

If there was one good thing about the day, the smoke shielded the city from the worst of the sun, and the temperatures didn’t quite get up to the forecast maxima of over 40°C. This also kept the fires from spreading too far or too dangerously close to inhabited areas, and there were no reports of property loss today (that I saw).

This afternoon the wind changed and blew in fresh air from the south, and by this evening it was cool and possible to open the windows without making the house smell worse. And I even managed to finish writing my 100 Proofs article.

New content today:

Bracing for Tuesday

I’m currently reading a book about Sydney, and it says that Sydney is a city governed by three winds. The nor-easter, the westerly, and the southerly. And it’s so true.

The nor-easter brings in warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean. It brings warm, humid weather.
The westerly brings in hot, dry air from the interior of the Australian continent. It drives the very hottest weather, but keeps the air dry.
The southerly is the wind of the cold change and storms. It brings cold air up from the south, often moist and laden with rain and violent winds.

On a hot day, especially in summer, the westerly wind will bake the city and dry everything up, parching the grass and blowing dust into the air. And people will wait for the southerly change, known as the “southerly buster”, to bring relief and rains.

The past few weeks the westerly has brought not only hot, dry air into the city, but also the smoke from the bushfires west of the city. But today was a blessed relief, with the nor-easter blowing fresh air in from the sea. The smoke was gone this morning, and I could see actual clouds in the sky, rather than just a uniform grey-orange pall blanketing everything. There’s still some smoke high up in the upper atmosphere, so the sky wasn’t really blue, it was more brownish, but at least today we could go outside and breathe. The only issue was that it raised the humidity a lot. I did a lot of walking today, and although it wasn’t hot, the humidity was a killer.

First thing this morning I had the car booked in for an annual service. I dropped it off at the service centre at 7:30, which fortunately is within walking distance of home. But I didn’t go straight home – I headed to my barber for a haircut. I knew he opened earlyish, but it turned out I got there at 8 and he didn’t open until 8:30. So instead of getting a haircut, I went to the supermarket and did some grocery shopping, which I carried home.

Once I’d unpacked the groceries and put them away at home, I headed out again. this time to the post office to mail a Christmas gift. I’m taking part in the reddit Secret Santa, and had a box of goodies to be sent to my secret giftee. I had good luck with the packaging – I grabbed a likely looking box from the Post Office packaging supplies and my gifts fit perfectly into the box. They were snug without being tight, and required no extra padding to stop them rattling around. This may be the first time this has ever happened!

After sending my gifts, I went back to the barber and got my haircut. I was a dollar short of the price on the wall, and said I’d go get some cash from an ATM, but the barber said he had EFTPOS now! I’ve only ever seen anyone pay cash there before, so that was a bit of a surprise. Saved me a walk to the ATM though.

Then I walked home and, not 10 minutes after I walked in the door I got a phone call from the car service place saying my car was ready to be picked up. So I walked back up there to get it. I tracked my walks on Strava and by the time I picked up my car I’d walked over 8 kilometres (5 miles). As well as servicing the car they’d washed and detailed it. When I got home I decided it was a good time to wax the car, seeing as it was now clean – and water restrictions mean it will be harder to wash again from tomorrow (more about that later).

But first I had lunch while the engine cooled down, and then after eating I waxed the car. I’d intended to start writing a new 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe today, but time really got away from me with all the various chores to be done. Late afternoon my wife and I took Scully out to the dog park for some exercise in the fresh air.

Now about water restrictions. Sydney has been on Level 1 restrictions for some time now, but Level 2 restrictions go into force from midnight tonight. The city’s water supply is at 45% capacity, and that triggered this change. From tomorrow, it will be illegal to use a hose for any purpose other than fighting fires – no garden watering, no washing of cars. Gardens can only be watered by drip irrigation or watering cans, and only before 10am or after 4pm. Cars can only be washed with a bucket (which makes it more difficult and laborious than using a hose – I think this measure is really designed to deter people from washing cars altogether, rather than to make everyone change from hoses to buckets, which I really don’t think saves much, if any, water as the bucket is so much less precise and you have to slop water all over the place with it to rinse the car properly).

Level 2 is mild compared to some rural towns which are on Level 4 or 5 at the moment. The details vary from town to town, but these include measures such as watering lawns and gardens allowed for a maximum of 30 minutes only by hand watering can on Sundays only before 9am or after 6pm, complete banning of washing cars by any means (you’re only allowed to wipe clean windows and mirrors), and restricting people to one shower of a maximum of 5 minutes per day or a bath with a maximum water depth of 10 centimetres. These are towns of 30 to 40,000 people with these restrictions. The drought in south-eastern Australia is terribly serious.

And the forecast for tomorrow in Sydney is not good. The westerly will be back, and with it smoke from the fires. It will bring temperatures over 40°C to the suburbs (the city is by the coast, so is usually a bit cooler, but it’ll be high 30s), as well as strong, and dry, winds. And there may be some dry lightning storms as well. All of this is a recipe for danger with regard to the ongoing bushfires. Hot dry winds will whip them up and carry embers further east, towards the city. Last Friday we had ash falling on the city as far east as my home, and some of my friends reported burnt leaves falling from the sky.

So everyone in this city of 5 million people holds their breath tonight.

New content today: