Daily update – Page 177 – dangermouse.net

Ethics of eating animals, round-up

This morning was the last lesson of the current Ethics topic on whether it’s okay to kill and eat animals. Since most of the kids missed last week’s lesson when we went through arguments that it was okay, I did a quick recap of those arguments, before launching into today’s lesson on arguments why it’s not okay. It went fairly well, with fewer interruptions and blurting out, and more kids putting their hands up to speak, so we had a good discussion of the topic.

At one point the very quiet girl (who I’ve mentioned before) put her hand up and I noticed it – but I was busy quelling some diverging discussion between a couple of other kids. One had started talking about how vegetarians are hypocrites because plants are living things too and have feelings and feel pain, and then another kid interrupted and said no they don’t, and then the two of them were talking at once and I had to step in and quieten them both down. I said that we weren’t discussing plants, we were discussing animals, and to stick to the topic. Then I turned to the quiet girl and she had her hand down, but I asked her anyway if she had something she wanted to say – because I want to encourage her to speak whenever I can. She said, “No, it was about plants.”

My pleasure at seeing her raise her hand was somewhat deflated. But after the class, she hung around because this was her regular classroom. She always helps me put the furniture back from the circle of chairs to the regular desk layout. As we were doing this, I asked her what she was going to say during the lesson. She said that leaves of plants can die, so they’re definitely alive. Okay, it wasn’t that profound, but I was happy that she’d raised her hand, and that after the class I’d followed up and encouraged her to talk. I only have two more lessons with this group of kids, and this girl is the one I hope the most turns out to have a good life ahead of her. And that in some small way my teaching her helps lead to that. I mean, I hope all the kids do well, but I think this girl will need a bit more luck than most of the others, and I hope she gets it.

I’d walked to the school, and I took a longer route home, via the hardware store again to buy some garden stakes, because after yesterday’s repotting our chilli plant was leaning a bit, and I wanted to stake and tie it to keep it vertical. Along the way I passed a kitchen supply shop and decided to poke my nose in to browse around a bit, since I’d never been in there. It’s way bigger than I expected, and full of all sorts of fascinating gadgets, as well as cookware and tableware, and some other stuff on the extreme fringes of things related to food preparation and service.

As I walked home through the grounds of Royal North Shore Hospital, I saw that a whole tree had been uprooted and blown over, probably by yesterday’s storm.

At home, I spent the afternoon writing some Darths & Droids strips. Oh, and doing a bit more housecleaning – the job that never ends! And tonight played a couple of games of Codenames Duet with my wife. We managed to win both by the skin of our teeth, phew!

New content today:

Fire and Ice

Today I planned to do another 5k run in the morning, but when I got up more bushfire smoke had blown in overnight, and the air was pretty awful to breathe. It was bad enough going outside for a couple of minutes – I didn’t want to be out running around and inhaling deeply, so I abandoned the exercise plan. This smoke is still being blown across Sydney from the large fires burning in bushland north-west of the city.

By lunchtime the day had warmed up a lot. And then the weather turned. It got very dark, and there was a lot of thunder. And then as I was watching through the glass balcony door, there was a sudden huge gust of wind, and a spray of water smashed into the glass, as if someone had thrown a large bucket of water at it. My chilli plant was blown off the table on the balcony and smashed to the floor, scattering soil everywhere. Hailstones clattered on the bricks and tiles.

And then a minute later it all stopped. 15 minutes later and the sun was out again. It was the most incredible blast of storm, lasting only a short time, but in that time it certainly packed a punch. It was part of a line of storms that left a swathe of destruction across Sydney. The highest recorded wind gusts were 96 km/h. In some suburbs, multiple trees were toppled, destroying several houses and cars, and bringing down power lines, leaving over 50,000 houses without power. Fortunately nobody was killed, although it could easily have happened. Here’s a news story about the storm.

The damage at my place was limited to my poor chilli plant. Once the storm had passed, I went out to the hardware store to buy some potting mix, so I could repot the plant. After doing that, I had to clean up all the spilt soil, from all over our outdoor furniture and the balcony floor. Overall, including the time to go to the hardware store, I spent about 4 hours cleaning up the mess caused by the storm.

New content today:

Report writing

Today was a working day. I needed to write a report on my recent trip to Germany for the ISO Photography standards meeting in Cologne. Standards Australia requires a meeting report, and I also need to prepare notes for a follow-up meeting with photography experts here in Australia, to report on what was discussed in Germany. Part of the meeting outcomes was a plan to host a meeting in Sydney in February 2021, which we now need to begin planning.

So I spent most of the day writing that report. Later in the afternoon we had a big thunderstorm crash through Sydney, although we only caught the edge of it and didn’t see a lot of rain, but we certainly got a lot of lightning and thunder. We have more storms forecast for tomorrow. It’s good to get some rain, although it’s not clear if it’ll make much difference to the current drought. Sydney goes onto Level 2 water restrictions in a couple of weeks, because our dams continue to dry up.

New content today:

Christmas market

This morning I did a bunch of house cleaning. This afternoon, my wife wanted to go check out the Sustainable Christmas Artisans’ Market, a new twilight market held at the Coal Loader, a historical industrial site near my place, now converted into a public facility.

We walked over about 4pm – according to my walk tracking app the return walk totalled just over 5 kilometres. Fortunately today was overcast and not too hot, although it was pretty humid. As we approached the market, there were streams of people walking form the nearest railway station, as well as cars choking the streets, seeking elusive parking spots. We realised it was going to be busy.

Although there were a lot of people there, the market was spread out in a large area, so it wasn’t too crowded. They had some food vans and a bar set up, with some seating in the middle for people to eat and drink, with the stalls set up around the perimeter of the space. Several people had brought their dogs, so Scully got to say hello to a few, including Norman, another black poodle who we’ve met a few times in a park near our place.

It was the sort of market that has stalls selling giant pepper grinders, hand-turned from native Australian woods:

The Coal Loader is in a nice location, on the side of a cliff overlooking the inner harbour:

Well, the water is behind the row of stalls! We bought a Christmas present for Scully – a new lead, with a cool Pac-Man design (although I suspect she’s too young to know Pac-Man). There was also a stall selling syrups and marmalades made from native fruits – I got a couple of bottles of cocktail mixer syrup: native lime, and riberry.

The walk back home was pleasant, in the cooler evening air, although uphill a lot of the way.

New content today:

Delta Dog training

Last night was fortnightly games night with the guys. We played Azul: Summer Pavilion, which I picked up last weekend:

And Deep Blue, one of the games I got in Essen:

I didn’t win either game, alas.

But on to today: After Scully passed her Delta therapy dogs exam last weekend, my wife had her training scheduled today. The training is for human handlers only, so I had to look after Scully for the day.

We dropped my wife off at the training place before 9am this morning, and then Scully and I drove back home. She was a bit distracted on the trip, and kept putting her front paws on the armrest console, thus activating various buttons. She does this occasionally when in the car with just a driver. She can turn the radio on and off, change the station, one time she set up a new favourite station. Today she managed to activate the satnav and store a new favourite address!

Back home, she relaxed in her dog bed while I made a new Darths & Droids strip. We went out for a bit of fresh air in the park across the street, and then it was time to go get some lunch. We drove back to a bakery near where my wife was training, and I got some pies for lunch. We walked over to a nearby park where Scully could run around and chase a tennis ball. The park is on a slope running down to Drummoyne Oval, where a grade cricket match was in progress.

At one point I tossed the ball, and it rolled down the hill with Scully chasing it… but she’s not a terribly agile dog like some others, and generally has to wait for the ball to roll to a stop before she can pick it up. I could see what was going to happen and ran after her, but by the time we got to the bottom of the hill, the ball had rolled under the fence and into the cricket ground. I could see it, some 10 metres inside the fence. So we had to walk around the outer fence to find a gate that was open, and then go inside the spectator area, and walk around the edge of the playing field while the game was in progress, to retrieve her ball. Fortunately grade cricket matches don’t charge admission for spectators, so we could get in and out without any trouble.

After an hour of playing in the park, we went to pick up my wife. Her training went fine, and she’s selected some hospitals near us that she’d like to visit with Scully as part of the Delta program. They won’t start until early next year, but she’s pretty excited.

New content today:

Golfing

Today’s post is going to be a bit self-indulgent, so I hope that’s okay! I played my postponed round of golf this morning – it was my very first time on a “proper” golf course. All my learning and practice so far has been on the Terry Hills “Pitch and Putt” course that I wrote about a couple of months ago.

This morning I went to Lane Cove Golf Club, which is the nearest golf course to where I live. It’s not a full length course, having only 9 holes with a mix of par 3 and 4. If you play it twice, the 18 holes have a par 64 for the course. But it was still a daunting step up for me, who had never hit a driver before apart from a few times at the driving range last time I played with Andrew.

I started at hole 1, and two other guys appeared behind me, waiting their turn. Under the pressure of them watching, I messed up my tee shot, and so invited them to play ahead of me. They were friendly and agreed to go ahead, and I felt a lot better following them than having someone behind me the whole time.

Here’s the par 3 hole 3, an uphill hole, with my ball waiting to be hit at the bottom:

I hit my tee shot pretty well! Here’s where it landed:

From here I pitched onto the green, but needed 3 putts to sink it, so I scored a 5. As I approached the green, the guys ahead of me were preparing to tee off on hole 4, adjacent. They asked me how I was going so far, and I said okay. They said, “Wait until you get to this next one!” I looked at it:

Whoa! Now that probably doesn’t look too hard for an experienced golfer, but to me that wooded gully was very intimidating. I couldn’t get away with a flubbed stroke searing along the grass – I had to hit a nice lofted shot through the air. With the pressure on, I lost two balls into the gully! My third attempt cleared it, thankfully, but rolled back down that hill on the other side, and I had to drop a ball. Oh well – better luck next time.

The 6th hole presented another interesting problem:

It’s downhill, and pretty short. If you hit too far, you’ll go over the green and into the bush there. So I deliberately tried to hit short. My shot landed on the slope leading down to the green and rolled….

Right onto the green! Yay!! That was one of my best shots of the day. Unfortunately, it was a very long putt, and I needed 3 putts to sink it, but that got me a bogey, which I’m fairly pleased with. Hole 7, on the other hand, was a disaster:

My first attempt at teeing off hit the trees on the right. I tried again, and went into the bush on the left. Finally my third shot went down the fairway. But not very far. I ended up taking 12 shots to finish this hole. And here’s the 9th hole:

I did well on this one. My first shot went down the fairway, and my second shot ended up right next to the green. I pitched once, and putted it in 2, for a total of 5, my second bogey of the day.

I stopped after 9 holes, with a total of 64, exactly twice the par for 9 holes (of 32). I don’t think that’s too bad for my very first go on a “big” course!

Phew! And tonight is fortnightly games night with the guys – I’ll be leaving home soon and queuing this post for automatic posting later tonight.

New content today:

Smoke and wind

This morning I’d planned to go to the local golf course to play a round of golf. This would be my first time on a full sized course, as opposed to the short “pitch and putt” course I’ve been playing on with my friend. I thought I’d have a go myself to try to get a bit of practice before playing a full course with my friend.

But when I got up this morning, there was a faint smell of smoke in the house. Overnight, a pall had descended on Sydney, blown in from the out of control bushfires north-west of the city. It resembled a thick fog, reducing visibility to maybe a couple of hundred metres or so. Despite having the windows all closed overnight, it had permeated into the building. Going outside, the smell was overpowering.

So I called the golf course and postponed my round until tomorrow. They were very understanding about it. And rather than let my wife and Scully walk to work as they usually do, I drove them up, in the car with the vents closed to try to stop the smoke getting in.

Here are links to a couple of reddit posts with photos taken by other people in Sydney this morning:

In the city centre
A bit closer to where I live (bottom photo was taken today)

The smoke hung around all day, so I didn’t go out at all, until it was time to take Scully to the park for some exercise this afternoon. By then it had cleared a bit with a stiff breeze, but the sky was still grey and you could still smell the smoke faintly. The weather bureau says it won’t clear fully until some time tomorrow. But that it’s likely to come back several times over this summer as more fires burn around the city.

New content today:

Application day

After applying for the Alaska Robotics Comics Camp yesterday, today I did another application. This time for a job. Primary Ethics, the non-profit organisation that runs the ethics classes I teach, is seeking people to train ethics teachers.

I remember the training course I did nearly 3 years ago, and I’m sure I can deliver the training. I have all the relevant experience and skills as per the job description. And it’s a contract position, expecting an average of 2 full days of work per month. This is exactly the sort of thing I wanted, to give me a bit of income while still allowing me to do my creative projects close to full-time in an effort to turn them into income as well. So here’s hoping!

Speaking of Ethics, today was my weekly class with the Year 6 students. We discussed reasons why it’s okay to kill animals for meat (next week discuss reasons why it isn’t okay). Most of the class were away today – being year 6 kids near the end of the year, they had a high school orientation at one of the nearby high schools, to prep them for moving up in January. With only about 8 kids, the discussion was tighter and more focused, and I got a lot of good responses from them.

New content today:

The downslide

I spent much of today doing coding tasks as well, after yesterday’s epic effort. I did a lot of tidying up of minor things, in particular setting up the permissions on the IWC forums so people can’t do bad things and can do the things they should be able to do. phpBB’s permissions administration interface is not at all intuitive, and at one point it was configured so that nobody could read anything. I think I managed to sort it out now, though. I also added an anti-spam extension, and a dark theme for users who prefer that. (If you want to use the dark theme, you can access it thus: Click your username in the top-right corner of the forums, choose “User Control Panel”, go to the “Board Preferences” tab, and select your board style as “Prosilver (Dark edition)”, and Submit.)

I also installed a bunch of SSL certificates on all my sites, and then went through the tedious work of tracking down all the security errors and fixing them. Now all my websites should show shiny padlock icons in the URL bar, instead of the scary “Not secure” warning they used to show. (If you see any pages that don’t show the padlock, please let me know.)

Finally, in a stab in the dark, I decided to apply for a position in the 2020 Alaska Robotics Comics Camp. For years I’ve envied everyone who has gone to this annual event, and wished I could go. This time, I don’t have a job to keep me home… so I thought why not apply and see what happens?! It’s a lot of money, getting to Alaska and then paying for the camp, but if I get selected you can bet I’m going to do everything I can to afford it!

New content today:

Debug day

Ugh, what a day. I spent basically all day trying to reconstruct the Irregular Webcomic! forums after yesterday’s disastrous PHP upgrade event on my webhost.

I tried several things, battling with cryptic documentation and apparently non-working installers. I installed a brand new copy of the latest version of phpBB, expecting that I could import/convert the old database containing all the forum poster user data and posts. The installer said there was a convertor included, but when I got to that step, it just wasn’t there. I fiddled around for some hours, trying things, searching for help, discussing with other people. Eventually I tried the installer again, and lo, this time the mysterious convertor interface was there! I don’t know why it wasn’t there the first time.

Anyway, I managed to import the old database, so all of the old forum data is now in the new forums. It looks like it’s working fine, but all of my graphical customisations have vanished. I may try to reinstate some of them, but it was actually the extensive modifications I made to the previous forum’s appearance that caused me to give up upgrading the software in the first place, since the customisations and upgrades interfered with each other and made the upgrade process a real pain in the neck each time. So this time I plan to keep any modifications minimal, so that I can keep the software up to date and hopefully avoid this sort of issue again.

While doing all this, I also got a report that the PHP 7 upgrade has also broken the comics on mezzacotta.net. I spent a bit of time debugging that as well, replacing some deprecated/removed functions. The code now seems to run okay under PHP 7 on the command line, but for some reasons it’s still failing when run via the web page. So I’m currently stumped on that one.

I also squeezed in a few other minor coding tasks in between bashing my head on a brick wall all day. I finally figured out getting an SSL certificate for Darths & Droids, so now the site loads with that trendy padlock icon instead of the “This site is not secure” warning. I’ll add this to all my sites in the next day or so – there’s apparently an interaction with WordPress sites that makes it less trivial than what I did today.

And I set up my new photography website on a brand new domain: dmm.photo. I’ll be expanding this site a bit soon, with a view to offering photo prints for sale. Oh yeah, and it links to a trendy new Instagram that I’ve started too: @davidmorganmar. These two items are part of a campaign I’m beginning to try and make some income as a photographer. Since it’s something else I love doing, like making comics.

New content today: