Daily update – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

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!

A walk near the zoo

This morning we all slept in a bit. I think we needed a final catch up of sleep after the working week straight after returning from Tokyo.

I did a 5k run, but it was a slow time. The humidity was overwhelming at 90%, about 23°C.

I worked on a new Darths & Droids comic.

After lunch my wife and I went for a short drive to take Scully out for a walk somewhere different for a change. I planned to go down to Bradleys Head, which has a nice area to walk around and good views of the harbour, but I forgot that it’s part of the Sydney Harbour National Park, and so no dogs are allowed. So instead we parked near the bottom gate of Taronga Zoo and walked along a bush track around Whiting Beach to Little Sirius Point. The view here is pretty good!

Also today I’m baking sourdough, with rye flour for the first time in a long while. I ran out some months ago and haven’t managed to buy more until yesterday when we walked back from the lighting place and passed the bulk foods shop.

Games night and new lights

Friday morning I did the first regular grocery shop since we got home from Japan. It was a big order. When I picked it up from the supermarket, the friendly woman there who always says hello told me that it was her last day working there. She’s moving up the coast for semi-retirement, and working reduced hours at the local supermarket branch up there. I don’t think I ever knew her name, but I wish her well.

After my ethics classes, it was gaming night. I took Scully with me to a friend’s place – my wife had a dinner out with her friends. We played a couple of games of 7 Wonders with the Cities expansion – the first time I’ve ever played the game with any expansion set. It was pretty fun, and I managed to win the first game, though did poorly in the second one. Then we played Azul: Queen’s Garden. I’d brought this game from home, but hadn’t played it in a while and had to refresh myself on the rules. Unfortunately I botched one rule and didn’t discover it until the second round, but from then on we played correctly. I ended up coming a poor third of four players.

This morning I went for a 5k run for the first time since leaving for Japan. I didn’t push too hard, but was pleased that my time wasn’t unusually bad.

After lunch my wife and I walked down to a lighting showroom that is not too far away. I’d been thinking about replacing our old boring light fittings with something a little more stylish, and possibly getting one with an extra bulb for increased brightness in the living room area. Since we moved from incandescents to smart LED bulbs, they’re not quite as bright and I miss the brightness when doing things that require concentration, such as playing games (board or D&D) on the dining table.

Anyway, we looked at hundreds of light fittings that were in display and tried to find the intersection of our preferences. There were some styles that I liked that she didn’t like, and vice versa, but we eventually narrowed things down to some that we were both happy with. The lights need to come from their warehouses, and the guy said that one major warehouse was in Brisbane, which is being affected by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, so it might be some time until we get all the lights. But we’re not in a rush, and they should be available in a couple of weeks or so.

That’s the other big news here in Australia. Cyclone Alfred hit Brisbane overnight and fortinately it lost strength just before making landfall, so wasn’t as intense as initially expected. But it’s moving very slowly and will dump a lot of rain on the area over the next two days. There’s a lot of flooding and fallen trees and power lines, which will take weeks to repair. One man is missing, suspected dead, after being washed away by floodwater.

The tail end of the cyclone will hit Sydney over the next couple of days too, as the tropical low moves south. We’re expected to get heavy rain, mostly on Monday and Tuesday, but no damaging winds thankfully.

New keys recut

I mentioned yesterday that I had new keys cut for our new front door lock, and they didn’t work. So today after my morning ethics classes I went to the hardware store again and took the keys back. The woman there examined the cut keys and tried putting them in the cutting machine again to see if it would take a bit more metal off. And lo it did, and I tested the keys in the lock there and then (since the lock isn’t in the door yet), and they worked. 🎉

I’m not sure I did much else of note today. Oh, I sent off a package containing copies of my two Irregular Webcomic! books:

A reader asked if I still had any left, and yes, I do have a few copies of each. So they sent some money and I mailed off the package.

I also did a bit of thinking about contacting an electrician. We’re planning to replace some light fittings in our place with new ones, and intending to go to a showroom on the weekend to choose some styles. Then we need to get an electrician in to install them. I tried phoning the old electrician we used many years ago, but it seems he’s no longer working. So I contacted our apartment building committee to ask if they had any preferred electricians that we could use. I got some details, but a bit late so I’ll call tomorrow.

More Japanese birds

Today I worked on the next Darths & Droids strip, then got stuck into finishing off processing and uploading photos from my last day in Tokyo. I also went through and found all the photos I’d taken of birds, and identified all the species. Some of them were a bit tricky, since I only got shots from a distance with my phone. But I’m pleased to say that overall I added seven new species to my list, plus a Eurasian coot, which I’ve photographed in other countries but not Japan.

Including brown-eared bulbul:

Eurasian teals:

Tufted ducks:

And common pochard:

At lunch I took Scully for a walk to the hardware store, where I had some new keys cut for the new lock that will be installed on our new door when the fire safety people come to replace our old door on Friday. Unfortunately when I got back home and tested the new keys they didn’t work! The supplied keys have six places where the metal has been removed to set a new level different from the blank. But the cut keys only have metal removed from the five spots closest to the back of the key. There’s a whole spot nearest the tip of the key which wasn’t ground down. So now I’m going to have to go back and either get them properly cut or my money back and go somewhere else. This time I’ll take the actual lock with me and test them in the shop before leaving.

This evening, fried rice for dinner, followed by three ethics classes.

Getting back in the swing Tuesday

I got another good sleep, although I went to bed a bit late due to not finishing ethics classes until 10pm last night. Tonight should be an earlier night.

My first task today was writing the new lesson plan for the new week’s classes. The topic this week is “Always Connected”, discussing the modern phenomenon of being able to contact and be contacted at all times, no matter where you are, thanks to mobile phones and devices. I start with a story about myself, and the fact that when I was the age of the kids in the classes, I had a pen-pal. I think I’ll have to explain what a pen-pal is! And how over time, as technology advanced, we moved from exchanging letters to e-mails, and then onto social media. And along the way I ask the kids about the effects of this technology change on how we communicate and our well-being. In the afternoon I had two classes to finish off the “Danger!” topic from last week, then in the evening the first class on the new topic.

After completing the plan (before the afternoon classes), I went for a walk with Scully up to the pie shop to get some lunch. They had a new special today, a peri-peri chicken pie. This sounded great so I tried one, and it was indeed very good.

I also spent a bit of time processing some photos from my last day on Tokyo. Here are some from Nezu Jinja shrine, in Nezu, Tokyo. The entrance, with the market:

Torii gates:

Torii and a pavilion overlooking a koi pond:

Ema plaques and the main temple building:

A warbling white-eye. Taken with my phone!: