dangermouse.net – Page 172 – David Morgan-Mar

Germany travel diary completed

I’ve completed work on my Germany travel diary from last week’s trip. I’ve revised the text a bit and added photos, after completing work on the photos I took over there.

And in some other good news: Remember how one of the hotels I booked through Amoma, and then Amoma went bankrupt, leaving my booking in limbo and me out of $500? I applied to Visa for a chargeback, and submitted evidence of Amoma’s bankruptcy and defaulting on my prepaid hotel bill. It took 7 weeks for Visa to process the claim, but today I got the money refunded! Woo!

Apart from that, I didn’t do much today. I strained my back yesterday while hauling those groceries home, and wanted to take it easy today, so I relaxed a bit.

New content today:

More Germany photos

This morning I went up the street to get some groceries, to restock things after being away for a week. I walked up the hill to the supermarket, and hauled three heavy bags of stuff home, including a cooler bag full of stuff to go in the fridge and freezer. I got home… and realised I hadn’t taken the key. Oops.

Fortunately, two circumstances made this not a disaster. Firstly, one of my neighbours was home, and let me put my cold groceries in his fridge, and leave the rest fo them in his kitchen. Secondly, my wife works only 20 minutes away. So I headed over to her work to pick up her keys, then came back home, picked up my groceries from the neighbour, and finally let myself in. So that was an interesting waste of an hour or so.

I spent much of the day sorting through Magic: the Gathering cards, trying to catalogue all the bulk commons in my collection. It’s time to clear them out and regain some (a) storage space and (b) cash, if I can. In between, I processed and uploaded a bunch more photos from last week in Cologne. Here’s my travelling companion Monkey at Cologne Cathedral:

On one afternoon after my meetings finished, my wife and I checked out the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of art. It has this painting, among others: Drawbridge at Arles, by Vincent van Gogh (my photo):

And then also the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln (MAKK), a museum of art and design. The historical permanent exhibit was closed for renovation, but the modern design exhibit was open, with lots of funky design stuff from around 1900-1950, like this Russian radio:

New content today:

Recovery Sunday

I slept soundly from 22:30 (after the Rugby World Cup Final) to 05:30, when Scully woke me up requesting to go downstairs to the grass for a toilet. I climbed back in bed about 6 and dozed for another 3 hours, while my wife got up and pottered around.

After a late breakfast, we took Scully for a walk. It was a hot day in Sydney – reaching over 30°C by 11:00. But it was cloudy and a cool wind picked up, reducing temperatures through the afternoon until we got a huge thunderstorm around 15:00. A bit after that we invited Luna (next door’s poodle) in for a puppy play-date for about an hour and a half. The dogs love each other and raced around the house playing and fighting over toys.

I didn’t do much else, taking it easy to get over the travel, except for uploading some more photos from Germany – including my day at the Spiel board games exhibition.

I also formatted my travel diary into HTML and uploaded that to my website. I’ll add photos to it a bit later, but you can read the text now.

New content today:

My trip to Essen

So, it’s Saturday evening and I’ve been home almost 12 hours now, after not sleeping since Thursday morning. I can never sleep on planes – just too uncomfortable. I am however surprisingly awake. I’m about to watch the Rugby World Cup final game between England and South Africa, before dropping into bed for hopefully about 10-12 hours, and waking up Sunday morning with no jetlag. We’ll see how that plan goes.

As mentioned in the previous short update, I couldn’t log into this blog from my iPad/phone, so I couldn’t update while travelling as I’d planned to do. Which means I have a full trip to report on. I kept a detailed travel diary as I usually do, and will be formatting that into web pages and posting it with photos over the next few days, so I’ll just mention some highlights here.

My wife and I flew out of Sydney on the afternoon of Friday 25 Oct, and landed in Frankfurt on Saturday morning 26 Oct. Which doesn’t sound so bad, until you realise Frankfurt is 9 time zones later than Sydney, which adds another 9 hours to the transit time. We got a train to Essen and spent the afternoon/evening exploring the centre of the city.

Essen Cathedral (it’s not very big):

A wurst hut:

On Sunday we went to Spiel, the huge board games exhibition. I have photos, but haven’t processed/uploaded any yet. But here’s a photo of the haul of games I bought/was given:

Top left: a pack of exclusive bonus cards for Race for the Galaxy. Below that two bonus tiles for Roll for the Galaxy, then bonus dishes for Sushi Go Party!, and a pack of bonus words for Codenames (in German). Next column is Cultistorm Face 2 face, a quick card game spinoff from the huge Cthulhu mythos board game Cultistorm. Below that Walking in Burano, a pattern construction game, with a pack of bonus cards exclusive to Spiel. Some Lego minifigures my wife and I made from the custom figure construction bins at the Lego store in Cologne (so not from Spiel). And finally Deep Blue.

On Monday-Wednesday I attended ISO Photography Standards meetings in Cologne, while my wife explored Cologne. Then Thursday we explored together before catching a train back to Frankfurt and flying home.

New content today:

Home from travels

I just got back home from my trip to Germany. I had planned to post some updates while over there, but for some reason the password manager on my iPad/iPhone didn’t share the saved password from my desktop machine, so I couldn’t log in. Sorry about that! I’ll post a fuller daily update a bit later today.

What monsters lurk in men

I was reminded today of just how horrible humans can be sometimes.

I decided to walk up to the fish & chip shop near my place to get some lunch, and then out to my favourite eating spot. It’s a lookout at the end of a street, perched on a hill with a view of Sydney Harbour. Not the grandest view, but a pretty nice one, and convenient for me to walk to. This is the spot where I mentioned magpies accosted me and my meal recently. No magpies today, thankfully, and this was the view:

Lovely, right? Here’s a panorama to show more of the surroundings:

At the left of the panorama you can see the wooden bench where I usually sit to eat my lunch. There’s also an old white wooden chair frame, but the seat is missing – I don’t know why it’s still there. Anyway, here’s a closer shot of the bench:

This is where it gets nasty. See the trees, the partly foliaged one in the middle, the deadish looking one on the left, and the one on the right with many branches removed? Normally these trees have very full foliage and provide a deep, full shade to the wooden bench, making it perfect for sitting on. Today, as you can see, the bench is at best 30-40% shaded, with the hot spring sun burning down on the rest. What’s going on? And wait… what’s that sign?

Some inconsiderate bastard has illegally poisoned the trees! This is unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence in Sydney, almost always around the harbour where some inconvenient tree happens to block the waterfront view of someone’s house. When these trees are fully dead and gone, the views from the houses behind them will take in considerably more of the harbour (and will provide no shade at all to my lunch seat). As you can see, tree poisoning is such a serious concern in Sydney that the law provides for fines up to $1.1 million – if the culprit is caught.

The council may have installed some CCTV cameras to keep a watch on the area, but I fear it’s too late. There have been some successful prosecutions for tree poisoning in Sydney, but often the perpetrator gets away with it due to lack of evidence.

On a brighter note, this morning I did another 5k run. I tried to push myself a bit faster than last time, and managed to drop my time from 6:25/km (8 Oct) and 6:19/km (15 Oct) to 5:52/km today! I still feel there’s a decent amount of improvement to go, so I’ll be keen to keep this up and try harder next time. Also, I can feel that my body is getting used to the exercise – I don’t feel nearly as sore as after that first run.

And otherwise I’ve been preparing for my trip to Germany tomorrow. I’m flying to Frankfurt via Dubai, then getting a train to Essen. On Sunday I’ll be attending the Spiel board game exhibition. The Monday morning I get a train to Cologne for three days of ISO Photography Standards meetings, before flying home on Thursday. I arrive back home Saturday morning, 2 November, so I’ll be gone just over a week. I’ll try to post updates from over there, but may not manage it – I’ll have to see.

New content today:

Finishing comics

Most of today was spent writing annotations for the batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed on Monday and assembled yesterday.

This morning I had my Year 6 Ethics class, and we continued last week’s discussion of homelessness. The goal this week was to educate the kids on some of the facts about homelessness, including statistics on how many Australians are homeless, and in what age and demographic groups. Most of the kids were shocked that at the last census over 8000 children of primary school age (that is their age or younger) were classed as homeless. And that the largest age group of homeless people is under 18s, not older people like they had thought. They heard the story of a homeless boy, who had been living on the street since he was 8. One student said that she had a 7-year-old brother, which is not much short of 8, and she couldn’t imagine him being out on the streets and surviving like that.

The rest of the lesson concerned stereotypes about homeless people. I asked the kids what ideas they had about what homeless people were like. Then we went through an exercise about jumping to conclusions from a small sample or hearsay, ending up with the question that if someone says homeless people are just lazy, does that mean all homeless people really are lazy? And would it be harmful to conclude that? Since last week there were a few of the kids who expressed the view that homeless people should “just get jobs”, I hope that today’s lesson made them think again about that assumption, and realise that 8 year old kids on the street can’t just get a job, and older homeless people might want to work but have trouble finding a job because potential employers turn them away.

I’ll miss next week’s lesson with my kids since I’ll be travelling in Germany. I’m not sure if they’ll get a substitute teacher or have a non-lesson time.

New content today:

Comic assembling

I spent most of today assembling the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took yesterday. For one comic I had to take two photos of each panel, because I wanted to composite them to create a semi-transparent figure. I also added a blue glow using some Photoshop tricks, and I think the result worked quite well:

So that’s a sneak preview of a future comic.

I didn’t really do much else today – assembling the batch of comics pretty much ate up a full day of work. Oh, I watched the new Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker trailer that was released. Pretty cool!

New content today:

Comic photos and walking

This morning I photographed the new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote over the weekend. I finished just in time for lunch, so went for a nice long walk to stretch my legs and get some food. I ended up doing a loop to the Italian bakery and back via a different route, completing 6.6 kilometres according to my tracking app. Phew!

Ad then when I got home I realised I should have got some groceries – we needed milk and bread, and probably something to cook for dinner. So later in the afternoon I took another walk up to the supermarket.

While at home I got a delivery – a copy of the original cover printing of the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual. I’ve had a Monster Manual since 1983 or so, but it was the updated cover art, while I had the original cover art of the Dungeon Masters Guide, so they never matched. I decided a while back to try to get an original cover Monster Manual, and have been watching eBay for several months now. I bid on a few but lost the auction, and there was one “buy it now” that looked good from a seller in the UK, except it was a large bookseller and they had a disclaimer that the cover photo was a stock photo and not the actual product, and they couldn’t guarantee that the cover art was the same as the photo. I contacted them and said I was after a specific cover art, and could they verify it for me, and they wrote back and basically said no… so I declined to purchase that one. But last week I found an inexpensive copy in good condition from an Australian seller, and snapped it up. When it arrived today, I was very pleased, as it’s in great condition for the age. And now I finally, after 36 years, have a complete collection of the original artwork AD&D rulebooks.

New content today:

Comic writing slog part 2

Another day of writing comics. I managed to get some momentum today and finished off the batch, ready to start photographing them tomorrow.

In some spare time I worked on another mezzacotta random generator, this time a random bird name generator. This was inspired by me discussing some actual birds with friends, and someone suggesting that since so many birds are named after colours and markings, it’d be easy to randomly generate new names. And yes, it was very quick and easy, using our generator framework.

Tonight I cooked soup for dinner, and used my new Bamix stick blender for the first time. It works really well – I can tell immediately that it’s better quality than our previous one. The old one got noticeably hot very quickly from the motor, and had to be mashed up and down to access all the vegetable chunks in the soup. The Bamix stayed nice and cool, and it creates a vortex in the soup that sucks the chunks into the blades, so there’s a lot less manual motion required. Really nice. The soup was chick pea, cauliflower, and carrot.

New content today: