I was woken by a weird noise just before 3:30 this morning. At first I thought Scully was being sick, so I jumped out of bed. But she was fast asleep still.
The noise sounded like a wet wheezing, like a sort of cross between a small animal and a squeeze bottle half full of water was being squeezed repeatedly to force the air out. It was so loud that I was sure it was in our bedroom and I turned on the light thinking it must be some sort of animal. I thought it was coming from under the bed. I was prepared to have to deal with a mouse or rat or something. But I searched and couldn’t find anything, until I finally realised the noise might have been coming from outside. I confirmed this by opening the window and the sound was much louder and from that direction. And then it died away.
I’m guessing it was the death rattle of a possum or a big bird that maybe a cat had caught. I’m not sure what else it could have been. But the upshot was I was now wide awake and had trouble getting back to sleep, so it wasn’t a very restful night.
This morning I taught two ethics classes, and then prepared to go into the University of Technology Sydney for the last tutorial lesson of the year on image processing. The students have their final assessment projects due tomorrow. So next week I’ll be marking those.
Because it’s Halloween, I thought there might be some students, at least, dressed up for the occasion at the university, being a trendy sort of place where young people do fun things. But of the thousands of students I saw, not a single one had anything. I didn’t seen a single indication anywhere that it’s Halloween. No costumes, no decorations. I know it’s nowhere near as big here as in the USA, but I was honestly a little surprised.
And in other news, I have signed up to Bluesky, which I am hoping will be a better replacement for Twitter for me than Mastodon turned out to be. If you’re interested, you can follow me here: @dmmaus.bsky.social.
The problem I found with Mastodon was that I picked a server that matched one of my interests, namely tabletop roleplaying games, but then the way the system works, my posts get shown to everyone who is also on the same server, and they all expect everyone to talk mainly about games all the time. So I felt stifled in my ability to just post random shower thoughts and wry observations, as I did back on Twitter. I could probably move to a less specialised and more social server, but it looks like Bluesky is much closer to what I hoped a Twitter replacement would be. I’ll stay on Mastodon, but I’m sure to post much more frequently on Bluesky, I think.
New content today:
