standards – Page 6 – dangermouse.net

Cologne meetings, day 3

We slept in later today, getting up a bit after 07:00, which felt much more normal than yesterday’s 04:00. We decided to walk up to the area round the Eigelstein-Torburg just north of our hotel to find some breakfast. There were some cafes around, but the only one open only had a choice of a “schnell” continental breakfast, or eggs. We really wanted some muesli or something. We settled on grabbing some bakery items at a BackWerk, which is a cafeteria style bakery with sandwiches and pastries. I had a falafel sandwich on a Turkish roll and a cherry danish while my wife had a chocolate croissant. They were really fresh and good. After that, she grabbed a cappuccino at an Italian cafe that we’d spotted, but which didn’t open until 09:00 – we had to wait a couple of minutes until it was open. They had muesli for breakfast, but again not until 9am.

It’s a very weird cultural difference to Sydney, where all the cafes are open and serving a wide variety of breakfast menu items from 6am.

After a quick stop back at the hotel for me to pick up my bag for today’s meeting, we left together to catch a train to Ehrenfeld, which I’d found as a neighbourhood worth exploring. We walked around some of the streets there, and it was okay, but not especially interesting. I’d suggested to my wife that she could maybe explore this area by herself after I left for my meeting, and then catch the train back to the Hauptbahnhof herself, but it seemed we’d seen everything by 11:00, so we both went to the station and caught our trains in different directions at the same time.

I arrived at Horrem for my meeting a bit early, but a few people were there already. Technical discussions today were on imaging noise, image flare, autofocus performance, and depth sensor measurement.

During the meeting I searched for some nice places to eat dinner on Friday night. I found a wine bar called Henne Weinbar in the Belgian Quarter which does tapas style dishes for sharing. It looks good and has good reviews, so I booked it.

The meeting finished a bit early today as some of the technical sessions ran short, so I left a bit before 15:30 to catch a train back to Cologne and meet my wife. We decided to go to the Roman-Germanic Museum quickly to have a look in there before it closed at 17:00. I wanted to have another look in there after our first visit many years ago, and it promised the bonus of being air conditioned so we could escape the heat of the day a bit. The weather today was 30°C and there seem to be precious few places with air conditioning to get out of it. Unfortunately, the museum seemed to be closed for renovation or something. So instead we walked over to the adjacent Museum Ludwig to look at some modern art instead. The good thing was this museum was open until 18:00, so we could take a more leisurely approach.

We finished a quick tour of the galleries a bit after 17:30, and then began walking to the restaurant Klaaf for dinner. We took a seat inside, though most of the tables and customers were outside. We wanted to be away from the sun and the cigarette smoke, although a lot of smoke drifted in anyway. My wife had a daily special which was a cast iron pan filled with fried potatoes, mixed vegetables, and topped with two fried eggs. I had the bratwurst with fried potatoes and mushroom sauce.

The food was decent, but the meal was spoiled when the previously polite waiter wanted us to pay in cash and looked offended when we asked if we could pay by card. He reluctantly got the card reader machine and then as he handed over the receipt he said pointedly that “the tip is not included”. I assume he must have mistaken us for Americans and assumed we’d be leaving a big tip. But we’re well aware that Germans don’t normally tip and had not been intending to do so. So we left quickly, a sour taste in our mouths.

I stopped at a gelato bar across the square to get a cup with scoops of pomegranate and lemon gelato. Then we walked back to our hotel for the night.

Cologne meetings, day 2

My wife and I were awake about 4 o’clock this morning, due to going to bed early and being partly jet lagged still. I searched online for a cafe or something open early for breakfast, but many places only open at 10 o’clock or thereabouts. There were only a few places at the main train station open that early. I found a place called Haferkater that made hot porridge, with various toppings. That looked good, so we went there and got some and took it to eat sitting on a bench in front of the vast Cologne Cathedral. It was chilly, so the hot food was good.

After eating, we went to see the Wochenmarkt farmers’ market in Apostelnkloster. This opened at 07:00, but we arrived a few minutes earlier while the stallholders were finishing their set up. It was a small market, with a couple of large fruit and vegetable stalls, a couple of flower stalls, a cheese truck, butcher’s truck, and seafood truck, and a baker with cakes and cinnamon rolls, plus a bread baker.

We stopped to look at the bread stall and the senior woman there began talking to us about their bread. She was very keen to tell us all about it, mentioning that they had sourdough starter over 100 years old, and most of their bread was made using rye flour. She asked if we’d like to try some bread and before we had a chance to answer she starting slicing a large loaf and spreading it with butter for us. She had us try the plain rye loaf, and one with walnuts in it, and then she cut a slice of a loaf with small bits of ham baked into it – she asked if we were vegetarian and offered it to me when I said that my wife was was. All the bread was really good.

She told us a story about how when grandmothers in Germany used to bake bread, they would hide it in a cupboard for a day and only let the family eat it the next day. She said that developed the flavour, but also it was because if they let the family eat it fresh out of the oven then the entire loaf would go in no time. She told us a bunch of other stories about the bread. They also had big trays of various slices with crumble toppings: apple, berries, and poppy seed. She grabbed some of there loose crumble topping and gave us a handful to try, then started cutting some of the poppy seed slice. Before she could offer us some of that to taste I said we’d like to buy a full slice of it. It was a large piece and cost only 2.20€. I asked if we could take some photos of the stall, and her and her junior assistant posed for a photo for us. And then she cut us two slices of their loaf with fruit in it – figs and other things – and put those in a bag to take with us as well! It was really good to have such a nice chat with a stall holder like that.

After the market we went for a long walk, around a couple of neighbourhoods that I’d found recommended as interesting places to see in Cologne. We went first to Rathenau, near the University of Cologne, a trendy student district. This wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped, seeming like any random district. From there we walked north to the Belgian Quarter, which turned out to be much nicer and more interesting. It had some nice parks and a lot of quirky and curious shops. Unfortunately they were all still closed, since it was still early.

We walked back to the centre of town along a street with more shops. My wife marked the area to come back later today when I was in my meetings. We continued east all the way to the Rhine River, and walked back to our hotel along the water. Here’s the church Groß St Martin, behind a row of picturesque old buildings:

During our walks, I spotted some birds: plenty of feral pigeons, some common blackbirds, a couple of carrion crows, and a Eurasian magpie. I used eBird to record them, but realised I needed to download a European bird pack to get it and Merlin Bird ID to work properly. Not being familiar with European birds, I had to spend some time later confirming the identifications of the blackbirds and magpie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen (or at least consciously noticed) a Eurasian magpie before – I didn’t expect it to have such a long tail!

Back at our hotel room I picked up my gear and went off to my meeting, leaving my wife to explore by herself for the afternoon. I caught a train to my meeting. Lunch today was chicken gyros with rice. Technical discussions were on: A new proposal to start work on technical stability of camera support systems (such as tripod mounts); image stabilisation; and a new high dynamic range and wide colour gamut image format.

After the meeting today, we had a group dinner with all of the delegates from the meeting. My wife was also invited to come along. We went to the Biergarten am Aachener Weiher. We took a U-Bahn train from Breslauerplatz to Neumarkt, and then a tram from there to Moltkestraße, which was a short walk from the beer garden. All the others were there already. We had a good time chatting with the other delegates and eating food and drinking beer. I had a Wienerschnitzel, which was okay, but nothing special.

After dinner we left as the gathering broke up. We walked all the way back to the hotel as the sun slowly went down. It provided perfect twilight for photographing the cathedral and the Hauptbahnhof, so I snapped a few photos with my phone.

Cologne meetings, day 1

It’s Monday, the first day of the ISO Photography Standards meeting that I’m here to attend. We still have several delegates unable to travel due to COVID, so we’re doing a hybrid online meeting, with roughly half the people attending via Webex (a virtual meeting app like Zoom). So rather than the usual 3 days of 9-5 meetings that we do for a regular face-to-face meeting, we’re restricting the hours each day for the sake of people in middle-of-the-night time zones, and doing 5 days of meetings from 12:15 to 17:00. And from the discussion today it seems we’ll be staying in this agenda format for at least a few more meetings, until most people can attend fave-to-face again.

We began the morning waking up early in our room in Würzburg. It was difficult to sleep because of how hot it was and the fact that the room had no air conditioning. I had an icy cold shower last thing before getting into bed, which helped and I got some sleep, but woke up in the middle of the night hot and sweaty. I opened the windows wide to let in cooler air, which helped a lot until the sun started brightening the room around 5am.

We got up at 6am, half an hour before we’d set the alarm. This gave us time to have showers and pack our bags before leaving the hotel early and finding some breakfast before catching our train at 7:32. We found a cafe/bakery and had some croissants, then bought some bottles of water and an apple for the train.

The train delivered us to Cologne a bit after 10:30 and we checked into our hotel, which is very close to the station. Our room was available already, so that was good. We dropped our bags and left straight away, because I had to catch another train to Horrem, where my meetings are. My wife said goodbye and went to explore Cologne by herself until I return this evening.

The first day of meetings went smoothly. It was good to see some of the familiar faces in person again after nearly 3 years of Zoom meetings. We had a dozen or so delegates present in the room, plus a similar number attending virtually. The host provided free lunch – today was choice of soba noodles with salad and a spicy peanut sauce, or some pasta which looked like lasagne, but I didn’t get a close look as I chose the noodles.

We finished almost an hour early for the day. I went back to the hotel and met my wife there, after she’d spent the afternoon getting reacquainted with the city centre. We walked north to the Ebertplatz area to get dinner at a restaurant called Feuer & Flamme (Fire & Flame). They specialised in flammkuchen and had a big selection of vegetarian options.

And after sharing a couple of delicious flammkuche we decided to try one of the sweet dessert ones:

Overall it was really good!

We’re both still pretty tired after the day, and adjusting to the time zone, so we’ll get another early night.

Comic crunching

Today I had a few chores to do: grocery shopping, tidying up some laundry.

And I spent some time working on writing Darths & Droids comics, to try to build up enough buffer to last through my upcoming trip to Europe in a couple of weeks. Two weeks from today I’ll be flying out to Germany for my next ISO Photography standards meeting. My wife is coming with me and we’ll be spending a few days sightseeing in the Netherlands afterwards before flying home.

That prior meeting online that I mentioned a few days ago turned out to be at 3 am in my time zone. I have no idea how the invitation managed to know that and convert the time zone. Anyway, the convener apologised for the inconvenient time for me and said it wasn’t essential that I attend, so I’ve sent my apologies.

Tonight is real life games night, but I’ve excused myself because I needed some time to relax and spend with my wife and do a few more tasks rather than spend the entire evening out. We went for pizza at our favourite local place. It was really cold, but nice to go out and have a walk.

New content today:

Not specifying a time zone

I have a meeting invitation in my email. It’s for an ISO photography standard technical meeting. The “When” field says:

Friday, 10 June 2022 3:00 am – 4:00 am

It doesn’t specify a time zone. So I’m not sure when the meeting actually is. It was sent by a guy in Helsinki. There are two somewhat plausible options:

1. It’s 3-4am Helsinki time (10-11am here). This would be my preference, obviously. It requires the odd choice of the organiser to schedule at 3am in his own time zone – but this is not beyond reason, as most of the people involved in the meeting are in Japan or the USA, and that time makes it a reasonable time of day for everyone else.

2. It’s 3-4am in my time zone (8-9pm Helsinki time). I find this less plausible, because I don’t know how the invitation could know what time zone I’m in. The organiser would naturally have selected his own time zone, and then got Microsoft Teams to send out the meeting invitations. But the invitation is going to my email address – and I don’t see how Teams could possibly know what time zone I’m in, so it shouldn’t be able to automagically convert the meeting into my time zone. And I’m not using a Microsoft mail client, so my mail client shouldn’t be trying to do anything “clever” and converting times in an MS Teams invitation into my own time zone.

I tried searching to find out, and I found two different contradicting answers on answers.microsoft! One said that Teams meeting invitations are in the time zone of the meeting convener, and another said that it automatically adjusts to the time zone of each invitee!

Either way…. the meeting invitation really should tell me what time zone the meeting time is in. Why does it not do that??

The gist of all this is that I had to send an email to the convener to ask what time the meeting is on, even though that information really should just be in the invitation.

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Games and Indian dinner

Friday night was online board games night with the guys. I ate dinner at home so I could join in early this week. We played Dice Forge, Can’t Stop Express, 7 Wonders, Azul, Scattergories, Codenames, and Sketchful. And possibly something else that I’ve forgotten.

Most of the day yesterday and today I spent working on my current secret project. There’s a bit of a deadline on this, so it’s occupying a lot of my time at the moment, and there’s nothing I can really say about it.

Oh, Thursday night I had that ISO planning meeting. We were deciding if enough people were prepared to travel to Cologne to have a face-to-face meeting, or if we should convert it to a fully online meeting. I was hoping the agenda would be finalised as a three-day face-to-face meeting, so I could travel to Germany, attend the meeting, and then have several days free at the end to explore some of the Netherlands. On the other hand, if we cancelled the face-to-face and did a virtual meeting, I would reschedule our flights and we’d have a pure vacation trip a few weeks later.

Unfortunately we kind of ended up with the worst of both worlds. Enough people are planning to travel to make it worthwhile doing it face to face, but virtually all of the Japanese contingent are not travelling—probably restricted by their companies in ongoing COVID precautions. So to please them it was decided to have a hybrid meeting, and instead of 3 days of 9-5 meetings, it’s going to be spread out as 5 days of meetings from 12:00-17:00. This is bad for me, because now I have to spend 5 full days in Cologne, while my wife entertains herself while I’m in the meetings, and then we only have a few days left at the end for sightseeing before heading home. SO it’s less than ideal, but I guess we just have to make the most of it.

Tonight for dinner we decided to go to an Indian restaurant that is a bit over half an hour’s walk from our place. We took Scully there in her doggie backpack, and she walked all the way home. I tried a new dish that I’ve never seen before: pistachio chicken, which was very nice.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Here comes the rain again

It’s cold and it’s rainy. We had a good run of 7 days in a row without rain, but it’s back, and the forecast is rain for at least the next 7 days in a row.

It stopped late in the afternoon and I took Scully to the dog park to say hi to everyone, since we haven’t been there for a few weeks. But when time came to do the traditional walk at 4pm, drops began falling, and there was heavy rain incoming on the radar – and I’d neglected to bring an umbrella – so we beat a hasty retreat back to the car to head home.

I finished off the ethics of farming topic today. And I worked on some secret project stuff.

Tonight I have a Zoom meeting to discuss the agenda and dates of the upcoming ISO Photography standards meeting in Cologne. That begins at 11pm, so I need to stay up late. This will finalise the dates for the Cologne meeting, so I can then book hotels in Cologne and onward into the Netherlands following the meeting. It’s also to decide if we will actually have a face-to-face meeting or will convert it into an online virtual meeting, but I expect we’ll stay with the face-to-face.

New content today:

Double writing day

It was a very busy day today. I had to write the ethics lesson for this week, on trial by media. Then I had to write a report on the ISO Photography standards meeting I attended back in February, to send to Standards Australia in time for our follow-up national meeting on this Friday. I should have done it a bit earlier, but I’ve been so busy that I put it off to this week. Those two tasks took a good chunk of the day. And then tonight I had three classes to teach, the last ending at 10pm! Thankfully from next week all the classes will be an hour earlier, since we go off daylight saving this weekend. (And I’m leaving the classes unchanged for most of the students who live outside Australia, so they’ll be an hour earlier by my clock.)

I also took Scully out for a drive at lunch time, because it was raining and I didn’t fancy a long walk in the rain. We went to the Italian bakery and I got some treats for me and my wife for dessert tonight, as well as lunch.

We had close to 60 mm of rain overnight, but it eased off during the day, being light for most of the day. Although this evening as I type it’s pouring down again. I added up the rainfall so far since the beginning of the year, and we’re not over the average annual rainfall for Sydney yet, but we’re getting very close.

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Super busy week: Wednesday

First cab off the rank today was travelling to the public school for my first face-to-face ethics class of the year. I got to the school and checked in, using the QR code and New South Wales Government app. This is similar to how we’ve been checking in to public places like shops for the past year and a bit, but I was surprised to find that checking in here opened a new page I hadn’t seen before, specific to schools. I had to answer additional questions about if I was feeling well, and if I was wearing a mask, and what the purpose of my visit was, and so on.

I got my class roll, and found I had been assigned 17 students. I ran into one of the other ethics teachers, and she told me that a lot of the Year 6 kids were away… following the Year 6 camp last week, apparently several have tested positive for COVID and were isolating at home. When I got to my assigned classroom, I found the teacher was away as well, replaced by a casual substitute.

I ended up with only 7 kids turning up – and 3 of those weren’t even on the roll! They said their parents wanted them to do ethics, but they got their forms in late. So 13 kids were away sick. It was actually a bit scary realising that so many of the kids in the school were sick, and here I was teaching a class of the ones who had come in today. I had to wear a face mask, but the kids didn’t. Honestly, I’m feeling a bit in two minds about continuing to volunteer to do this, while COVID is still circulating in the child population.

The other thing was I forgot to print out the lesson plan! So I had to run the introductory lesson from memory.

Back home, I squeezed in my daily run and stretching exercises, making a new loaf of sourdough, eating lunch, and having a shower before the ISO standards meeting began at 2pm. It was a full technical session day, discussing standards related to autofocus, depth sensing, and image file formats. That led almost right up to my first online ethics class at 6pm, but I had some time before that began to start making quiche for dinner. My wife had to finish that off while I was doing my class, and then I quickly ate a slice between classes 1 and 2, and then a second slice between classes 2 and 3. I finished at 9pm… and could finally wind down and relax a bit before bed.

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Super busy week: Tuesday

This morning I got up and took Scully out, then had breakfast, and then went for my run. I tried to get it in early before the rain closed in, because the forecast was for a lot of rain today. I managed to get that done. The sky was dark and thundery for several hours before the rain finally arrived around lunch time.

Then the rain pounded down most of the afternoon, very heavy at times with loud rumbles of thunder, interspersed with medium rain. It’s still quite heavy now, late in the evening.

From 2pm I had the ISO Photography standards meeting, held online. One of the first agenda items was to move the first technical session from late today to early Thursday, so we ended up doing only administrative things today.

Before the ISO meeting started, I had to complete work on the new ethics class for this week, since I’ve now moved classed from Thursday evenings to Tuesdays, to give me time to attend the university for the Data Engineering course on Thursdays. But this means I have a day less in between to write up the new topic (I was often doing it on Wednesday mornings). And since the first ethics class was hard up against the end of the ISO meeting, I had to get it completed before 2pm. (Although as it turned out I had a spare hour because of the agenda change, but I didn’t know that in advance.)

For dinner I made pizza, and topped it with pumpkin and some of the bunya nuts that we’re working our way through.

They’re not crunchy like walnuts, which is what I usually use, but added a nice subtle flavour and a different texture.

And finally, in about 10 minutes, I have the second ethics class of the evening. The topic is genetic engineering, which I think will be a good one. The first class went well, and I think the kids enjoyed it a bit more than the patriotism topic.

New content today: