weather – dangermouse.net

Starting packing for Japan

Today I got our luggage out of storage and started assembling a pile of clothing to take on our trip to Tokyo. I also printed out some documents, including the map and directions to get to the ISO Photography Standards meeting place, which is a building I’ve never visited before. Prior meetings I’e attended have been in Yokohama, adjacent to the site of the CP+ camera show, but they’ve moved the meetings to the CIPA (Camera & Imaging Products Association) offices in Tokyo.

I’m packing cold weather gear, which is always interesting when coming from our summer here in Australia. Looking at the forecast for Tokyo, it looks like most days will be colder than an extremely cold winter day here, although it shouldn’t get down to freezing. And no rain, so I won’t bother packing an umbrella.

I did another Darths & Droids comic today, which extends the buffer past when I return from Japan, so that comic will run uninterrupted. And I took Scully for a couple of walks. The weather here is fairly pleasant now, with an easing of the hot summer temperatures towards autumn.

New content today:

Warming weather and secret subjects

The weather here is steadily warming up throughout this week. We had 30°C today, but it’s going to climb slowly as the week progresses. With little respite at night, as the minimums will be around 21-22°C each night. That’s the worst part, really, since it’s difficult to sleep without having the air conditioning on.

So far five people have submitted secret “expert subjects” for my planned trivia quiz night with my friends I still have two or three more to tell me if they want in. Some of them are very obscure from my point of view, so I’m going to have to do some significant research to come up with questions!

Not much else to report today. I had a lot of classes as usual for a Monday. University courses start in a few weeks and this year the Data Engineering course I help teach is on Monday afternoons, 1-4pm. Which clashes with two of my ethics classes, so I’m going to have to reschedule or cancel them. I’ll have to get that sorted out in the next couple of weeks.

New content today:

Dealing with tech issues

I had a couple of annoying tech issues today.

A few days ago I logged into my University of Technology Sydney account to check my email there. I found, to my surprise, an automated transcript of a phone message, left by the project manager of the Standards Australia photography committee. This confused me, because I never gave Standards Australia any contact details related to the university. They have my direct mobile phone number, and should be calling that. I don’t even know if there is a UTS phone number that is supposed to be able to reach me – I don’t have an office there, and as far as I know I haven’t been assigned a number there. SO this was a big mystery.

Today I emailed the project manager about something else, and mentioned that I was surprised to find a phone message from him at UTS. I asked him what number he called. He replied and confirmed that he’d tried my mobile number (though didn’t quote the number). And he just tried again, but it diverted to a message bank. My phone had not rung at all.

Now I was worried. I couldn’t even imagine how this was happening. How had someone calling my mobile been diverted to a UTS message bank without my phone even ringing? Was this happening to everyone who tried calling me?? HOW??

I got a friend to try calling my phone to see what would happen. He got through – my phone rang and I answered it. No diversion to a message bank at UTS. I went back to the project manager and asked him again specifically to give me the phone number he had called, and to check SA’s records to see if any other number was listed by them on their systems.

A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was the project manager! He was confused too. I stepped through the sequence of events with him, asking him to state what number he was calling. He said they only had one phone number for me, my mobile number that he’d just called, and that he just used Microsoft Teams to place the call…

And that’s when the shoe dropped. He had MS Teams place the call, so he wasn’t actually entering a phone number. I use MS Teams routinely at UTS. I was describing all this to a friend in a chat window at the time, and I said the guy was using Teams to place the call, and he said, “Ohhhh…. Okay, it was all weird and inexplicable before, but now it suddenly makes sense. Yeah, Teams will screw up stuff like that all the time.” Presumably what was happening was he opened his contacts in Teams, hit the “phone call” button, and Teams decided that since I have an account at UTS, it should direct my call there, instead of, you know, to my actual phone number.

I mean, that explains what must have happened, but why would Teams do such a stupid thing? Who on Earth thought that use case was a good idea? And presumably this is going to keep happening unless the project manager actually picks up the handset and dials my number manually. Ugh.

Anyway, the second issue I had was with Numbers (the Apple spreadsheet). I had a bunch of cells with date values in them, which I wanted to format just to display as months. I had them formatted as “January 2025”, but wanted to change them to “Jan 2025” format to save some column space. So I selected the format drop-down list and was confronted with the following:

As you can see, every option under the sun, except the one that I wanted! Fortunately this was not as serious an issue as the phone thing, because I created a custom format and got what I wanted.

The other main thing about today was the weather. Wow. It was really hot. We got up to 43.3°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was a few degrees cooler, but still around the 40°C mark. But then at 4pm a storm rolled in, dropping the temperature a good 15 degrees in just a few minutes, strong winds blew in, and the clouds unleashed heavy rain and hail. We got some hail at my place, but my wife reported that where she works, just half an hour’s walk away, there was a lot of hail, blanketing the ground in a white layer like snow.

A few hours later now and several storm cells have come through, dumping heavy rain and splitting the sky with lightning and thunder, separated by calmer periods. The temperature now is below 20°C, which is a nice respite from the heat.

Tonight I started this week’s new ethics class topic, on “Opinions vs Facts”. I spent the morning writing up the lesson plan. The class went well, with some very interesting and nuanced discussion from the kids on the differences and similarities between opinions and facts in various tricky contexts.

New content today:

An easy Saturday and a closed restaurant

I was glad that I did a 5k run yesterday, because this morning’s weather was miserable. Cold and rainy and still very, very windy. But the awful weather eased up today and the sun finally came out in the afternoon, heating things up and releasing a ton of humidity into the air.

I basically took it easy, doing some comics stuff and random puttering around. I took Scully for a walk at lunch without my wife, and we got fish and chips for lunch. We planned to stay in for dinner again, but my wife got a hankering for dinner at Organica restaurant, so we walked up there with Scully early in the evening. This has become her new favourite restaurant, after the closure of some of our other favourites over the years.

But when we got there, it had closed down! The furniture and signage had all been removed! My wife checked online and sure enough, it’s listed as permanently closed. So that was a big disappointment. We walked over to Green Gourmet, the vegetarian place that last time said we were welcome to bring Scully inside. So we popped in and they confirmed Scully was welcome. I actually don’t think this is technically legal in New South Wales – dogs are allowed in commercial outdoor dining areas, but not indoors. But it’s on them, so we were happy to enjoy a nice meal there. Another couple came in with a dog too while we were there, and they looked like regulars, as the staff greeted them and knew the dog by name.

Not much else to say about today.

New content today:

An extremely windy day

Everything about today was about the wind. It was extremely windy. A bit of rain, overcast and cloudy, but super super windy. I had two incidents. I went for a 5k run in the morning, and leaves were blowing all over the place, and bits of twigs, and one actually got stuck in my shoelaces and I had to stop running briefly to extract it. When I’d finished and was walking back home I passed a broken lamp post, which had suffered a fatal hit from a fallen tree branch.

I took the photo because there’s an app here where you can report incidents like this to the local council, so they know about it and can come fix it.

At lunch I didn’t want to brave the wind and so drove to my wife’s work to pick up Scully. On the way home we stopped off at Maggio’s Bakery where I got a porchetta roll for lunch. This is a thing I’ve been wanting to try for some time, but I usually default to a slice of pizza when I go there. But today they were out of pizza, so I tried the roll. It comes with sliced porchetta, chunks of potato, rosemary, and mayonnaise, and was delicious.

On the way driving home, I turned down a street and ahead of me was a roadblock, with emergency workers in the middle of removing a tree that had fallen across the road. I had to turn around and backtrack and find another route home. (I didn’t get a photo of it since I was driving.) We’re predicted to have similar weather tomorrow, though easing off a bit.

Otherwise, I did my four ethics classes, did a bit of puttering around with comics stuff, and made potato and pesto pasta for dinner. And tonight is board games night online. We just played a couple of games of Codenames, using the dedicated Codenames site rather than Board Game Area since for some weird reason one of my friends can’t load their site.

New content today:

The backwards day

After last night’s storm, the rain continued through the night and cold winds blew in. Today’s maximum temperature was at 1:30 am, at 21.1°C, and it just got colder from there. The minimum temperature was at 1:00 pm, at 18.3°C, and then since then the rain and wind has eased off and the temperature has climbed again! We may set another maximum later this evening. Very weird.

It really was a big storm. By this morning there were still over 100,000 properties without power. This was combined with industrial action by our train drivers here in Sydney, who didn’t exactly strike, but did a go-slow on the train network, so this morning we had heavy rain, a lot of trees and power lines down, and reduced capacity on the train network. So it was pretty miserable for anyone having to commute to work.

After two classes in the morning, I took Scully for a walk at lunch, in the rain. We went up to the pie shop, which has been closed for a few weeks over Christmas, so I haven’t had my regular fix. I like the spicy ones, so chose the butter chicken and Mexican beef ones today.

In the afternoon I processed some more photos from 2023’s trip to Japan, and used some of them to fill in my travel diary page for the day. I really want to get all the photos from that trip sorted before I go to Japan again next month! Here’s an amusing photo that I didn’t put into the diary:

And in other travel news, I’ve managed to book a hotel in Berlin for my June trip. The first hotel never got back to me about the corporate rate, but the second hotel I emailed got back the same day with full details and took my booking when I replied to confirm. So good business to them, and none to the first one that never responded! I can leave that trip for a while now and think about it again after we get back from Japan. I still have some things to organise for our itinerary there first.

New content today:

A big storm

As I’m writing this tonight a severe thunderstorm is lashing the city outside. Two of my friends have lost power at their homes (and are chatting online from their phones). I had three ethics classes in a row this evening and told the kids in the last class that if my power went out and I disconnected from Zoom, then the class will be over for today, and least they’ll know what happened.

Until the storm hit, it was a hot and humid day. But the wind has picked up and the temperatures has dropped dramatically in the last hour, as the rain pounds down and the lightning flashes. I just checked the power outage website and there are over 100 separate outages across Sydney, with over 61,000 buildings affected at the moment. Wind gusts up to 100 km/h have been recorded too. And… wow… we had 30 mm of rain in just half an hour. And it’s still coming down.

The good news is tomorrow and the next few days will be cooler than the past few days, down to around 25°C, although rainy.

Today I had some totally free time in the morning since my wife took Scully to work. I thought about going out somewhere, but in the end I started tidying up my email inbox… and three hours later I realised I still hadn’t gone out. Then I spent some time in the afternoon pricing up some more Magic: the Gathering cards in preparation for selling them. And then did some thinking about planning story stuff for Episode IX in Darths & Droids.

New content today:

That La Niña arrived quickly

I just said yesterday that the Bureau of Meteorology reported the formation of La Niña conditions, heralding the possibility of a cooler/wetter next two months of summer, and today it magically seemed to have come true. Today was really chilly, and very wet. The temperature was a minimum of 19.3°C overnight, and rose to only 20.3°C during the late morning, before plummeting down into the 17s for most of the afternoon and evening. We’ve had nearly 30 mm of rain as well, in windy squalls blowing intermittently across the city, which make it seem even colder. It was actually the coldest day in Sydney since mid-October.

I didn’t go out much, but I did get in a 5k run early in the morning. I started in a brief period of no rain, but it began raining on me halfway through the run

My wife took Scully to work and I had to go pick her up at lunchtime, but I drove rather than walking in the heavy rain at the time.

This evening I was really back into my online ethics classes, with three classes in a row. I had a new girl in the first one, who was very sociable and talkative, and engaged with the class questions really well, giving some very well thought-out answers. And after the class she wrote me a note through the Outschool platform to say how much she loved the class and how it made her think about the topic in new ways. That was really nice to receive. So I think I have a new enthusiastic student, which is great!

New content today:

Missed Monday, back to work Tuesday

I just completely forgot to do my blog post yesterday until it was too late. I had a day full of working on comics stuff, and avoiding going outside as much as possible because it was very hot.

However I did have to go out in the morning to drop the car off for an annual service, and then walk home in the heat – it’s about 25 minutes walk away. And then in the afternoon I had to walk back to the service centre to pick the car up again. There was an additional expense as the car needed a new battery installed, but otherwise it’s in good condition.

The heat broke with a cool change overnight, bringing some rain. Today was gloomily overcast all day, much cooler, and threatening rain, although there was barely a sprinkle. The Bureau of Meteorology today issued a report that La Niña conditions had returned, which may indicate increased rainfall for the remainder of the summer. I’d been enjoying the relatively dry conditions for the past few weeks, after the rain-soaked and very humid summers of the past four years.

Today I did some more comics stuff, making the first strip of Episode IX for Darths & Droids. I ran out of things to make lunch with at home, so had to go out and decided to get some pies. But when I got there the pie shop was closed! Probably still on a Christmas break. I ended up getting some Vietnamese rice paper rolls instead. Then I caught the Metro to my wife’s work to pick up Scully and walk home from there with her.

Tonight I restarted my online ethics classes, after two weeks break for Christmas and New Year. The new topic this week is Journalism. With questions such as:

Is it generally more important for news to be reported quickly, or accurately?
What purpose does journalism serve in our society? Why does it exist?
How can we tell if the news we see is really true?
Has the Internet made journalism better or worse?

It should be an interesting week!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Early board games night

I’m able to write this post tonight because we had our fortnightly Friday night board games gathering early this week. There were only four of us who could make it, and one friend wanted to bring his young daughter along, so we decided to start at my place at 4pm instead of the usual 6pm, and finish early so they could go home before it got too late.

Because we had a young girl (about 9 years old, I’d guess – I didn’t ask how old she was), we played some lighter games with her first. We started with a game of King of Tokyo. Then we played a few hands of Uno: Show ‘Em No Mercy to start. Then while the girl entertained herself with an iPad and headphones the rest of us played a game of Evergreen. Then she rejoined us for a game of Camel Up (second edition). And finally we rounded things off with some hands of Uno Flip!

We ordered pizza during the gaming and also had plentiful snacks. I was hoping to have them eat some of the copious sweet things we have leftover from Christmas, but they brought so much other stuff that there wasn’t much room for those.

Earlier in the day we basically just took it easy, staying inside as it was extremely hot out. It reached over 37°C in the city, and just a fraction shy of 40°C in some suburbs, despite an early storm which dumped heavy rain about 9 o’clock in the morning. That just served to keep the humidity up. Another storm hit about 4:30pm, which dropped the temperature rapidly. We now have a strong southerly blowing, which will cool things more overnight. Tomorrow should hopefully be nowhere near as hot.

We did take Scully out in the late morning, after the first storm, but not for a long walk. We just went to the nearby park, where she could run on the grass and there was plenty of shade, rather than walking on hot concrete paths.

New content today: