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A split birthday lunch

Sunday morning, I got I another 5k run. 🏃🏻‍♂️ The weather was a bit showery, but not as wet as yesterday. 🌧️

After showering and changing into dry clothes, we headed off to meet with my wife’s family for a birthday lunch for her sister, at a cafe near her place. They booked an indoor table. But because we couldn’t take Scully inside we also grabbed an outdoor table and my wife and I took it in turns to mind Scully or head inside to chat with the family. We ordered some lunch and it was pretty good. 🍝 The rain held off. We were under shelter anyway so that wouldn’t have been a big problem, but unfortunately it was pretty windy, which made things a bit uncomfortable outside. 💨

Back home in the afternoon I did some Darths & Droids writing while my wife worked on her watercolour artwork. She’s only been doing it for less than a year, but has decided to enter an amateur art show which will be selling paintings anonymously to raise money for… I forget what exactly. 👩‍🎨

For dinner I used the leftover roasted vegetables from last night to make a sort of bubble & squeak pasta topper, adding some fried onions and cherry tomatoes and feta. It turned out pretty delicious! 😋

I added emojis to the paragraphs here because we’ve been discussing in my online ethics classes this evening about whether emojis count as a form of writing or not, and in which circumstances they are acceptable or not. I’ve been using the following “sentence” to discuss how well they convey meaning: 😋🍕😋🍍😲🤮

Very quick Thursday update

It’s late after my 9-10pm ethics class, so I don’t want to spend too long typing this tonight. THere’s not much to report about today anyway. A bunch of online classes, I ordered groceries online, I made a new Darths & Droids comic, and it rained heavily late morning. I actually had to interrupt a class I was teaching on Zoom to go close windows to avoid the rain coming in. We’re expecting a lot more rain in the next two days too.

Cooler after hot weekend

Not much to talk about today. Thankfully that cool change came through after midnight and dropped the temperature a lot. Today was much more pleasant and comfortable.

I did some ethics classes online in the morning, then headed into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was about data presentation, including tables and graphs.

While there I saw posters up on noticeboards about an anti-Donald-Trump protest rally to be held at the university on Thursday. I don’t know how many people in the USA are aware of this, but people in other countries are organising anti-Trump protests – that’s how awful him and his actions as US President are. And I’ve got to say, a lot of us are wondering where are the protests in the USA? Why aren’t there millions of people cramming the streets? Why haven’t New York and Washington and Los Angeles ground to a halt? Because from here it looks like Americans are okay with the destruction of democracy and society there.

I know a lot of Americans aren’t okay with it. In fact probably all of you who might be reading this. But, like, why isn’t anything happening about it? We’re over here in Australia boycotting US goods and organising protests, and the USA is just radio silence.

The clutching tendrils of summer

We should be getting cooler weather with autumn progressing here, but today was one of the last gasps of summer. Overnight we had the highest March minimum ever recorded in Sydney, 25.9°C. We slept with the air conditioning on all night, which is a rare thing. I don’t imagine we’d have got much sleep without it.

By the time I had my 5k run this morning it was almost 28°C, making it another slow and exhausting one. And by mid afternoon we approached 37°C. There’s supposed to be a cold front change coming through after midnight, but until then it’s supposed to still be almost 30°C at midnight. Thankfully tomorrow is supposed to be much cooler. But the Bureau of Meteorology says this isn’t the end of summery conditions, and we’re going to have more hot spells throughout autumn.

In the middle of the heat I went to the lighting showroom to pick up our new light fixtures, which we’d ordered last weekend. I got a message yesterday that they were in from the warehouse, so I drove down to get them.

Some of the new light fittings say that they are DIY installation, not requiring an electrician. I checked and they involved simply unscrewing the existing light battens, fitting the lightshade over it, and screwing the thing back in. No need to touch anything electrical at all. However when I tried to do this, the shade didn’t fit over the existing batten base. So I think new smaller battens need to be installed, which is indeed a job for an electrician. I’ll call one tomorrow to make an appointment for them to come around and install all the lights.

DIY electrical work is simply not an option in Australia. I know that in some countries you can do your own electrical wiring work if it’s not too complicated, and honestly I feel confident that I could most probably do this job of changing the light fixtures. But here it’s illegal to do so. Anything that touches electrical wiring must be done by a licensed electrician. Otherwise you’ll void your home insurance and be liable for fines up to $40,000. So absolutely not something I want to mess with.

Three more ethics classes this evening, and some Indian curry vegetables with rice for dinner.

And some more Japan photos! Takeshita Street in Harajuku:

Okonomiyaki, before self-cooking:

And after:

In the restaurant Sakura-Tei:

Followed by dessert from a crepe place on the street:

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:

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.

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: