Lev Lafayette's journal

Because the evidence says I'm a swot, I'm powering my way through the first paper of my graduate psychology degree; now about halfway through week three, even though week two has just started. At this rate, I should finish quite early, although that's not too unusual. It gives one additional time to discuss interesting corner cases. Apropos, I have written a very broad sweep entitled "Initial Hypotheses On Emotions, Trauma, and Happiness", which basically is about what is written on the tin. As a set of hypotheses, the next step is to conduct a literature review and test against the evidence. Yes, it does sound like I'm already moving towards another research thesis. But I have a life project to conduct in this regard, and I will see it through.

I visited the Blood Donor Centre yesterday; it's a place of some emotional importance and connection to me, being where lei_loo committed to each other for life and for effective altruism nearly two years ago. "Meeting at the Blood Bank is actually quite a sweet rendez-vous", I wrote at the time. "Most people wouldn't consider it very romantic... In many ways it is the perfect place for us. Simple acts of human kindness, coupled with technology, to save lives". "We have the rest of our lives to make up for lost time", was the response. But circumstances meant that this visit I was by myself. I managed quite well whilst I was there, but broke into tears when I left the centre. Goodness knows what the young tradie in the lift thought to a man my age in such a state. Whilst many are hardened by age I find that I am becoming increasingly sensitive. Despite what I'm going through at the moment, I'm booked to go again in a fortnight.

Finally, the past few days have witnessed four very enjoyable social experiences. My regular catch-up with caseopaya involved watching a German superhero film, "Freaks – Du bist eine von uns", which explored some great themes of control, madness, responsibility, and community. The second was a visit to the Botanical Gardens with new friend Tiffaney D., who lives in the broad neighbourhood. I am impressed by her sharp mind, sense of organisation, and appreciation of natural beauty. The third was another visit by caseopaya, this time with Damien B for the irregular cheesequest and gaming; I managed a truly wicked move in Munchkin, followed by the lightly educational Sunda to Sahul. Finally, dinner (or rather, 7pm brunch) last night with Ayna and Ryan H., where we discussed all manner of issues related to mental health and relationships, fields which Ayna is developing professionally.

Over the years I've written a few pieces (e.g., Australia's Carbon Price Legislation: Climate Responsibility with Social Justice (2011)) and given a few public presentations (e.g., The Future of Planet Earth (2007), The End Is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth (2018)). It is therefore unsurprising that I am pleased to see so many young people a few days ago take to the streets in some 2993 locations and 162 countries the world in support of action on climate change, the largest climate rally in history. It was very reminiscent of my own youth in the 1980s marching against the threat of nuclear war; we won that battle, we can win this one, too. Because we can assign a narrative to reality, it was also the date where I left the so-called "Australian Political Debate" Facebook group, which is basically a moderation-free wasteland for climate-change deniers to neo-Nazis and even flat-earthers. Essentially people who think that their ignorant opinions are at least as good as considered facts. As increasingly this distinction becomes politically partisan, we see a breakdown of non-partisan political discussion, which cannot bode well for the world.

I've had a few opportunities for my RPG hobby recently, too. Obviously the RuneQuest Glorantha Down Under Con has a certain priority, but have also been engaging in some actual play. Today was a session of RuneQuest Glorantha which was a bit of a dungeon-crawl dealing with Lunar bandits and chaos cultists (those cosmopolitan Lunars are always getting themselves into trouble). Yesterday was our irregular CheeseQuest session where I ran a session of D&D Charlemagne's Paladins as they ventured deeper in The Lost City of Cyrenaica. Apropos this, there was an oversupply of milk at work last week, so I took the opportunity to make some homemade farmer's cheese with thyme. It wasn't anything special, but at least I used up the milk (and used the whey for pottage stock). On Thursday night we skipped a session of our usual game and played DungeonQuest instead, with two characters getting out in a game that's meant to have a 15% survival rate.

Thursday and Friday last week I worked from home whilst tradies ripped up the 30-year old carpet upstairs, which had been pretty trashed by our old pets. The laminate replacement is pretty gorgeous I have to say, and was quite inexpensive. Anyway, the opportunity has been taken to do a bit of spring clean at the same time and work out we don't need in our somewhat excessive book collection; caseopaya does have a lot of adolescent fiction and urban fantasy, and there's quite a few rather marginal politcal and technology texts, and a lot of science fiction that I don't need either. So that's reduced the upstairs collection by close to 50%. That which we're not donating to the local Willsmere library will find its way to charity etc. We'll still have at least 28 bookcases along with a similar number of of storage containers for such items. I also took the opportunity to turf a bunch of old computer technology to hard rubbish that was well-passed it's use-by date - even if I still have more several desktop systems to deal with. Nevertheless, it's a pretty solid start for a pair of near-hoarders.

The past few days I've had the opportunity to get stuck into my preferred pastime of RPGs; much of this afternoon, which should have been a session of RuneQuest but our GM was under the weather, was spent editing the Cow Orkers supplement for Papers & Paychecks - the word count is over 90% complete but that last few percent is slow-going as I'm taking out one word for every two I put in. Thursday night was our regular Megatraveller game where we not-pirates investigated the ruins of the old Sindal empire - and were set up on a cliff-hanger situation with psychic forces against us. Yesterday was our irregular cheesequest-lunch-gaming with ser_pounce and hathhalla, which provided the opportunity to play my reconstructed version of the old D&D scenario The Lost City, with a summary write-up of the session available. We also took the opportunity to watch two "lost" episodes of Moral Orel, a rather twisted WASP adult animation comedy; curiously did better apparently in Australia than it did in the United States. Maybe something to do with the irreverent Australian culture. The lunch also provided the opportunity to crack open my previously unused Oneida cutlery set which, (in a Morel Orel related tangent) is what remains of a 19th century Christian free-love commune that became a silverware manufacturer.

As part of the luncheon I made a carrot cake. One of our guests isn't great with wheat, so I made up some oat flour and used that instead. One could say it was a "carroat cake". It was pretty tasty, but I was surprised when I was told by hathhalla (who admitted being very fond of carrot cakes in general) that it was best thing they had ever tasted. For something that takes about ten minutes of preparation time that's quite a call. Anyway, this provides a nice segue to the wonder that was International Carrot Day! which is to be taken with good humour. I couldn't help but notice that their translation links for Spanish and French weren't operative, so I fired off an email to the owner of the site and shortly afterwards provided translations for the aforementioned along with Esperanto and German. So that's my double-carrot contribution to the international day.

Apart from this the usual requirements of work and study take up my time. I've had a few positive developments with the International HPC Certification forum, but will leave that until things are more set in stone. Tomorrow and the day after I have training courses to run - this time they were booked out in 42 minutes, which gives an indication of demand. I've been doing a lot of study on economics, specifically Public Economics and Macroeconomics, and mainly tax and fiscal policy respectively. The fact that the current government is defending thoroughly uneconomic subsidies (negative gearing, capital gains, franking credits etc) serves as a good example of the problems in public policy and class-based partisan capture. I still rather wish that I had the extra few months to complete this course which I feel is owed to me. Insofar that isn't going to happen it is fortunate that are holidays available later this month which I will take advantage of. I am not really optimistic I can make up the ground, but will do the best I can under the circumstances.

The biggest issue this week in the Australian IT world was the passing of the Access and Assistance bill, which has the IT industry fuming for good reason. It came on a chaotic last day of parliament where this, and a bill to get children to appropriate medical facilities of Nauru were dominant issues. Minister Christopher Pyne made a particularly disgusting tweet, which he then deleted, and my response to him was picked up by Gizmodo.

In other IT issues I conducted training early in the week with an Introduction to HPC and Linux, with a good attendance. Some fellow staff members think that I'm a bit crazy running courses through December, but when you have a waiting list of some six hundred people (yes, you read that right), you have to take every opportunity. Still on the IT agenda visited Anthony L., after work on Tuesday to deal with an old and dying RAID system. It is at the point where I recommended Payam Data Recovery. Here's a pro-tip; don't expect disks in regular use to last six years.

Must also mention that last Sunday gave an address at the Unitarian Church, The End is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth, where I discussed religious apocalyptic visions, real problems with the environment, and the importance of political action.

A couple of social activities in the week; the semi-regular CheeseQuest went well, and we started playing the classic D&D scenario, The Lost City, which should keep us busy for a while. Today, we had a vendor-sponsored "coordination and review meeting", i.e., lunch at Le Bon Ton. which is thoroughly misnamed, but good for what it is; I don't think any of the staff spoke French, let alone any New Orleans variety.

For the past few days we've had the pleasure of strangedave visiting us from Perth, for the stated purpose of attending some Burning Man organising group. It just so correlated with a release of a new edition of RuneQuest by Chaosium. As we are both knowledgeable fans of said product we were able to go through with a critical eye with a certain speed and intensity; my dotted notes are on the RuneQuest rules mailing list; the short version is it's pretty big, very much in the style of the old RuneQuest2, incorporates personality features from the runes to the characters, and includes a fair amount of Pendragon (parental history, passions etc). I intend, of course, to do a more complete review in the near future for RPG Review.

In actual play it just so happened to be RuneQuest week at our regular Sunday gaming group, which involved raiding tombs, battling certain lizard-folk, discovering our original employer had come to the sticky end of a sorcerer, and facing complaints from landlords. Quite a lot packed in for a single session really. In addition, the day previous was our regular CheeseQuest with Damien and Jacqui B., where we played another session of Mice & Mystics finishing off the penultimate chapter with relative ease - one more to go and we've finished the game, which has taken us over a year.

A somewhat disappointing conclusion to the week was the realisation that our much-plagued GPGPU partition for Spartan would not going going to be ready for a Top500 test by the deadline on June 1st (even with Pacific Time taken into consideration). We still have what appears to be intranetwork issues; in aggregate we can be a fair result through individual racks, and obviously on single-nodes we can get excellent results. But the system as a whole shows very poor performance issues. Assuming we can get this resolved we can have another crack for the November list. It's just the nature of the beast; sometimes when you're a blade runner, you get cut. EDIT: Almost forgot, have wirtten a short piece on installation of MrTrix on HPC with EasyBuild in mind.

The past couple of days have been dealing primarily with the Spartan upgrade. It was a massive change, involving switch upgrades and reconfiguration, driver and kernel upgrades, including iDrac, OFED, NVidia upgrades, Puppet reconfigurations, new storage filesystem for home and project directories, synching those directories (the slowest and most terrifying part really), a new upgrade to Slurm, new partitions, and an upgrade to the Nova OpenStack provisioning. To be fair, I had a fairly minimal role in all this (much of my time was dealing with the sync and taking the opportunity to update course material and Supercomputing with Linux), but it all went smoothly, and surprisingly according to timetable. This all puts up back in line for more work in the remaining of the week for the GPGPU partition.

The weekend was busy enough as well, with our irregular Cheesequest (white stilton, blue stilton, dutch smoked, vegan brie) with ser_pounce and hathhalla visiting the asylum. It was also opportune to crack open a long-forgotten bottle of Pierre Naigeon beaujolais from 2008 which hadn't aged badly at all. After that it was a session of Dungeons & Dragons with Charlemagne's paladins dealing with rebellious Saxons and a werewolf monk. That night we went to The Astor to catch up with funontheupfield and Marie to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi. It was good without being great, on par with The Force Awakens. I admit I'm looking forward to the end of this series however. Apart form Kylo Ren's character being annoyingly petulant rather than threatening, it would be good to tie-up the mysticism of The Force. Indeed, if you want the rebels to win democraticise The Force. Curiously Sunday's RuneQuest game (assault against evil sorcerers) seemed somewhat apt.

Preparations are underway for a one-week end-of-year visit to Perth; tickets booked, Secret Santa stuff organised (for goodness sake Australia Post, hurry up with those deliveries, I ordered them weeks ago), the cat has a home in the duration courtesy of NinjaDan, and the other animals will make do. It'll be my third visit this year to The Western Lands, which is somewhat above the usual rate that I'm used to, although this year did have special circumstances. It's curious has many connections I still have with the place that I left some twenty-five years ago for the final time. I don't particularly like Perth aesthetically; the relentless heat, isolation, and suburbia is not really to my taste. But I have been fortunate to know so many good people over there. I'd better get a move on with arranging something.

The past couple of days have seen two of my proposed presentations accepted by two difference conferences. One is for eResearch Australasia on andragogical methods in teaching high performance computing, which I'll be helped by an HPC educator from Goethe University Frankfurt, and the second being the IEEE eScience conference in New Zealand on cluster-cloud architectures which I'll receive assistance from the HPC group at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. In addition, Friday was a particularly good workday as we held a workshop for about a dozen various HPC systadmins from around the university, as part of the massive upgrade to the Spartan system from being a relatively small and experimental system, to one of the most powerful in the world. I effectively have been given the coordinating role for this group and already several good ideas have come out the workshop for improvements and preparations as we integrate a six-rack GPU partition to our existing infrastructure. Apropos I am off to NCI in early September for their HPC course and will be taking the PRACE online supercomputing course to see how they do things.

Yesterday we visited hathhalla and ser_pounce for our irregular CheeseQuest and the next chapter of Mice and Mystics, which was not at all successful for the noble rodents. Afterwards played game of Pandemic: Reign of Cthulhu, which we prevented the destruction of the world with one turn to spare - it's notably a very quick game. On returning home completed a review of Hunter Planet which will soon be going into RPG Review. I've just been in contact with the original author about my ideas for rules revisions (most of which I tested over 25 yeares ago) and a new scenario implementing Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. I'm also currently writing a version of GURPS Autoduel to fit with the Mad Max series, all of which are contributions to the now late issue of RPG Review.

It is good to able to return to a moderately normal set of topics in life. Previous posts of deaths, funerals, and loss of cognitive functions have been quietly uspetting, despite a calm personal exterior. About twenty years ago a person, who didn't know me that well, was engaged in conversation about motivation and emotions. He used the phrase 'Still waters run deep' to describe me. I appreciated the accurate encapsulation, and indeed have tried cultivate that part of my character (not always successfully). As an obvious variation, I am certainly not the silent type and express my considered views with some abandon. But it is the considered views that I express. I will either ask a question if I don't know something or I will make proposition if I am fairly certain of something. It is part of my recognition (and I do lay claim to coining this phrase) that deeply considered convictions are better than deeply ingrained prejudices, even if the emotional response is the same.

Visited hathhalla and ser_pounce for our regular Cheesequest. Amazing fromage of the day was a herbed Corsican. Afterwards played a challenging scenario in Mice and Mystics. This evening did a sence write-up for my long-running HeroQuest Glorantha game. It was the conclusion of a bit of bad luck in gaming sessions this week with the regular Laundry Files game cancelled on Wednesday night, and Eclipse Phase on Friday night. Nevertheless, this has given me more opportunity to work on Papers & Paychecks with the effects of alcohol and drugs and distribution curves added to the repository.

Have finally decided to join the 21st century and bought a chunk of cloud storage for some offsite backups; specifically the Google offering, which integrates well with the rest of its services. Have also discovered and used RClone, which a rather genius piece of work - effectively rsync for various cloud storage vendors. Apropos, a made a talk proposal for OpenStack Australia Day which has been accepted.

Other major events in the past few days has been organising for the AGM of the Victorian Secular Lobby, writing up the major events of 14th and 15th weeks of Lord Dampnut, US President, and attending a great wine tasting at University House for Klein Constantia with a selection of South African and French Savoy wines. The Vin de Constance was pretty amazing; it was sweet liquid gold and with a price to match (on special for a mere $137 for 500ml) .

Working on the transhumanist issue of RPG Review Issue 33 this week, having received (a little late) the interview with Rob Boyle. Reviews for that issue are also gradually making their way on rpg.net, with Eclipse Phase - Gatecrashing, receiving a strong recommendation. The week also witnessed a session of Papers & Paychecks which thematically took aspects of the classic The Keep on the Borderlands; it worked very well. Friday night managed to get some Eclipse Phase play in, a variation of Think Before Asking. Today was another Cheesequest day with hathhalla and ser_pounce where - apart from making our way through several varieties of said food - we also made our way through another chapter of Mice and Mystics.

The Isocracy Network continues at pace with a meeting on Friday night on a 2019 Labor-Green Alliance. Of course, a week is a long time in politics, and the departure of the ultra-conservative Cory Berndai from the Liberal Party does give the possibility of greater control by more liberal elements; the possibility of even a Grand Coalition was raised. There has been four 'blog posts on the Isocracy Network this week, including Actually, Nazis Are Still Bad, by reddragdiva, Tribune of the Plebs by catsidhe, and my own The Shambling Mound's Third Week.

This coming week I leave for New Zealand for a fortnight, which will include visits to some computational centres in Canterbury University in Christchurch, Otago University in Dunedin, MC-ing and presenting at Multicore World (that's quite some speaker's list, then to Cambridge for Nyriad and finally the Auckland University of Technology. I must say I'm rather looking forward to the visit, as it has been far too long since I've had the opportunity to drop into this rather favoured corner of the world. "Home is where the heart is", and mine is very much in the deep south of Aotearoa.

Two major events on Saturday and three on Sunday make for a pretty full weekend. It started with visting hathhalla and ser_pounce for another cheesequest session (Pont-l'Évêque was a personal favourite) followed by a chapter of Mice and Mystics, which we finished quickly and successfully through some particularly hardline decision making and some lucky cards that provides a delightful emergent narrative. Post-cheesequest we went out to The Astor to see the double of Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy; and ran into justadecoy, whom I hadn't seen for a couple of years. The latter film is, of course, charming and I've managed to see it three times now in recent months. The former I think will be lasting because in additional to some good character development it made excellent use of special effects and colours in a manner that was both artistic and clever in its simplicity.

Sunday started relatively early with a trip to the Unitarian Church, where Dr. Hans Baer was speaking on the recent US elections; it was entertaining enough even if I found myself mostly in disagreement with his strategic considerations, not to mention the only fleeting reference to religious content. Afterwards was a meeting of The Philosophy Forum, where Graeme Lindenmayer speaking on What is Life? What is a Life?, a primarily descriptive presentation but which drew light to some interesting edge cases where the binary between living and not-living becomes a little murky. Afterwards it was a journey to our Sunday session of GURPS Middle Earth which included revived discussion of the geopolitical situation and settlements, before narrowing down to the immediate scenario. Afterwards was a committee meeting for the RPG Review Cooperative which concentrated on the Papers & Paychecks Kickstarter, which remains frustratingly close to succeeding (go support this, now, please).