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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 [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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I feel like for much of this week I've been engaging in piece-meal progress; patching up my workshop lessons on regular expressions and shell scripting, completing various software builds, making some progress on for my next degree (the masters in higher education at Otago), and working through a whole variety of semi-complete tasks and projects. There are larger projects that I could, and indeed should get my teeth stuck into, but I'm a bit in recovery mode at the moment from (a) completing the MSc and (b) spending three days teaching whilst suffering the effects of a cold. So whilst my overall productivity has not declined by any stretch of the imagination, I have engaged in the more mentally enjoyable activity of letting my mind jump around on multiple subjects in succession. Doubtless, this will not remain, but for the time being it is both cathartic and necessary.

On Saturday went to visit [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla for our semi-regular cheesequest which is now dominated by vegan alternatives, although we did bring a bit of rather delicious "fromage de chevre". Top points I think goes to the sun-dried tomato double-not-cream-not-cheese, it really was quite good. We played a session of Spirit Island a co-operative game of nature spirits combatting colonists and, due to a sheer dumb-luck on my part, I managed to save the island by sacrificing my spirit and causing the colonists to flee in terror. Quite a nice dramatic ending. After that, we played Trial by Trolley by the good people at Cyanide and Happiness, where I made strong use of my utilitarian reasoning to justify running certain people over in preference to others. On a related note, ran a game of Eclipse Phase on Sunday, and played around with the interesting topic of sensors in space as a result.

As another food-related event, as could be expected [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya has caught a cold that I had last week. After visiting the medical centre in Ripponlea we made our way down to the old haunt of Elsternwick in search of favourite Chinese restaurant from yesteryear; Wong's Cafe - apparently after being in business for some fifty plus years, it closed down in 2017 or so. I'll miss Wong's; many good memories there, and the owner was always charming. I won't forget how he dutifully told me that I could visit one month as his doctor said he needed to take a holiday; his idea of a holiday was to take his extended local family - about twenty people or so - to China. Anyway, we ended up at Rising Dragon instead which was inexpensive, delicious, and with very generous portions.

I am trying to get my head around (FB link) Australians panic-buying toilet paper, of all things, over the novel coronavirus. There is sensible advice of course from the Department of Health for the public and for medical practioners, but I'm sure that most people would prefer to read hyperbole and conspiracies instead, leading to an outbreak in idiocy. It is true that the virus does have an eclipse phase from incubation to symptoms (where the game got its name from, naturally), the mortality rate is higher than seasonal influenza, and with a high ease of transmission, if not contained. Yes, it ought to be treated seriously, but the over-the-top reactions quite unnecessary.
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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; [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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Eclipse Phase is a post-cyberpunk transhumanist roleplaying game which includes political factionalism, alien contact, the devastation of Earth by rogue AIs, and travel to exoplanets by wormhole Gates. It has something for everyone in a mostly hard SF simulationist approach, and understandably it won the Origins Award for best RPG in 2010. The books are invariably beautiful, and the setting rich, and the author was not afraid of where transhumanist logic took him (I interviewed him in RPG Review Issue 33). For the past three-and-a-half years I've been running an Eclipse Phase story, and it's now coming to an end. The PCs been to every planet on the solar system, several moons, and a few exoplanets, and now they're staring down the singularity event on the edge of the sun, and Sunday's session ("A Holiday in the Sun") has all the hallmarks of an end-of-campaign chapter. It's been a hell of a trip, and despite some odd crunchy bits to the game, it's been very much worth it. I am, to be honest, a little inspired to pitch a similar game for Chaosium.

It was the second day of gaming in the weekend, as Saturday was our irregular CheeseQuest with [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla. Game of the day was Pandemic: Fall of Rome, which is similar to those in the co-operative Pandemic series, but with a few additional changes to suit the particular example. Our downfall was quite brutal with a succession of unfortunate event cards and an inability to stop an overwhelming takeover of the Iberian peninsula by the Vandals. Overall, not a bad game and certainly one that I would play again - this time with a better sense of the dynamics and the strategy that entails. And speaking of matters of the strategy, the rest of the weekend was spent working on a 3000-word essay on strategy for my MSc in Information Systems. One essay and one short dissertation to go and I'll be finished my fifth degree and second Masters.
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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 [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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Sunday was my 51st orbit around the sun and, as is my want, I actually needed reminding of the day by a work colleague late last week. This is a rather regular occurrence for me as close friends will testify. Indeed, it wasn't until virtually the last moment that I decided to do anything for my 50th, and just as well I did, it turned out to be a great night. Whilst I'm not really into birthday celebrations myself I am, always, overwhelmed with by the number and quality of people who take the time to send me wishes on this day. Somehow I've ended up with a truly remarkable and invigorating circle of friends from various branches of life that I have an interest in.

As for the day itself, I treated it pretty much any other alternate Sunday - ran a session of Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels found themselves promoted to probational Proxy Agents to deal with an escaped mad AI and de-escalate a war. For characters that had been operatives for the past couple of years of play, the switch to management and recruitment was an interesting alternative challenge. Apropos the previous day was our semi-regular CheeseQuest with [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce. We played Cthulhu Wars that day, a real monster of a game (pun not intended), where the Elder Gods are in conflict to take over the world (obviously). In this instance, the crawling chaos led by Nyarlathotep just pipped yellow sign of Hastur. Despite the size of the game and the quantity of pieces, it was pretty easy to play and quite well paced. I just can't imagine myself owning a game physically that size. Finally on-topic I've added some 150 or so classic Traveller books to the RPG Review store, all in preparation for Arcanacon this weekend.

The other big event of the weekend was going to the MC Escher exhibition at the National Gallery of Victory. In my younger years I was quite taken by his works which combined mathematical approaches to perspectives (resulting in impossible objects) and tessellations. In many ways it was a combination of seemingly contradictory approaches of cubism and surrealism, both of which he was a contemporary. Alongside this major exhibition was the pop and lighthearted Julian Opie, which included a fun and interactive "kids studio", which unsurprisingly was full of adults.
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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.
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It appears that I have moved into end-of-year meeting mode. Just yesterday arranged for professor Clinton Fernandes, to the guest speaker at the Isocracy Network Annual General Meeting, slated for October 20 at the Kensington Town Hall (probably clashes with a LUV meeting, but timetables are tight). Clinton will be speaking on Australian foreign policy with a focus on East Timor and Witness K (not to be confused with Agent K from the film Men In Black, although correlations could be noted). For my own part I have just completed some 1700 words on an article Isocracy Profiles: Martin Luther King Jnr, which the second in this sporadic series (following Albert Einstein.

RuneQuest Gloranthan Con has had a couple of updates recently mainly behind the scenes. After a bit of poking around for my own alternative I discovered the joy of Drupal Webform and Webform Report, which has allowed me to put together a couple of pages for the auction. I can't believe that I'm selling my first print of White Bear and Red Moon form 1975, the game which launched Chaosium. Further, it will make an ideal template for the RPG Review store which has been offline since Quicksales closed its operations. I'm planning to have that at least partially in place by the end of October, as per the RPG Review Newsletter which I released yesterday.

In other gaming news went to see [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla for our irregular day of cheeesequest and Mice & Mystics. After a year or so of play we actually finished the basic scenario, Sorrow and Remembrance, and did so with relative ease courtesy of a succession of very beneficial die rolls and the availability of some handy magics. The night previous ran a game of Exalted Journey to the Far West where the travelling band discovered that a local village had been taken over by shapeshifting demons of seduction and gluttony. Credit to [profile] funduntheupfield for recognising a key theme from the original Journey to the West. Tomorrow will be Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels have found themselves trapped in a medical facility on Earth with various robots banging on the door that want to cut their stacks out.

Courtesy of a neighbour relieving themselves of a particularly large bookcase I've spent a few hours re-arranging a good deal of the furninsings around the house in an effort to save space. Somehow, despite the fact there is an additional item in play, I've actually managed to create more space and better space, with our sizeable liquour cabinet now in the lounge room along with a display cabinet holding the fish tank and turtle tank and various indoor pot plants. The bookcase itself will be gobbling up a stack of "do not sell" RPG books which will allow some of those which are currently in boxes to join a real shelving unit. I suppose it's spring (of sorts) so the idea of a spring clean does come to mind, but it also reminds me that my love of RPGs has resulted in a collection larger than most specialist game stores.
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For the past few days we've had the pleasure of [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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It's been a while (over a year), but I have completed another Golden Owl on Duolingo, this time in Italian, which wasn't even on my list of priority languages. I basically just want enough to order food on Lygon Street, although the course did seem to emphasise food, death, love, and some cosa nostra implications. Many decades ago I did some at junior high school and didn't really grasp it at all. This time however, I found it a lot easier - Duolingo is apparently a better teacher than Mr. Rousseau was, and certainly language acquisition theory has improved a lot since then as well. All I really recall is the expectation that we would read and translate Le Avventure di Pinocchio. All said, whilst there is still a sense that I would like to get a good grasp of at least the major international languages, there are quirky experiential and aesthetic choices on my agenda as well. I confess I'm having trouble deciding whether the next Golden Owl will be Portuguese or Dutch. Probably the latter as I intend to visit in a few months.

Last Saturday Damien and Jacqui came over for our semi-regular CheeseQuest event; I made a mountain of hummus variations (spicy, sour etc) and then a mushroom gnocchi. We finally finished our Complete Lessons Collection of Moral Orel and then went on to play a session of D&D Charlemagne's Paladins which involved a visit to Irminsul, a meeting with King Widukind, and the discovery of Charlemagne's Massacre of Verden. They may have rescued their kidnapped bishop, but now they are far less certain of their loyalty to Charlemagne. They'll have plenty of opportunities to upset the history as it has been writ.

One of the side-effects of being a social gamer is that apart from cinema visits for classics and arthouse, I don't usually get much time to engage in television shows etc. Indeed, it has only been very recently that I found myself making use of NetFlix, and binged my way through Altered Carbon. I had, almost by accident, caught a few episodes in the past of The Blacklist which I enjoyed, especially with James Spader's utterly superb performance as a powerful cultured criminal informant. Now, over the past month or so, I've binge-watched four seasons and have caught up with the actual series in production. It's all a little out-of-character for me, but does explain, at least in part, a lack of my typical writing output.
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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 [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.
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In my preferred measuring of time, today marks the the three-quarter mark of the year and it has recently been eventful, rather than the reflective opportunity I take on such quarter calendar markers. The day started with a visit from [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce for our irregular cheesequest session, which was followed with me running the third session of our Charlemagne D&D game, involving adapting The Veiled Soceity with the the historical revolt against his rule in in Friuli. Alas, the day ended with a very sad note with a message that [personal profile] caseopaya's mother has taken a turn for the worse and is now in a critical condition in hospital; a plane has been immediately booked to Perth and it is almost certain I will be embarking on the journey shortly afterwards. However, before I depart I have to attend VCAT on Tuesday to have power of financial attorney transferred to me for Rick B. and, with the universe displaying no sense of irony, the meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby with Lesley Vick on the Dying with Dignity legislation.

On the scale of things there there is little else to report. I have been busy catching up on my PRACE supercomputing course when the opportunity presents itself, and even more so working on Papers & Paychecks at every available opportunity, especially working my way through the "sapient monsters" - cars, computers, photocopiers, fatbergs - that come to "life". There was a good game of Megatraveller on Wednesday evening with our regular group, and I have taken it upon myself to update and extend on existing javascript files for character generation to ship and world design. Finally, workwise things have been at their usual level of mad activity, with staff illnesses pushing our already tight deadlines for the GPGPU project into stormy territory. A lunch sponsored by SanDisk's Gary M., on Friday was thoroughly appreciated with a particularly high quality conversation. After that smashed my way through the somewhat tricky dependency chain for the SUMO traffic simulator. But, as mentioned, all seems to fall into insignificance at this point, even in my rational brain tells me that it is not.
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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 [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] 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.
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Apart from dealing with multiple medical issues that I've raised in previous posts, I have had the opportunity to engage in my favourite hobby othe weekend - traditional roleplaying games. On Friday evening I participated in what I call Eclipse Phase Mars, on the basis of its standard location (although most recently this has involved extrasolar gatecrashing etc). This particular group meets primarily on Google Hangouts with players in Western Australia, Vietnam, Victoria, and New Zealand. I've missed a couple of sessions of this game, partially due to technology issues (my computer screen was completey destroyed on my last trip to NZ, so I've been trying to work with a dinky Asus Aspire One), and partially because of international trips. Both of these have affected my ability to complete Papers & Paychecks; although I did release an update on Saturday morning following completing the bestiary section, and integration a number of significant changes, even this late in the publication process.

Saturday was also a regular CheeseQuest day with [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce. Given the cool weather, our lunch feast consisted of a pumpkin gnocchi and Nova Scotia brown bread. The cheese feast included fried saganaki and halloumi, havarti, maasdam, gorgonzola, Dutch smoked, and two not-cheeses, a faux cheddar and "tree nut" cheese, which are quite tolerable. I was rather taken by the Devil's Corner pinot noir that our guests brought over, light but tasty and with a brilliant ruby colour. After lunch was the second session of our historical-fantasy Dungeons & Dragons game, using the very different 4th edition rules in the setting of Charlemagne's rule. The game went very well, everyone plays up their character ethno-religious background and character class, as they cleared out a old Roman-Germanic temple in Freisland haunted by Wiedergänger.

Sunday was also a gaming day, this time with my own game of Eclipse Phase. This session involved the PCs engaging in a short-case to an autonomist morph resleever on one of Neptune Trojans, then taking a stealth craft to intercept an Ultimate scout ship en-route to Eris. There was an almighty gun-battle that followed which eventually saw the PCs successful, and partially courtesy due an inside agent providing assistance at the last moment. After that was the challenging process of psychosurgery and the literal merging of minds. More on that for the next session. Appropriately I've started reading the two books entitled Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy (one published by Open Court, 2012 and the other by Wiley Blackwell, 2014)
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Visited [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] 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) .
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The week started with ANZAC day, a national holiday in remembrance of lives lost in war, which war-mongers try to turn into a celebration of invasive military endeavours. A Muslim woman had the temerity to suggest that we shouldn't forget people dying in current wars or the refugees from such conflicts; the conservative media hounded her as a result. For our ANZAC day we had one of our regular cheesequests with [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce with a heft European range (and Breton cider). In the spirit of things, I'd made an ANZAC cookie in the shape of ANZAC cove and surrounds - [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla commented that it was like one of her (primary school) student's science experiments until I started pointing out the topographical features.

Afterwards we had a game of D&D 4th edition, probably the edition that's closest to a board game, making use of the Charlemagne's Paladins supplement and Open Grave. It was the beginning of a gaming intensive week, with the following night spent playing Papers & Paychecks, and the night after that reading The Non-Designer's Design Book, an excellent summary publication on such matters ([personal profile] reddragdiva may also be interested in this). Today has included prepartion for a session of Eclipse Phase which I'll be running tomorrow, which also has a Kickstarter for a second edition (I did some playtesting for this).

But of course, that's not the only events of the week. Much of work has been battling a monster of a suite of programs, FENiCS, which has a monstrous toolchain of dependencies (probably close to a hundred, including those we've already done). Who knew that I'd ever need, for example binutils/2.25-GCC-4.9.2-binutils-2.25? It is enough to drive one to drink and fortunately University House came to my assistance with Dr. Geoff Scollary providing a class on the various types production and tasting of sparking wine (aka 'champagne', but we're not allowed to call it that anymore unless it's actually from Champagne). Based on blind testing apparently I'm fond of Domain Chandon Pinot Noir. Finally, on other matters that drives one to drink, earlier in the week completed a two-part special of The Shambling Mound, a fortnight's summary of the activities of the current US administration.
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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 [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] 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 [personal profile] reddragdiva, Tribune of the Plebs by [personal profile] 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.
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It's pretty clear that I'm going to have to get back into the habit of posting to this journal at least twice a week, for the sheer sake of having a somewhat succinct personal record of events and links to various thoughts and considerations. Today apparently is the point of my forty-ninth revolution around the sun, which I'm hardly going to celebrate hard; a small lunch gathering at Timiao courtesy of my manager at work. Received some great books from [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya, which will keep me busy for a while. The day however will live in some infamy however - not for the inauguration and speech of President Trump (which happens at 4am January 21st AEDST), but rather of rampage in the Melbourne CBD (caseopaya's office was in lockdown).

This aside the week has had some other highlights. Last Saturday's Cheesquest day with [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla went very well. I made two cheesecakes, with the baked vegan one surprisingly working out quite well (crazy but true, I can cook vegan food with some competence). It was also the first attempt at porron drinking games, being an item I'd picked up the week prior. We played Asterix: Das Kartenspiel, a rather clever and quick bidding game. The following day was the AGM and BBQ for the RPG Review Cooperative, which was very much enjoyed by all present. Other gaming related events for the week included Laundry Files on Wednesday evening. Tomorrow is another BBQ I'm preparing for; this time for Linux Users of Victoria.

The week Zhou Youguang died, known as "the father of pinyin". His passing providing a psychological impetus (this often happens for me) to start learning Mandarin on Memrise which I must admit is bloody hard. Unlike European languages (even Russian, which I started again this week) there is nothing in terms of lexical similarity. Then there is the simplified logographic script and hanyu pinyin to learn with the vowel tones ("mā ma mà mǎ", "mother scolds the horse") which can lead some stunning writing (e.g., Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den). I've been led to believe that the grammatical structures are a lot less complex than English (let alone German etc) but I'm hardly at that level yet.
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Two major events on Saturday and three on Sunday make for a pretty full weekend. It started with visting [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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).
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Whilst others on Saturday were concerned on which side of the grand ritual of the boot would be premiers for the year, we nerdlingers held a Cheesequest day, between myself [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya, [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla, and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce. I made a small mountain of liptauer (including a surprisingly tasty vegan not-cheese variant), which was contrasted with a crumbly Warrnambool cheddar, and some Wensleydale with cranberries. All of which was accompanied with a tofu goulash, which another European dish of "find vegetables, add 'x' (spices, stock, cream etc), simmer". Afterwards we played the classic realist-comedy game of Junta where one plays a ruling family of a Latin American dictatorship. The idea, of course, it to get as much money as you can into your Swiss bank account from foreign aid before the international backers give up on you. An early run as El Presidente followed by a well-time assassination resulted in my victory.

Overall it was a good weekend for games; played Eclipse Phase Mars on Friday night via our usual multinational Google Hangouts group, and on Sunday ran the Eclipse Phase Extrasolar group, and gave them a little more than they bargained for with robotic spiders under the sea. It is something worth realising; GMs of Eclipse Phase can be a lot challenging to their player-characters because of the backup system - even more so than fantasy GMs with various Raise Dead or Resurrection magics. Indeed, there is something to be said about the hostile alien system where the GM goes out of their way to confront the PCs with deadly forces that are beyond their capacity to defeat in a stand-up conflict. Interestingly the game dove-tailed well with The Philosophy Forum group which met earlier that afternoon. Our planned speaker had fallen ill and thus could not attend, but nevertheless was kind enough to provide some papers on the pro-technology environmentalism and its relationship with transhumanism, which was just as well given the excellent turnout.

Baa baa black sheep how much wool can you carry? 'Well, it all depends on the load-bearing capacity of my legs, and now we have new ways of calculating this'. Yes, I'm the co-author of a published paper (I helped with the computational side of things) with the snappy title: Spatial Distribution of Material Properties in Load Bearing Femur as Characterized by Evolutionary Structural Optimization. I have also been preparing papers for my presentations at eResearch Australasia next Tuesday, and OpenStack Summit in Barcelona in three week's time. Janie G., from SA will be our housesitter whilst we're away. All legs of the transport are now booked with a combination of train and bus through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Spain. In the next couple of days I'll get what remains of the hotels bookings done.

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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath

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