Workplace Considerations, RPG Updates, Secular Updates

Recent work decisions have been extremely disappointing for me with what I perceived as reneged agreements locally and with attempts to break-up professional and academic staff in workplace agreements which of course would empower management significantly in the future. Yesterday, appropriately on May Day, the National Tertiary Education Union held a workplace meeting which resulted in a unanimous vote for strike action - the only debate was for how long (I seconded an amendment for extended action). Combined the experiences have led me to cast more than an indifferent eye to my finances. I live a fairly simple lifestyle which has meant a reasonable accumulation of savings and assets, greatly aided by stable employment. The result of which I don't actually need to work; the reason I go to work is because I like providing researchers the computational capacity to make their discoveries. But reviewing continental European real-estate has become a serious matter.

Out of work-hours I've had a buy time almost entirely dedicated to RPG activities. I have just finished a contribution this year's One Page Dungeon. In addition ran Eclipse Phase on Sunday where our brave Sentinels are making their way across the wasteland that is Earth, specifically Tangier with the objective of getting to Ibiza and then to Barcelona where they need to have a meeting with the MareNostrum. In addition, finished my Rolemaster/Spacemaster cross-over campaign summary (at some 2300 words), and also enjoyed another CheeseQuest with Jacqui and Damien. We finished chapters seven and eight, which means that game is nearing completion, and played a session of 221B Baker Street, whose plot does require some pretty interesting stretches to match with the clues (e.g., in the Park you discover.. an anagram!).

I've finally made the arrangements for the annual general meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby on May 12, with Dr. Meredith Doig from the Reason Party being the guest speaker; we've had some good advancements for secularism in the past year both nationally and in the state, but that has not stopped various antidisestablishmentarians (yes, I did use that) from fighting various rear-guard actions such as to expand federal funding of religious chaplains in schools - when everyone else (professional counsellors, teachers etc) are arguing on the basis of grounded evidence that the system ought to be scrapped. This is, of course, a purely ideological position on their part and no appeal to evidence will make an iota of difference to the advocates. Use of reason and evidence is wasted effort on such individuals.

EDIT: Because I'm rubbish, completed to neglected to mention the awesome catch-up I had with arcadiagt5 and especially discussions about the Australian public service and IT project management; he was visiting Melbourne for the Joe Hisaishi concert which he has many good things to say about.