Current Affairs, Courses, and Illness

The Federal election has been called for May 18. The Coalition has started off quite impressively in terms of the corruption stakes, starting with a massive spending splurge (paid by the public) in a desperate measure to shore-up their declining chances, followed by a number of last-minute plum appointments. A pretty classic act from what must constitute one the most economically illiterate and incompetent governments in living memory (actually this would make an interesting empirical test). I suspect that the public is sufficiently frustrated by these clowns to give them the thorough thrashing that they deserve on election day.

All this aside, I've been under the weather for the past few days. I managed to deliver Introduction to Linux and High Performance Computing without trouble, but on the following day Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting I was feeling a bit out of sorts. It's one of the problems of being a specialist educator; if you're sick the class doesn't happen, so one makes additional effort to deliver even in conditions when they probably shouldn't. Yesterday I worked from home and concentrated in developing a new course on Regular Expressions in Linux but today I surrendered entirely took a day's sick leave. Despite this, I have been working away on economics and higher education studies. In addition, was invited over for dinner at nephew Luke's new abode and met housemate Jana, who has the delightful story of being saved from a house fire by her pet rabbits.