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Indulgences, Work, Valedictions
Aug. 21st, 2020 07:06 pmI feel like apologising for my last entry on account of it's self-indulgence, but the nature of LJ/DW always has been a one well-suited for "dear diary" entries. There is no doubt I am blessed with good and true friends who offered words of comfort and advice, and even some with a more professional background who provided helpful advice outside of such forums, including one relative newcomer to whom I was so impressed that I must, like Captain Louis Renault and Rick, declare "I think this is a beginning of a beautiful friendship". The root cause of the problem is far from being resolved of course, and the experience and strategy remains the same; awake with feelings of despondency and fear, redirect the energies of those feelings to what I know is true, and can control and continue to remake the world; "so it goes" as Kurt Vonnegut would say. And appropriately, ever onwards, I have given considerations to the continuum of needs, wants, and virtue with an essay on Lightbringers, which seems to be creating some resonance among those who care about such things.
Work has been a challenge this week with two workshops early in the week, "Parallel Processing on Spartan", an introduction to parallel architectures, OpenMP, MPI, and debugging tools, followed by "GPU Applications and Programming", which covered various scientific applications designed for GPUs, an introduction to the OpenACC pragma-based language, and the CUDA programming language. I was less happy with the latter workshop and I feel I need to develop more and tighter content for it. Much of the rest of the week involved writing a new course about using the Gadi Supercomputer at NCI. the most powerful system in Australia. Apropos all this, I received a "thank you" (and citation) in a recent paper "The effect of variation in moonlight on nocturnal song of a diurnal bird species", which was a nice surprise. It was quite a beautiful study and the practical assistance I provided was actually quite a joy to engage with.
Valedictions are given this week to the tireless work and community arts advocacy of Paddy Garritty who passed away in the past week from COVID-19. I was never close to Paddy, but we worked together on a number of projects, and I see that he was an honourable and dedicated man to a fairer and more beautiful world. Plus he had a wicked sense of humour; everyone who knew him had a Paddy story of that nature so here's mine: In 2002 or thereabouts I organised a "Labor Left Activists Conference" at Trades Hall, which was basically Pledge Unions officials and allies in the ALP. One of our sessions, rather daringly, touched upon issues related to censorship, health and safety issues etc in the sex industry which a small group (smell?) of FARTS took exception to the libertarian socialist line that was being advocated. At the end of the conference, it was time to pay Paddy for use of the hall and, having passed over the cold hard cash, he dropped to his knees and feigned performing oral sex on me. Certainly the sort of experience one doesn't forget. Valedictions Paddy, you cheeky warrior for what is right and just. We'll miss you terribly.
Work has been a challenge this week with two workshops early in the week, "Parallel Processing on Spartan", an introduction to parallel architectures, OpenMP, MPI, and debugging tools, followed by "GPU Applications and Programming", which covered various scientific applications designed for GPUs, an introduction to the OpenACC pragma-based language, and the CUDA programming language. I was less happy with the latter workshop and I feel I need to develop more and tighter content for it. Much of the rest of the week involved writing a new course about using the Gadi Supercomputer at NCI. the most powerful system in Australia. Apropos all this, I received a "thank you" (and citation) in a recent paper "The effect of variation in moonlight on nocturnal song of a diurnal bird species", which was a nice surprise. It was quite a beautiful study and the practical assistance I provided was actually quite a joy to engage with.
Valedictions are given this week to the tireless work and community arts advocacy of Paddy Garritty who passed away in the past week from COVID-19. I was never close to Paddy, but we worked together on a number of projects, and I see that he was an honourable and dedicated man to a fairer and more beautiful world. Plus he had a wicked sense of humour; everyone who knew him had a Paddy story of that nature so here's mine: In 2002 or thereabouts I organised a "Labor Left Activists Conference" at Trades Hall, which was basically Pledge Unions officials and allies in the ALP. One of our sessions, rather daringly, touched upon issues related to censorship, health and safety issues etc in the sex industry which a small group (smell?) of FARTS took exception to the libertarian socialist line that was being advocated. At the end of the conference, it was time to pay Paddy for use of the hall and, having passed over the cold hard cash, he dropped to his knees and feigned performing oral sex on me. Certainly the sort of experience one doesn't forget. Valedictions Paddy, you cheeky warrior for what is right and just. We'll miss you terribly.
