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tcpipLast weekend I had the pleasure of spending some time in the home of Carla with her child and friends; we played the boardgame "Root" with its various anthropomorphic animals seeking to control a woodland. It's quite a clever design, with each faction having its own style and victory conditions (I played the cantankerous Eyrie). The youngsters are very keen on the game and explained their own modifications and alternative factions; I couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was rather like being part of the "Stranger Things" D&D group - and Root does have its own RPG, which I am keen to try. Appropriately, the following Monday, spent time at the Red Triangle for the regular fortnightly game with far more aged players (we haven't changed over the decades) of Burning Wheel where - as an extreme mashup - our setting is the Thirty Years' War, the story is following the classic "The Enemy Within" campaign from Warhammer FRPG, and with scenarios from Lamentations from the Flame Princess.
Betwixt these events I had a linner event with Rob and Angela, with Erica turning up to graze for dinner. Mention must be made of Rob's Rookwood Distellery whose Yuzu gin was awarded a Silver in the Australian Gin Awards last week. Of course, we sampled said gin, which comes up with quite a subtle and beautiful blue sheen when mixed with tonic. Later we moved on to drinking tequila out of skull glasses, which Rob (he has taste this man) cleverly paired with gouda and cummin. In the course of the discussion Angela and I decided we are going to write a psychology paper together, with her professional doctorate clearly taking the position of lead author, and my mere GradDip and wordsmithing helping the process (working title: "Catatonia: a misunderstood and missed diagnosis"). We both have a few publications under our name and we're making some initial progress on that project as well.
The fun and frivolity of the weekend had to come to a close of course and now the nose is to the grindstone of the ongoing preparations for the operating system and software upgrade on the Spartan supercomputer. Whilst applications are constantly being updated, we've managed to avoid doing a major version upgrade to the OS since the system was first initiated way back in 2015 (our system version of gcc is 4.8.5, the environment module version is 11.3.0, for example). The change is necessary (RHEL 7.x will be unsupported soon), but it is going to come with some pain as users will have to reinstall and recompile many of their own applications, and some will just not work. But with the exception of building containers for old software to live in, there's not much that we can do - and the timeline is going to be incredibly difficult with the amount of work we have to do.
Betwixt these events I had a linner event with Rob and Angela, with Erica turning up to graze for dinner. Mention must be made of Rob's Rookwood Distellery whose Yuzu gin was awarded a Silver in the Australian Gin Awards last week. Of course, we sampled said gin, which comes up with quite a subtle and beautiful blue sheen when mixed with tonic. Later we moved on to drinking tequila out of skull glasses, which Rob (he has taste this man) cleverly paired with gouda and cummin. In the course of the discussion Angela and I decided we are going to write a psychology paper together, with her professional doctorate clearly taking the position of lead author, and my mere GradDip and wordsmithing helping the process (working title: "Catatonia: a misunderstood and missed diagnosis"). We both have a few publications under our name and we're making some initial progress on that project as well.
The fun and frivolity of the weekend had to come to a close of course and now the nose is to the grindstone of the ongoing preparations for the operating system and software upgrade on the Spartan supercomputer. Whilst applications are constantly being updated, we've managed to avoid doing a major version upgrade to the OS since the system was first initiated way back in 2015 (our system version of gcc is 4.8.5, the environment module version is 11.3.0, for example). The change is necessary (RHEL 7.x will be unsupported soon), but it is going to come with some pain as users will have to reinstall and recompile many of their own applications, and some will just not work. But with the exception of building containers for old software to live in, there's not much that we can do - and the timeline is going to be incredibly difficult with the amount of work we have to do.