Lev Lafayette's journal

A good portion of the past few days have consisted of moving various furnishings around in preparation of getting part two of our flooring done; thirty plus years old carpet goes out, laminate floorboards go in. The problem of being a somewhat bookish person is that one ends up with literally dozens of bookcases, and these aren't much fun to carry upstairs. Playing furniture Tetris is an interesting game, as well as the contents of an additional three rooms, are squeezed into the already furnished two which have had their flooring done. After that, it'll be to get the questionable electrics in the place fixed. Capital depreciates, land increases in value, and that is why the earth should not be owned.

On that topic the Isocracy Network is having its annual general meeting (FB) in two weeks. Apart from discussing Nicolò Bellanca's book on the subject, there is also the Victorian Parliament's inquiry into homelessness, which we have more than a few issues to raise (land prices, public housing supply, harmful effects, etc). In my own adventures in landlordism, our tenant in Dunedin is moving out to get their own place (congratulations Dominic!). Against the advice of our estate agent, I am recommending that the rent should not be increased.

Despite the various time-dependent home activities (all work and no play etc), last night caseopaya went out to see We Lost The Sea, a Sydney-based band which I first encountered a couple of years ago. They started off a metal band until their vocalist committed suicide. After that they transmogrified into something that is a cross between math rock and metal, which some punters are calling "post-metal" (really? as if "post-rock" wasn't bad enough), with now two albums out in the new style (Departure Songs, Truimph & Disaster). Also caught up with funontheupfield who randomly turned up at the gig.

In a previous entry I mentioned the issues I was having with my MSc dissertation supervisor. I decided to apply for a new supervisor and, credit where it's due, the college organised one within a matter of days. After explaining the various issues I was facing the new supervisor accepted the extended proposal without any further additions or amendments, which suggests to me that it was fine as it is. I have joked about the funny McSweeny's article on the hilarious the snake-fight portion of your thesis defense, but there is some wry amusement to be derived by the fact that I had a poisonous snake of my very own. I assure you, the snakes are very real.

The past few days have been throwing myself into various activities after getting (mostly) over the cold last week. I have prepared myself for all the bits and pieces required for RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under, and I'm feeling quietly confident that it should all fall into place. Tonight we had a committee meeting of the Cooperative and pretty much checked off all the boxes of things that need doing. I've been composing Metaphysical Musings of the Scholar Wyrm which will be one of my three articles for the Convention special issue of RPG Review. In actual play on Thursday, there was another session of Star Wars: Force and Destiny where we're finding ourselves working for the Empire for the greater good (and they want it for the greater evil). Today I ran Eclipse Phase, where the proxies and their sentinels have been assigned a mission into a radioactive zone of sex-crazed mutant exsurgents; should be fun for them.

Last night was nephew Luke's birthday. After dropping off a nice bottle of whiskey for looking after our place during the European holiday, and as per last year. we took him to a local Thai restaurant, Sukho Thai, which does well with food, price, and decor - plus a nice drop of French red. After giving ourselves a hearty meal, we took Luke to see The Gang of Four, which Luke had familiarised himself with from my collection last time he did house-sitting. It was the fortieth year of their debut album, Entertainment!, and it was a pretty damn good gig. I ended up buying Andy Gill's guitar, making it the first electric guitar I've owned, which is pretty funny for someone who has been reviewing music as long as I have. Unsurprisingly, I've already written a review of the night which is available on Rocknerd.

One other pleasant distraction to this was visiting Brendan E., on the weekend who provided us with the viewing pleasure of Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die. New housemate Hien N. was also present and we all had quite a good time watching this quite tongue-in-cheek movie with some rather good cultural names - Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Bill Murray, Adam Driver. and a hilarious performance by Tilda Swinton. The somewhat mixed reviews of the film seem to have forgotten that this is essentially a comedy film, a spoof of the zombie genre, and to be honest there were some scenes where he could have turned it up a couple more notches in this regard. But it was jolly good fun and not to be taken at all seriously.

Apart from this, I've been working through the dissertation of my MSc thesis, specifically the draft of the literature review. My supervisor is being a bit ornery about getting all the specifics in and I suspect I'll have to provide a third version of the proposal even though I'm getting close to halfway in writing the draft thesis itself. I've also discovered that he doesn't actually read the entire thing - he made a request for the timetable in the last revision when it was at the end of the document. It really does strike me that sometimes various academic reviewers are not as careful as they should be.

The second half of the visit to Stuttgart included a visit to the Maulbronn Cloister, formerly of the Cistercians and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With parts 850 years old, the monastery complex is in astoundingly good condition, effectively a preserved medieval village. It is unsurprising the local council now uses one of the buildings as council offices. Naturally enough the pun "from Melbourne to Maulbronn" had to be made as well. Apart from the stunning buildings, three stories of the cloister were charming; firstly, the determination of where the cloister would stand (a thirsty mule, laden with treasure, establishing "Maulbronn" aka Mule Fountain), secondly, the use of Maultasche, a ravioli-like pasta to hide the consumption of meat from God, and thirdly, that Johannes Kepler was a student at the cloister. Felix, our host, mentioned that he was a descendent of Kepler and later showed us his family history book and family crest which affirmed the claim. That night had a dinner at Tina's Trollingerstub of traditional Swabian fare.

The following morning we bid our farewells for another year and journeyed to Darmstadt, which is primarily a university and technical city close to Frankfurt. It also just happens to be the home of the European Space Agency's Space Operations Centre. With an invitation from the director of ground facilities, a magnificent tour was provided, including a visit to the control room and a plentiful discussion of past and present operations of the Agency, along with connection with New Norcia in Western Australia. I was particularly taken by the ESA's involvement in on the landing on Saturn's moon, Titan, along with their landing on a comet. Also of particular note was the small box of remains of Ariane EDIT, a rocket which exploded shortly after launch (a programming error caused a 64-bit float to be shoved into a 16-bit integer), which I have used in a few presentations in the past. Whilst the sheer enormity of relatively deep space (and time) explorations touches deeply into my pantheistic orientations, on a more practical and immediate sense the Copernicus Earth Observation programme has many varied and obvious applications.

From Darmstadt, a fairly long trip was planned by train along the Rhine with quite a few changes. This was quite interrupted by the cancellation of a service at Mainz. Whilst Mainz is a fairly charming city, staying there for an extended period was not planned on this trip and, following some juggling, the timetable was re-arranged with an eventual arrival in Delft at 2100 hours (with short changes in Dusseldorf, Venlo, and Eindhoven). Arriving in Delft, Jett D., was already present to take us from the station to our lodgings on the outskirts of town (relatively so in a country like The Netherlands). The next few hours were spent over drinks discussing where various people of our mutual rock-and-roll youth have ended up and swapping listening tips on older and more contemporary bands. It is true that a few of the visits of the Europe 2019 trip are short, but one can hardly travel from literally the other side of the world without making a detour to see friends old and good.

The past few days in Sydney has been pretty packed series of events. Friday's events included a visit to the rather fun Sydney Aquarium and the inner-city Australian Wildlife zoo; highlights of the former include the dugong and penguins and for the latter, meeting a quokka and patting a python. A highlight of the following day was meeting a homeless man Chris and his pet rat Lucy, who acquired some fame some weeks back when his rat was stolen and recovered. If you're in Sydney go down Pitt Street and spend some money to be in their company. Afterwards, we went to Manly to meander around the parkland of the former quarantine station where we met several bush turkeys and an echidna.

That night was the Underworld concert at the Sydney Opera House, our second in three days. It was, to say the least, an incredibly high-tempo evening, and they really didn't have any need for seating - at any point in time well over 95% of the audience was on their feet dancing as the Underworld duo provided a truly incredible show of light and music. What really made the night, however, was the enthusiasm of the crowd, which does beg the question of whether Underworld was at a concert to see their punters, rather than the other way around. Quite seriously, the second-best concert I have been to (Hawkwind retains top spot).

The day after the concert had a long five-hour lunch, drinks, and catch-up with few Sydney-siders whom I know, including John A., of the Pirate Party, Adam B., and Alex. We had a wide-ranging chats from the state of contemporary and international politics, the role of corruption, visits to abandoned locations, and even astrophysics. Appropriately the following day visited record and book stores in the city and Newtown, where we went to Gould's, which I hadn't been to for some years. That evening went down to the Darling Harbour to witness more of Vivid, specifically the Robot Space Land.

Today, however, I've come down with a cold. I'm dosed up on medicines and have pretty much avoided doing anything in the vague hope of recovery as soon as possible. In the morning we went out to a local cinema to watch Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion which involves the quest of the druid Getafix to find a successor after an accident. It was a pretty good kid's film with plenty of screen-time for all the favourite characters with their well-known behaviours, and introducing the pathetic Senator Tomcrus. The cinema itself had a grand total of four people present, which despite its success in France makes me wonder about the future of the franchise.

For a good portion of the past few days I've been working on a workshop on Regular Expressions, which are truly one of the greatest things imaginable when one starts with plain-text data and wants to build information. The workshops starts with a bit of the historical-mathematical aspects, revising some of searching with grep, subsitution with sed, and reporting with awk before moving into incorporating these in shell scripts. This is all parts of my introductory and advanced Linux workshops, which is what most people need. Then one delves into things like POSIX basic and extended regular expressions, grouping, backreferences, alternation. Then there's perl's own regular expression syntax which includes features like lookarounds, backtracking, named capture groups and even more - but for a four-hour workshop there are limits. The further one goes down this path the more complex the syntax becomes and more is tempted by the verbose, but clear, Simple Regex Language.

Naturally enough in the excess of spare time available, I've been continuing my studies and research. Research-wise there is another paper in the works for the HPC Certification forum in the Journal of Computational Science Education, plus there will be a BoF at the International Supercomputing Conference. Study-wise, most of the work has been in economics, but with a moderate amount for the higher education and information systems course. For the latter, I received a mid-term grade back this morning which I am less than happy with - it's a solid pass and all, but it's several percent below what I am used to and mainly because the tutor has assessed me on their criteria, rather than the advertised criteria. I will be putting in an appeal at the end of the course, regardless of what my final mark is. That sort of mistake needs to go on their record.

Speaking of records, last weekend was Record Store Day and caseopaya and I took the oportunity to visit Dutch Vinyl. There was quite a good selection of collectibles there with a moderate price-tag. I fell down the prog-rock path and picked up Hawkwind's Space Ritual, a truly great album for the original space rockers, and The Pentateuch of the Cosmogony, an early multi-media effort (art, book, music). It dove-tailed quite well with the weekend's session of Eclipse Phase which mostly involved debates of what to do about an increasingly powerful hive-mind of scientists and technicians who have acquired psychic powers and a double-agent within the group.

Last Friday I attended a pleasant gathering at The Black Cat, quite a Melbourne icon of some Perth visitors, hosted by Jason M. and Megan M., which involved quite a collection of recent and old Perth migrants (and others), some of whom I hadn't seen for literally decades. Yet despite the animated conversation and good spirits, there was a sombre mood in the background as we inevitably reflected on the events in Christchurch that day. There is a great deal of distaste left in my mouth witnessing numerous politicians, including the Australian Prime Minister, who have vilified Muslims for years and then expressed horror when an extremist massacres people of said faith. For one Sky News reporter, who had lived a double-life for too long, this was a time to leave. I try to be sensitive to personal contexts and not to elevate them (as even good media is want to do), but I do have a heightened visceral reaction to this. As many readers will know, the South Island is a special place for me, and home is where the heart is.

Life, however, goes on for the living and even mine as I try to pack more in a couple of lives in my allocated time. The following day would have been my 1,000th day-streak on Duolingo - and I forgot with the last leaf for the day as I was distracted by macroeconomics of all things. Thank goodness for the streak-freeze. As it turns out I've taken to writing short essays as I'm working my way through my economics courses, looking at market concentration in various industries, monetary policy and money, and - coming soon - the ideal size of government. Another area of interest is in the next couple of days I'll be taking the course to become a credited Software Carpentry instructor, something that's been on my bucket-list for five years. Unfortunately, the classes are in the U.S. and I'll have to attend by video-conferencing and do so from 3 am in the morning to 11 am. Nevertheless it was too good an opportunity to miss out on, and a couple of days working ridiculous hours will just be the price I have to pay.

Ran Eclipse Phase on Sunday with the PCs now in the role of Proxies managing a team of Sentinels. Dealing with a direct existential risk one group decided to enhance an existing intra-Transhuman conflict rather than take a peaceful but even more dangerous option. Another Proxy has the interesting task of receiving two jobs from competing factions, one to kidnap a group and the other to prevent it. The other Proxy has the issue of having to extract information from the equivalent of a minister of internal security. It's all quite challenging and as yet unresolved, but in terms of rising tension, there's plenty of that. Afterwards, there was a committee meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative which went well, following by dinner with nephew Luke. I took the opportunity to introduce to some material of Radio Birdman and, in somewhat related news, have discovered that one of the main people behind the musical act New Waver works in the same building as me. I was quite a fan of what they were doing in the late 1990s, so the opportunity to meet up is tempting.

The start of the year has been pretty productive just a couple of weeks in. I've had a flurry of activity over the past few days, making extremely good progress on the Papers & Paychecks supplement, Cow-Orkers in the Scary Devil Monastery. I was especially happy with my decision to make western dragons basement-dwelling advocates of the gold standard with a taste for young maidens ("Technically, I'm a ebevore", they say). If I had them wearing fedoras it would be too obvious. Write-up for last Sunday's Eclipse Phase game is done, and on Thursday we had another session of Megatraveller following our successful acts of piracy against the Aslan. Tomorrow is RuneQuest Questworld.

I've been making good progress marching through my MSc in Information Systems and the Grad Dip in Economics. Received a rather acceptable 85% for the final assignment in the former (a proposal for an immersive online learning platform). The latter is one of those horrible and archaic subjects where everything is determined by a single exam (who does that in 2019?) which might actually benefit me given my capacity to cram. Have been trying to install gretl from source on the HPC system (packaged version was easy on the laptop) and have discovered some very interesting ways it handles LAPACK. Apropros such things have also had a little rant which generated some interest on Simple FOSS versus Complex Enterprise Software; summary version; simple but hard FOSS that is interoperable is better than complex but easy feature-rich closed-source software.

For the Isocracy Network I've put out a couple of 'blog posts both directed at individuals who prefer to let ideology take precedence over facts, namely Mark Latham on Drugs (there is such beauty to the variance the English language allows), The Fame Geoff Kelly Deserves (I've been sitting on that one for a while). I have also been busy on Rocknerd as well, with two reviews - one of the The The concert in Melbourne a couple of months back and another of Gary Numan's Savage (Songs from a Broken World). Finally, I spent a few days going over the French translation of David Gerard's Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, noting only a couple of major errors, a few suggested improvements, and a couple of cases where the translation improved the original (surely not!).

Have made several preparations for the Isocracy Annual General Meeting (FB link) with Professor Clinton Fernandes on Timor-Leste issues, along with the relase of the monthly newsletter, released the same day I have a few words to say about Invasion Day and Captain Cook. I've also put my hand up to be a correspondent for LabourStart, which will mean a bit of digging around on various matters of industrial action in this country. For what it's worth, a new enterprise agreement is being voted on at work which is a result of the "mostly successful" action of the NTEU. It is still perplexing how some people express disdain for unions, let alone never join, but are quite willing to take the wages and benefits that union members campaign for and deliver. I guess they think that negotiations for wages and conditions is between equals or something.

With a month to go before the end of ticket sales, RuneQuest Glorantha Con III is moving along reasonably well. Mark Morrison has stepped up to announce he'll run a session of 13th Age Glorantha which is very nice of him. Today I officially launched the auction submission and auction bidding pages which includes some of old favourites from my personal collection. In actual play having an off-week as our regular GM is away on holidays, however still planning on our regular RuneQuest game on Sunday. In addition it looks like I'll be going to PopCon in Ballarat tomorrow, a one-day popular culture event, which will provide an ideal opportunity to promote RQ Con.

Yesterday a good portion of the day was spent cleaning out Rick's apartment. It was truly impressive how much he managed to squeeze into that tiny one-bedroom apartment, although a good portion of it was folders stuffed full of print out of journal articles and the like scanning a dizzying array of subjects. Denny of Red Rabbit Rubbish Removal was hired to help out with the job and he brought along a couple of francophone youngsters to help out. In three hours they'd emptied the place with the exception of a small amount of books and various personal effects that I saved. It's a rather amazing and sobering experience to see ninety percent of a person's life go into the back of a truck, yet as Denny pointed out (a) I'll see a lot more of this as I get older and (b) somebody will have to do it to me one day.

That evening managed to drag my somewhat weary carcass off to see The The who are on the final leg of their "comback tour". I have mixed feelings about this band (well Matt Johnson and friends). When I like them, I really like them, and they have a string of great hits all of which are quite worthy. However a lot of their other material comes across quite flat to me, as aural filler. It was an enthusiastic concert for the fans who haven't seen them play for decades, although they came out a little rough on the edges despite obvious competencies. Over the course of the concert caught up with a few people I know, including neighbour Adam, The Dwarf, Gwaine Mc., and at least caught sight of Glenn K., and Robbie C., who I was supposed to see before the show started. Naturally enough will give a more complete review on Rocknerd and, as a reminder to self, must do my increasingly out-of-date review of Blue Man Group.

Many decades ago, whilst living in the notorious dilapidated goth-punk duplex that was The Accelerated House, I was fossicking through Jay Nova's record collection and decided to play Nostalgia by The Chameleons. That was the beginning of a great love for said band, and whilst I engaged in some correspondence with frontman Mark Burgess in 2002, I had given up on the possibility of ever seeing them live. Well, that changed on Friday night, and damn they were very good indeed (as were, I must add, were the support act, Panic Syndrome). Managed to have a chat with Mark after the show and apart from the obligatory signings (including of a toy SUSE chameleon I had brought along), he was pleasant and friendly - which contrasts quite strongly to his maudlin lyrical content. Something of note was the number of younger fans that the band still attracts. In other Rocknerd news, I have just published a review of last year's concert with Snog and Severed Heads where my biggest complaint is that they could have made the concert longer, in a better locations, and taken more of my money.

Much of the rest of the weekend was dealing with RPG Review Cooperative activities. This included food preparation for the Annual General Meeting (yours truly has ended up as coop president again) and the conduct of the BBQ itself. We were planning to have it at Studley Park but the combination of crowds and the fact that half the BBQs were broken meant we ended up at Bellbird picnic area instead - which was devoid of people and with functioning equipment. It was a great afternoon, a good turnout, and the business side of the meeting went along painlessly. We've done extraordinarily well for an association that's only a couple of years old with publications, journal, and a rather massive library. The following night was another Cooperative advertised event, another visit to the Astor Theatre, this time to view the pure schlock, yet curiously popular, cheap Italian horror movies from the 1970s - Suspiria and Zombi 2.

Last week I saw Blade Runner 2049 at IMAX which some fellows from the RPG Review Cooperative. A couple of days later caseopaya and I went to see it at the Balwyn Place in a much smaller theatre. I am somewhat of a fan of the original, indeed I have lived much of its life with it being my favourite film, an advocate for its style and the cyberpunk subgenre it spawned, its themes, and of course, greatly enjoying the soundtrack. Thirty five years after the original, a sequel is released - most of the main actors in the sequle weren't even alive when the original came out. Anyway, I've let my two viewings sink in and given the sountrack several listenings and have felt brave enough to pen a review of the film on livejournal's cyberpunk community (even if I am apparently the last person posting there), and a review of the sountrack on Rocknerd. My summary version is that both the film and soundtrack are excellent, and give respect to the original. But there are some significant problems with both (poor dialogue in the film, immersion breaking and lack of movement on the soundrack).

It was the second post I have made to Rocknerd this week, the first being a few coments on the curious alliance between the Juggalos and the Democratic Socialists of America. On Sunday night caseopaya and I went to see Snog and Severed Heads at the Corner Hotel; surprisingly cheap tickets and a rather good concert as well. So reddragdiva will be getting a third Rocknerd article soon in as many weeks. I do hope I can coax him to write one article for the Isocracy Network as well on his recent book. I also have a review in progress of Slowdive's relatively new self-titled album. Also, in absolutely astounding news (from my perspective anyway), The Chameleons will be playing in Melbourne next year.

The last three days I have been in Sydney for the OpenStack Summit and alas, I haven't had much to do except go to the conference, to the hotel, and take an occasional walk around Darling habour. Most visits I have managed to catch up with a friends this time and I feel somewhat guilty for not managing to do so this time. It is a big event although only have the size of the northern hemisphere summits and I did manage to catch up with a lot of people from that side of the industry. Stig Tifler gave me a physical copy of the book I contributed to. From the several talks I viewed, the two which really stood out where Andy Botting's Monitoring the Nectar Research Cloud (youtube), the Nova Project Onboarding, and Questions to Make Your Storage Vendor Squirm (youtube). Special thanks also to the generosity of Juniper Networks who hosted a harbour cruise and dinner on the Starship Aqua. whilst providing information about OpenContrail.