Lev Lafayette's journal

There are currently two unbelievably bad matters of corruption and mismanagement facing Australia that have been subject to a Royal Commission in the past week. The first was into the banking and finance sector, and various cover-ups and predatory activities. The Federal government, on no less than twenty-three occasions, blocked motions to have an investigation. When Commissioner Hayne handed down his report, the incumbent treasurer (my local member) tried to turn it into a photo opportunity. In response, commissioner Hayne showed what I think was dignified restraint. For his part, the Prime Minister is still trying to block the Commission, warning against any "rash" responses. Which is, of course, code for "we're going to ignore the recommendations, business-as-usual, lalalala".

The second that should be attracting more attention is the gross negligence of the Murray-Darling basin, the largest water system on the driest continent. You would think that this would bring down any government in a civilised country, but not Australia (not so civilised, apparently). Over a year ago it was reported that the scheme was for the benefit of cotton farmers, with the minister positively crowing that he had taken water out of the environment into agribusiness. Now the drought has hit, there's a million dead fish (some up to a hundred years old) and cotton executives have turned themselves in for millions in fraud. It stinks the high heavens, although I don't think that's where those responsible are heading.

Whilst I quietly seethe at this unbelievable combination of corruption and negligence and the inevitable results, I'm still trying to have something akin to a life in my spare time. I was supposed to be teaching this coming week, but that's been canceled because of an administrative error outside my control. I had an animal weirdness magnet hit me yesterday in two parts, the first having to carry a dead dachshund off the road; it had just been run over, and there was heavy traffic. Intervening between the body and the cars, I moved the poor thing to a side park where a neighbour of the owner took over. Then, returning home we discovered that Gremory rabbit had been dug up the previous night, presumably by a local fox.

Apart from that I've been plodding away with various coursework and installs at work, including a submission for the IEEE conference in Prague. I've been working away at the mountain that is my economics material (mostly macro this week), along with some assessable requirements for my MSc, which I've pretty much completed. There has been some opportunity for gaming, and ran both Exalted China and Eclipse Phase this week. In addition, I have made some pretty good sales on Traveller material, reducing my stock of items on said game system to just a handful of books. Plans are afoot for another RPG Review BBQ event, given that we didn't have one for the AGM; March 3 is looking like a probable candidate.

Sunday was my 51st orbit around the sun and, as is my want, I actually needed reminding of the day by a work colleague late last week. This is a rather regular occurrence for me as close friends will testify. Indeed, it wasn't until virtually the last moment that I decided to do anything for my 50th, and just as well I did, it turned out to be a great night. Whilst I'm not really into birthday celebrations myself I am, always, overwhelmed with by the number and quality of people who take the time to send me wishes on this day. Somehow I've ended up with a truly remarkable and invigorating circle of friends from various branches of life that I have an interest in.

As for the day itself, I treated it pretty much any other alternate Sunday - ran a session of Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels found themselves promoted to probational Proxy Agents to deal with an escaped mad AI and de-escalate a war. For characters that had been operatives for the past couple of years of play, the switch to management and recruitment was an interesting alternative challenge. Apropos the previous day was our semi-regular CheeseQuest with hathhalla and ser_pounce. We played Cthulhu Wars that day, a real monster of a game (pun not intended), where the Elder Gods are in conflict to take over the world (obviously). In this instance, the crawling chaos led by Nyarlathotep just pipped yellow sign of Hastur. Despite the size of the game and the quantity of pieces, it was pretty easy to play and quite well paced. I just can't imagine myself owning a game physically that size. Finally on-topic I've added some 150 or so classic Traveller books to the RPG Review store, all in preparation for Arcanacon this weekend.

The other big event of the weekend was going to the MC Escher exhibition at the National Gallery of Victory. In my younger years I was quite taken by his works which combined mathematical approaches to perspectives (resulting in impossible objects) and tessellations. In many ways it was a combination of seemingly contradictory approaches of cubism and surrealism, both of which he was a contemporary. Alongside this major exhibition was the pop and lighthearted Julian Opie, which included a fun and interactive "kids studio", which unsurprisingly was full of adults.

The past few days has seen me write over ten thousand words for a variety of projects, mostly scenarios for Papers & Paychecks, articles and material for RPG Review Issue 41, write-ups for Exalted China, unexpectedly completing another Golden Owl for Duolingo (Italian to English) and, as a complete aside, a small number for my final tutorial discussion on "The Internet of Things" for Digital Innovations, where I took a pretty dark turn on the subject. The combination of artificial expert systems, militarisation, and miniaturisation is an issue that has troubled me for some time, and I am yet to encounter a convincing argument that says that with each step in military technology we bring our own species-extinction a little closer. I have also written a few paragraphs on a new Norwegian comedy, or more to the point, how Norway can have such a comedy show by having an equivalent of a mining tax, and Australia missed out.

In happier events, yesterday was the eight-year anniversary of caseopaya unofficially tying the knot. We had a pretty delicious dinner at Estivo, a local restaurant with an excellent reputation (even if the decor was a little modern for my taste) and sadly downed our last bottle of 2012 Glenlofty Shiraz-Viognier, but of course there are plenty more other bottles in the cabinet. Postage being what it is my half of the gifting exchange has not been delivered yet, but I am the recipient of some adorable French hedgehog cufflinks. In many ways, the event encapsulated much about our relationship; Epicurean, functional, content, and low-stress. There are some aspects of more wild and passionate affairs of my youth which I can reminisce with both happiness and hysteria, and I certainly wouldn't want to begrudge such experiences to others - I'll be damned if I become one of those grumpy old men who complains about young people having fun.

Tomorrow I am giving an address at 11 am the Melbourne Unitarian Church entitled The End is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth. Putting it together has been an interesting exercise, ranging from an investigation into various (failed) predictions of earth's apparent demise from religious prophecy to a somewhat more secular investigation into the effects of global warming and the various forms of environmental destruction and the existential threat that poses to human and non-human species. The address correlates quite nicely (and without any pre-planning) with strikes and protests by school students who are understandably frustrated with political inaction. "Protest and survive" was a rallying slogan when I was their age in the early-mid 1980s and the issue was the possibility of nuclear war; it remains just as important and realistic now.

The past few days have also seen significant progress in my MSc in Information Systems studies and having finally received the relevant course material (lost in the post), I'm making some headway in the GradDip in Economics. My weakest point in the latter will be econometrics, an area which I have managed to avoid in most of my life as a student, but a comment by Tim R., in a different context suggests that the best way to learn it will be to program it, which will work nicely as I have planned to write a training course for high-performance computing usage for economists.

A rather full weekend is planned with ser_pounce and hathhalla coming around in about ten minutes for our regular cheesequest followed by a session of D&D which, as is my want, is based on a historical fantasy version of the era of Charlemagne. For this scenario of retrofitted the classic Moldvay scenario The Lost City, placing it in North Africa as they search for the lost Eagle of the XIXth. Tomorrow nephew Luke and his housemate Nick are coming over for dinner; I am considering firing up a game of RuneQuest for them, having given Luke a copy of the game for his birthday a few years back (and he is yet to play).

Most evenings this past week I've spent on finishing articles and doing layout for the 10th anniversary issue of RPG Review, the 40th issue and a special for the RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under. I've actually reached the point where I'd rather my review of game systems of the numerous editions of RuneQuest was actually smaller rather than larger (it's currently twelve thousand words), but much will depend on how everything else fits in, and what spare time I have (in advance, I know that will be very little). In Cooperative news, with content by Karl B., we've published a diversity survey. In actual play this week run Exalted Journey to the Far West on Thursday night which involved a battle with wild boars with human faces, apparently envoys of King Wumu of Chu. Chief suspect is the moody Consort Yuan, who has invited the Solar PCs to dinner in her dilapidated siheyuan. Finally, Pax Australia is on this weekend, and I'll be running RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu.

This week at work we had a planned outage on our HPC system for various upgrades, which fortunately was the day after the large union march which a number of. Despite extensive testing, I suggested and carried out a last minute review of various changes to the planned scheduler upgrade, which revealed that we really should go on version further ahead, which we did. There was a bit of data shuffling on our high-speed scratch disk partition and testing of our recompiled OpenMPI versions of which which involved me writing several scripts, making extensive use of shell expansion and heredocs. A range of invitations has been sent out to introduce various HPC educators in Australia and New Zealand on the International HPC Certification Programme, which will correlate nicely with the BoF at Supercomputing next month. Finally, spent a bit of time working through the review comments for the co-authored paper between our UniMelb team and the University of Freibug team for Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal.

As I've started hitting the peak level on various languages on Duolingo I've found this week that revision is consisting of cross-over between languages that I've already worked on. After all, why revise one language (e.g., English to German) when you can revise two simulatenously (e.g., Italian to German)? It's been a valuanble process not only for revision purposes but also because the crossovers seems to contain at least a handful of worlds that are not included in the from or to English courses. It is also quite likely to keep me busy for at least an additional month or two, without having to venture out of my comfort zone of standard Romance and Germanic tongues. Finally, to top things off I seem to have done my back in somehow. The past couple of days I've been in serious discomfort and some pain my lower back. Gives me good insight to those who experience it regularly because it really is a little unpleasant (and annoying enough for me to 'blog about it).

Weekend was a full collection of various social activities, starting with attending an exhibition by old friends RJ Cameron and Denham Carr, At The Hard Edge exhibition (FB). Afterwards followed the lead of local artist Cameron Potts (former Sir John Sulman Prize winner) to their studio space in the back of a warehouse in Northcote, where there was also the tail-end and stragglers of a local indie gig. Dave Graney was in attendance, so I thanked him for all the music, and told him he was just too hip (referring to his 1993 hit). For a guy that's pushing sixty it's pretty good to see him make the effort to go out to see undergound indie gigs. Afterwards we stumbled back to Cameron's place for more music and conversation, and I finally decided to head home before the morning sun made an appearance.

Following day included an (thankfully) afternoon trip to Lachlan's Memorial Birthday gathering at the Imperial Hotel, which shows all the signs of becoming a nice tradition, and then on to the annual general meeting of Linux Users of Victoria, where xanni_au stepped down after four years as president, and imajica_lj returned to take up the role after ten or so years since their last tour in the role; not many people come back for a second bite of this cherry. I also announced that this would be my last year on the LUV committee, having held various roles since 2006. It's been a long and fulfilling trip, but with other items coming on my agenda it is about time I gave my activities on LUV over to someone else. Afterwards headed off to Brendan E's place where he showed us a good fan edit of a terrible film; 2012. Cut to around a third of its original length one still gets the main elements of the special effects and plot without loss of continuity. We also watched a few episodes of the dramatic thriller Utopia (not the Papers and Paychecks styled Australian show of the same name), which certainly is a captivating conspiracy.

On Sunday picked up several crates of RPGs which Ben Finney (aka Big Nose of Debian fame) was selling; some real classics in that lot. By the early afternoon caught up with strangedave who was visiting Melbourne, and discussed various matters regarding RuneQuest Down Under which I am pleased to see is doing quite well in terms of registrations. Because strangedave is on of the world's experts in matters RuneQuest and Glorantha he will be a key speaker at the panels planned for the conference. Afterwards I ran a session of Eclipse Phase, which followed on from the previous episode where the Sentienls saved several lobotomised bikini girls with machine guns from the insane L.R. Hobart and made their way to a re-sleeving facility in Belém, Brazil. It hasn't gone well for them as they are now trapped in the hospital's resleeving theatre with dozens of extractors and a hostile supercomputer wanting to make short work of them. Let's see how they get out of this one. After that was the RPG Review Cooperative committee meeting where we discussed various matters relating to the Con, but most importantly thrashed out our first draft of a Code of Conduct. As has been pointed out before, if you don't have one of these earlier, you will regret it later.

Annoyingly I still have the (hopefully) tail-end of bronchitis, which apparently includes a thumping headache, which isn't quite as bad as having trying to breath through lungs full of fluid. For me the most frustrating thing about all this is the dent that it's placed on my productivity and the unfortunate timing with several bigger projects that need attention. I have been fortunate in this regard that other people have stepped in and taken up some of the immediate tasks that require doing, so in part my concerns are more low-level anxiety rather than a complete disaster.

One thing I did manage to achieve was conducting a training day on Friday for Introduction to High Performance Computing Using Spartan. It was a full class and it went reasonably well, although there's a couple of bugs in my sample NAMD job which require fixing - probably just the wrong version of the application. I have courses booked for Friday's for the rest of the month, and probably for the rest of the year given how long the waiting list is. In other education-related matters, finished the extended Esperanto course on Duolingo yesterday and will see if I can get the same done for Spanish this week.

As usual, have had a regular gaming sessoin this week of Megatraveller. Session involved travelling to Neumann to either aid or prevent a scientist for applying a patch to an existing grey goo event, which would either save or destroy the planet (killing billions). By virtue of a pure dice roll at the end it saved the planet, fulfilling a prophecy of our own creation. On a related matter last night binged on Z Nation, which is hardly gripping and full of terrible plot holes (yet a good premise), designed for some amusing set-pieces.

Curious facts about the long weekend. Unlike other state holidays, this Queens Birthday holiday is celebrated by the University of Melbourne not that it's Lizzie's birthday anyway (that's April 21st). Interestingly, we don't have labour day. Although if we really wanted to we could have an 8-hour day holiday to (kinda-sorta) coincide with the real Queen's birthday. But the practical upshot is it's been a long weekend, and I have spent it in a somewhat relaxing manner.

Over in Facebook-land I was tagged in a meme for one's ten most influential films. To date I have listed Ratatouille (2007), Novo Centro (1976) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975). When I've finished the top-ten over there I'll 'blog here with summaries, rather like the Ten Books That Made Me meme from a couple of years ago. Appropriately went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at The Astor on Saturday night, a 50th anniversary screening with 70mm film. It was really quite remarkable seeing this great film at the last of the grand single-screen theatres and the print really made a difference to the resolution.

Apart from that I've had a bit of gaming related activity over the weekend, including a new scene for my ongoing (eleven years now!) HeroQuest Glorantha game, and running a session of Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels have had their first encounter with a TITAN (based on a real world supecomputer facility). Also briefly caught up with fellow gamer ariaflame who is visiting interstate for a science fiction convention.

Finally, have spent more than a few hours today plodding away on a couple of philosophy papers. One, unsurprisingly, is Transparency and Immersion in User Experiences for High Performance Computing which I'll be presenting in the Netherlands in a few weeks. The other I'm dusting off a fairly lengthy piece I wrote for a presentation to The Philosophy Forum a year ago on The Ontology and Epistemology of Race Theory to submit to the Pathways to Philosophy journal.

It's been a busy past few days with various events in the high-performance computing world. Our neighbouring partners, Melbourne Bioinformatics are in the process of having one of their clusters, 'Snowy', upgraded and integrated with Spartan. I raised the issue of ensuring reasonable compatibility of software for users and as a result I have found myself with a list of some six hundred and eighty two applications and versions that I have to install by the time of the move; I should have the first hundred done by the end of the week. Meanwhile, final preparations are underway for Spartan's admission into the Top500, aided by the addition of the GPGPU partition. On the basis of current metrics we're hoping to get around the 250 mark. Meanwhile poor old UTAS has lost their HPC (temporarily) due to flooding. It is a harsh irony that one of the reasons for its existence was to model extreme weather events.

On the RPG front tonight will witness an episode of Exalted, and I completed a write-up of the last session of this mythic Chinese story last night where the heroes made their way from the court of Wang Shenzhi to Nanping. On Sunday ran a session of Eclipse Phase where the Sentinels made their way to Illa na Gorra off the coast of Ibiza, avoiding such TITAN horrors as Creepers and Factals to find the stack of weapons-manufacturer Helga Busenberg (German speakers may snicker now) only to discover it was she who created said weapons in the first place. Apropos had a committee meeting that evening followed with a meeting today with the organiser of Arcanacon concerning the input of the RPG Review Cooperative for that Con next year.

People are probably aware of recent killings in Palestine which occurred simultaneously with the US moving its embassy to Jerusalem. The protests were part of an ongoing right-of-return campaign by Palestinians. It is appropriate to recall that the Gaza strip was captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War with Israel (5/6) and Egypt (1/6) ensuring border closures with Israel ensures a sea and air blockade. The population is not allowed to freely to leave or enter and allowed to freely import or export goods. It is a prison and given the population density (third highest in the world) it is accurate to call it a concentration camp, or even a ghetto. It makes a good example of the recent post on political partisanship. In encountering apologists for the Israeli regime of recent events, I have found that asking them whether their opinion would be the same if the situation was reversed to be quite revealing.

Hosted a Sysadmin Training Day for new and interested Spartan and GPGPU sysadmins and power users; was expected around a dozen people and ended up having close to twenty. It went really well, with others making very worthwhile contributions. I get the sense there is good potential for a working team to come out of this - and just in time, I completed two internal courses at work, Mentoring Others and Building and Managing Teams. Despite being short, both had utterly superb signal-to-noise ratios, and with immediate practical use - much better than most of the facilitated courses that I've been to over the years.

I haven't bee well enough to get out much this week after hours, and as result have only played Eclipse Phase via video conferencing. Nevertheless my writing output has been pretty consistent; finally managed to give a summary for the Eclipse Phase Rimward and Return story which ended in a TPK, and the fourth chapter of the Dungeons & Dragons Vassals of Giselbert historical fantasy which was very heavy certain incidents of Germanic history. In addition, have taken the loose reigns of RPG Review 38 and have written reviews of the classic Star Trek Basic Game by FASA, as well as ICE's SpaceMaster. Both reviews are close to 2000 words apiece. Apart from that I've been making ample usage of the new "crown" system in Duolingo. Hopefully, I'll finish the Dutch tree before I step on the plane.

Recent events in Syria have proven interesting to say the least, starting with the suspected chemical attack in Duoma, followed by Russia using veto in the UN Security Council on a investigation on who could have carried it out, then the US-led strike against suspected chemical weapon facilities, then the medics are intimidated, the inspectors are prevented on reaching the site, and when the finally try to, they are shot at. Meanwhile, there's an amazing amount of complete nonsense in social media about these events, most of which comes under the category of tribalist fake news (people like to believe they are 'in' on a conspiracy). A steafast committment to deliberative analysis remains the boring, but accurate, method of evaluation.