Lev Lafayette's journal

There's been a couple of opportunities for exploring the arts this week with Erica H., being present for both events. The first was entitled "Folio Live" for graduating students in Interactive Composition from the University of Melbourne, which combined film, animation, dance, and theatre. The second was the Australian World Orchestra and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (again, recent graduates) performing Mozart, Glinka, and Dvořák, the latter as always being very impressive to me. This coming Tuesday I also have an evening with Alison B., for Chant du Saxophone Ténor with pieces from Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Glazunov. Whilst in so many ways Southbank is the Manhatten of Melbourne with its towers of glass and steel, it is also a great arts precinct, and I cannot imagine living here without taking advantage of that.

On the work-related front, the Spartan supercomputer has finally run the necessary tests on part of the upgraded system, earning itself a certificate in the top 500 this week as the third most powerful ranked system in the country (after NCI and Pawsey). The assessment actually leaves out a good portion of our GPU nodes that would have pushed our ranking even higher and doesn't include any of our CPU-only nodes which would have given it another third in performance. This said the Top500 is really a marketing exercise that provides an at-a-glance indication of improved computational performance over time. The real metric is how much successful research is done, and on that criteria, we're doing extremely well. On that matter, the first three days of next week will include HPC training workshops, including "High Performance and Parallel Python", which I have spent a fair bit of this past week doing further development.

Finally, there is some academic progress for the Masters of Climate Change Science and Policy. As expected my illness in the assessment week had led to a dip in grades, although in one case it really strikes me as quite implausible. Nevertheless, by my calculations I have two A- grades for "Climate Change Mitigation" and "Climate Change Impacts Adaption" and have fallen just short of one with a B+ for "International Climate Change Policy"; I am still waiting for the results form "Climate Change Lessons from the Past". In any case, I am certain to have received a sufficient overall grade to do the research paper, which will be a 15,000-word essay on climate change impacts, adaption, and mitigation in developing Pacific nations - that is, combining content from the year's study. I am extremely tempted to take a visit to one such set of islands in the next month or so as part of that research, and the most likely candidate is looking like Vanuatu.

I have become an MBA student! Specifically at the Chifley Business School, the programme in technological management is very sensibly designed, allowing one to complete a Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma and then Masters in succession. One of the matters pointed out at my last workplace performance review was that at some stage I'll have to choose between the management path and technical path. With postgraduate qualifications in technological management, at least I can become a manager and still justify having an interest in technical developments. Speaking of technology, which bank gets confused about some fairly trivial technical and security issues on their own helpdesk system?

Went with caseopaya, Meghan, Erin and Jenny to see AvenueQ at the Comedy Theatre, an adult version of Sesame Street. Not quite on the same scale of purile hilarity as Meet The Feebles, it still is memorable for the classic The Internet's For Porn (youtube). Appropriately we ate at Mrs. Parmas beforehand (amazing how many people don't get that old joke). Also have booked tickets to the performance Servant of the Revolution next month.

Following that tangent (see how my life links together?), have written article on Revolutionary Reformism as an appropriate strategy in liberal democratic states on isocracy.org which will be reprinted later this week on LeftFocus. One thing that should be mentioned here is that said strategy certainly isn't appropriate for countries where the pretence of democratic elections is clearly a sham (read: Iran), rather than supposedly due to "false consciousness", or other dubious claims of leftist elitism.

Have added a few more RPG items to the list for sale on Ebay; more coming soon.