Lev Lafayette's journal

One of the ways that affirmation occurs for those who live by the keyboard is that your essays are read and then circulated. I've had two such experiences recently. The first was my letter to members and associates of the Australia China Friendship Society (ACFS) Victoria on the 75th anniversary of its founding of the People's Republic. Apart from the hundreds of people it is distributed to normally, local members and other state branches have also asked me if they could forward and republish. The second such experience occurred just today when a member of East Timor Women Australia (ETWA) asked if they could republish my review of the Tais Exhibition and Symposium, as it includes a combination of a capsule history, personal experiences, and a review of both events.

If this wasn't enough, I have received similar feedback in recent days from multiple sources concerning three HPC workshops that I ran the week previous which started from the Linux command-line and ended with profiling and debugging MPI code, which is quite a firehose to drink from in three days if you're starting as a newbie. Over the years I have become accustomed to receiving positive feedback from doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from these workshops. After all, when you have complex problems and big datasets being introduced to supercomputing opens your eyes to computational possibilities. However, when such remarks are made by professors and lecturers with years of experience in the HPC world you can be forgiven for thinking that you've done a fairly good job. Apropos, in a few weeks I will be giving a presentation at eResesearch Australasia with the snappy title "The Spartan HPC Story: From Small Scale Experimental to Top500 and Beyond". This is story of a brave little supercomputer that started on sticky-tape and elastic bands and now is one of the most powerful systems in the world.

The third related item is that I've started work on my doctoral studies in climatology and sustainability. Being just a couple of weeks in it is an orientation period where one is introduced to the Euclid University way of doing things, which includes using their preferred tools. Coming from an open-source world it never ceases to surprise me how products like Microsoft Word (for example) are the default; a lot of this of course is because educators themselves teach how to use a tool rather than the underlying principles of learning such tools and then cycle of ignorance continues. For the shell game that is referencing systems, the University prefers Chicago-style referencing with Zotero for tracking (at least that is open-source). In the future, I may get an exemption to use my preference, IEEE style, notable for being spartan in implementation and free from unconscious biases.

The past week, in addition to my usual work, has consisted of my annual series of five guest lectures for the UniMelb master's level course, "Cluster and Cloud Computing" which covers supercomputing from a high level, the local system, job submission, parallel programming, more than enough Python, and a modicum of Linux commands. The course coordinator and I had some discussions about how the education system is prepared to teach the intricacies of object-orientated programming, but core operating system commands are learned by osmosis. After all this comes the marking of the 380 students enrolled this year. In addition, I have three days of workshops to run next week, with much greater detail and with the addition of regular expressions into the mix.

I have been blessed by a few occasions this week with a visit of my dear Darwin friend, Lara D. Hilariously, we met at the airport at 12.30am on Saturday morning, as her plane from Darwin arrived at the same time as mine did from Townsville. Shortly afterward we found ourselves visiting the Triennial exhibition for what must be the fourth time or so for myself and later in the week it was off to the Da Vinci (and friends) exhibition at Lume, which is another impressive show (although I twitched a bit on a misattributed quote, which is sloppy of them), with VR flyovers, drawing classes, a lovely cafe, and Lume's signature immersive experience of art and music, in this case mainly 19th and 20th century Italian operatic.

On a more culinary and personal aesthetic dimension I hosted a very nice dinner for Liana F., Julie A., and Erica H., during the week which included confit byaldi, the signature dish from the film "Ratatouille", which turned out pretty well for my first attempt at this; it looks fancy, but it's pretty straight-forward). Another event of note was attending Anthony L's wonderful annual gathering at "Life's Too Short", attending with Ruby M. We took the opportunity to visit the NGV at Federation Square beforehand with the wide collection from the Joseph Brown collection. Anthony, as host of his event, noted that it was International Submarine Day and offered plentiful AUKUS-based "yellow submarine" cocktails (rum, tequila, citrus, with more than a dash of imperialism). It dovetailed well with my attendance the day prior at a Labor Against War meeting with former Qld Senator Margaret Reynolds visiting in support.

The past two days have been taken up with delivering training workshops and the two days previous a hefty proportion of the time spent generating new content and revision for said courses, along with marking assignments for the university's Cluster and Cloud computing unit. From the latter there were a few assignments that made me think "What on earth are they doing?" and a few where the students quite clearly understood what was going on; which I would hope for a master's level course. As for the training workshops, the Parallel Processing was in need of a decent revision and I had new content for GNU Parallel in particular. Alas, this meant that the content that I had for the debugging and profiling part of the workshop was cut shorter than what I would have liked. Then, for the new course, HPC Databases, I delivered pretty good content on the file system, data management and resources, and especially embedded databases with job submission, but when it came to the rather major component of database servers I'd left out a line in the configuration in the midst of a live demonstration - so nothing worked after that.

In the midst of this, the kitchen sink suffered a blockage. I tried the usual methods - plunger, hot water, baking soda and vinegar, wire, caustic soda - before resigning myself to some home maintenance. I'm not afraid of such things having lived in houses with questionable plumbing in the past (ahh, those Accelerated House days), so working step-wise from the drain basket I removed the piping piece-by-piece to discover that there was a fine collection of immovable gunk in the trap that was causing the problem. It's a wet and messy business, so I put it all back together and thought the problem was solved. Alas, my enthusiasm for pipe removal meant that the twenty-year-old plumber's putty had given out and now I have leaking pipes, so a trip to collect some silicone as a replacement is in order.

I've taken both events in rather good humour. It all rather reminded me of one of my earliest forays into this profession (IT in a general sense) when I worked as a volunteer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor-Leste twenty years ago. That had more than a few challenging issues, to say the least, given the lack of basic infrastructure or even a semi-reliable electricity supply. In the early months I my time there I had the opportunity to spend some time with one Gabriel Accascina who was responsible for setting up the satellite link so that the (refounded) new country have at least some sort of link to the wider Internet. His previous background included developing a sewerage system in Bangladesh. "It's all shit through pipes", I quipped. But it really is; the data (like the spice) must flow. A lesson plan that doesn't quite work out, a blocked sink. All of these fade into the category of "first-world problems" in comparison to getting just basic infrastructure in place.

The mad month of March continues. I knew it was going to be tricky finishing one full-time degree whilst starting another full-time degree, but I am getting through it. The fact it has been coupled with my usual full-time work with additional casual lecturing and tutoring has really meant that my life consists of (a) get up (b) work (c) study (d) sleep and repeat. Still, there is light at the end of the tunnel; completed two workshops today for Cluster and Cloud Computing, I have a lecture to deliver tomorrow, followed by another workshop, and then marking assignments. I've been successful at getting some particularly finicky software installs completed (ceres-solver and pytorch in particular), and I've finished multiple assignments for the master's in climate science degree, the most important I believe being of the relative virtues of carbon taxes versus emission trading; I fall slightly in favour of the latter, although both can run in parallel.

Still, it hasn't been "all work and no play". Liana kindly dragged me out on Friday night to a local pub, "The Rubber Chicken", to see some comedy for a couple of hours (I thought the MC was the best). And on Sunday I spent the afternoon in the fine company of Erica, Angela, and Rob, followed by dinner with Anthony where we primarily discussed the very expensive submarine deal and Keating's remarks that there should be an internal ALP revolt against it. The reality is that they are ridiculously expensive, they're not designed for defensive purposes, they won't achieve their objectives (let's face it, it's to contain China), and they'll be obsolete before they're deployed. So what's the point?

This week, and appropriately for the week, I had the opportunity to see two lectures by two different feminists. The first was the ever-enjoyable Rosi Braidotti at The Capitol on International Women's Day, giving an almost utopian and science-fiction perspective of post-human feminism under conditions of neoliberalism, with Spinoza's ethics of joy and affirmation as empowering. It also out it was also her retirement from academia speech. Something like four years ago I have the honour of seeing her at the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference in the Netherlands, and like that conference, I managed to sneak in a bit of a chat at the end of the proceedings.

As a bit of a juxtaposition last night Liana F., and I went to see Charla Hathaway's "Naked at My Age" at The Butterfly Club a rather charming multi-story retro-bar and theatrette. Hathaway provided an amusing (and it has to be) recital of her life journey concerning teaching, sexual experiences, reproductive rights, and eventually her decision at 54 to become a sex worker (and as can be imagined she's also an advocate for decriminalisation of such work). We had quite a chat after the show, especially concerning her upcoming tour of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Apart from that most of this week (with the exception of a visit from Erica H., to watch the rather charming pro-animal rights Korean film, Okja my life has been utterly buried among work and study. From the former, I have recently completed two reviews on usage following training, and matters concerning a potential new HPC, along with attending a farewell function for a staff member who has spent the past twenty years in storage and data management, most recently with MediaFlux. For the latter, my first assignment for climate change science has been submitted, and I continue to power on towards an early completion for my psychology degree, with the first assignment (on identity as a social process) completed. Eighteen days before the end of the ridiculously busy month! Onwards!

This week started with the regular delivery of three days of supercomputing workshops with the final day on parallel programming. There was a good turnout to each of the workshops, and some excellent questions, especially on the last day which led to building a few more examples in the code repository that I keep for researchers. Whilst I have almost completed the expected number of workshops that work has set for me this year, I also want to revise and get as much content established in a self-managed manner for researchers, although I do know that many prefer to have my presence in the room, so to speak. In a few minutes I'll be continuing the process of bringing the content to an international stage by attending the Steering Board of the HPC Certification Forum. In other vaguely education-appropriate news, I managed to top the Diamond League in Duolingo again. Finally, although it is not due for a few more weeks, I am over halfway through my next assignment for DevoPsych. I confess that I'm rather itching to do the final, neurological-based unit - not just because I'd love to get my teeth in the subject matter, but also with the desire to finish two degrees in a single year.

Despite some appearances to the contrary, I am not entirely a person of work and study. A couple of nights in the past week I have caught up with Erica H. where we've been making some progress through the fourth season of Stranger Things. Assuming there are no thematic twists, I am quite enjoying the social juxtaposition between the unpopular but salubrious nerds and freaks in the Dungeons & Dragons club compared to the popular-but-toxic jocks and normals associated with the basketball team. I have a lot to say about toxic communities based on competition, but I'll reserve that for another day. Another significant social event was Raph and Rach's combined birthday (50 and 40) held at The Party House, a rather good venue. There were some truly wonderful and good friends present, and a lot of new friendly faces, overwhelmingly of good and intelligent character. Alas, late into the night I found myself struck by a sudden wave of melancholy and thought it best to make a quiet exit. With the rationality of hindsight, I probably should have stayed, but sometimes such emotions are hard to fight.

In the past few days I've been carrying out my casual lecture work for the Uni's master's level course, "Cluster and Cloud Computing". As a compulsory subject for computer science and data science students, it is perhaps not surprising that there are over three hundred students in the class, which is just huge for a subject at this level. Anyway, my contribution covers supercomputing, schedulers, and parallel programming. Their job (when I am converted from lecturer to tutor) is to produce code that deals with a data problem that uses these technologies. At the other end of the lecturn, I'm getting ready to submit my first assignment for my Grad Psych degree, on recidivism, which will be a little critical of disciplinary focus (worth stirring the possum early on). Further, I'm just about to submit a second draft of MHEd thesis for my supervisor, with a third and final one due at the end of next month.

After three weeks of selling off a good portion of my collection of tabletop roleplaying games, I've raised some $8.5K AUD for the UNHCR to provide support for refugees from the Ukraine-Russian war. There was also a generous donation of two sets of dice from a local Kickstarter effort from a certain Anthony Christou, so there's now a short video of yours truly conducting a raffle from donors for that prize. It's all very fun and sociable to be distracted by games and RPGs actually give one an opportunity for mental exploration of a shared imaginary space that other games do not. But one must always be cognisant of reality foremost. It is a source of significant depression to me that humans, once a level of wealth is acquired, seem more distractable by trivialities and lose their sense of solidarity with those less fortunate.

Recent events have led me to become more sociable of late. Justine and Simon were awesome company at the former's new digs with deep conversations of motorbikes and psychology (Justine really is patient zero). Wajeeha proved once again to be a very welcome visitor, and I'll never cease to be amazed how this wonderful woman has liberated herself from horrendous patriarchial and theological conditions to become the person they are today. Friday evening was a scavenger hunt in Fitzroy organised by the Wilds Arts Social Club with music and art objectives. About forty people were in attendance with a live performance by Synthotronica. Three sisters from the winning team decided to take me, a judge, for a night on the town with their winnings (oh my). Erica, with awesome cats, continues to be a loyal friend and on Sunday we went to Francis Ford Francis Ford Coppola's adaption of SE Hinton's "The Outsiders". I liked his attempt to recreate 1950s movie styles (albeit with a couple of anachronisms), and as a youngster I found myself identifying with The Greasers, the kids from the wrong side of town. Tonight I was blessed with a visit from Liza and Matthew, two campaigners for the recent successful changes to sex-work decrmininalisation in Victoria; more power to you, comrades.

It is easy to forget that it's been a few days since I've posted anything, especially given that the first three of those days were delivering high performance computing training workshops. Whilst I am sure newcomers get a lot out of the first two, the third (Regular Expressions) was perhaps the most interesting to me, especially as I've reviewed the course to include a great deal more about incorporating regexes into HPC job submission scripts and even after the course adding content about how to further incorporate GNU parallel. I rather get the feeling that there is potentially too much content from such a tool and, with the potential addition of parallel processing using Python as an introduction (compared to C and Fortran), I might have to split my existing workshop into two. Another project for 2022, I guess.

Most of Victoria's restrictions were eased on Thursday, for the fully vaccinated, having reached close to 90%+ double-dose vaccination for those aged 12 or older. On the first night out caseopaya and I went to a concert; Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' at The Athenaeum Theatre, a rather charming "old Melbourne" venue. We originally booked to see Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" but, 'rona being what it was, caused three cancellations of that performance. Played in shopping centres everywhere, "Le quattro stagioni" was quite an innovative group of concertos for its time for its naturalistic representations, and this concert certainly represented that style faithfully, also interspersing with the somewhat less well-known sonnets, before concluding with part II of the Sønderho Bridal trilogy.

Today ventured into the city with a meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, especially discussing the third attempt of the Federal government to introduce it's "religious discrimination" bill. A number of people also attended online but I rather failed to account for the effects of ambient noise in an open environment. The city was also had a number of protestors of the anti-vaccination, anti-employment mandates, anti-pandemic legislation which, as has been observed, are very much based on "outrage first, detail second" (if ever) and are very prone to the most foolish conspiracies (I've seriously seen "zombie apocalypse" claims) but more disturbingly, the advocacy of violence. In both cases, I suspect that the relevant legislation will be passed by the end of the year, with amendments.

At midnight tonight Melbourne opens up, somewhat, having reached a 70% double-dosed vaccination level; really I we need about 90%+. I am not particularly comfortable with this given that there are currently over 20,000 active cases in Victoria, compared to just over 5,000 in New South Wales. One can simply urge people to be careful, be cautious, keep an eye on those numbers, and avoid the unvaccinated like the plague. Because, if the math is right, these figures will increase and very quickly, and this will weigh very heavily on healthcare workers. Apropos, I have also taken the opportunity to correspond with the primary author of a Burnet Institute report which last year pointed out the Melbourne lockdown prevented 18,686 cases in July, and he gave me the data for August of this year - instead of 5,643 cases for that month, we had 1,001.

But on this note, what's the wildest vaccine conspiracy you've encountered? Today, a person was trying to tell me (after claiming that vaccinators would be prosecuted "under the Nuremberg code") that "the pedos" had paid bribe money to medical administrators across thousands of GP clinics across Australia to falsify vaccination numbers over the last year and continue to do. When I asked for their motivation they responded "they're pedos" and said that they would categorize me in the same if I didn't "do my research". They did claim they're doing a PhD on this particularly novel research, although they couldn't tell me which institution has accepted their candidacy. They did tell me that that they were a scientist and widely educated. However, they couldn't tell show me any recent journal publications under their name. I followed their LinkedIn profile and they have (or at least studied) a Diploma in Recreation (Fitness), a Diploma in Early Childhood Education, and a Diploma in Business. They also claim to have a Masters in Public Administration, but that's from a production company that they run not an accredited educational institution. I don't think they liked me pointing this out to them!

Much of the past several days, even in my nominal personal hours, have been spent on work-related tasks. This includes adding exam content for the HPC Certification Forum (we had a board meeting last night), submitting an abstract for eResearchNZ for next year on the same, attending the Victorian GPGPU Symposium (great presentation on machine learning for global weather predictions), and a workshop for NCI's supercomputer. My sole non-work-related seminar was China From the Inside, hosted by the Victorian Fabian Society, which was quite worthwhile and will help in my own evolving perspective on said country.

I have been deeply buried at work for most of this week with three HPC training workshops in succession, leaving me quite exhausted as it does. This said the feedback from the researchers is, as ever, very positive, and I was especially glad to have a Monash University HPC educator in attendance as well with a promise for further collaboration in the future. Education in general, and especially in this space, is something that must be collaborative. Collectively we know much more than we do individually. Apropos, I have been fortunate enough that my editor at CRC Press has given me a couple more days to finish the book chapter I am writing for "Cybersecurity & High-Performance Computing Environments". This week I also had a bit of a frank discussion with my MHEd supervisor who seemed very keen to push my thesis in the direction of the various content frameworks for online delivery, whereas I am much more interested in the economics and public policy imperatives. Different approaches in scale, I suppose.

Outside of work I have been fortunate to have some excellent social occasions, including a magnificent French dinner with Jac, Damien, and caseopaya, and then on the following night with Brendan E., and caseopaya to experience the popular culture special of "Army of the Dead", which fulfills the niche of being a zombie-heist film. It had the good sense not to take itself too seriously. I have also been blessed by the company by one lebens_art9, who took some time off work and drove down from Bendigo to keep me company over the past couple of days, as I've some health matters to deal with. They will be, and must be, subject to another post of their own.

Of special note, however, was the move of most of my chattels from The Asylum to my new abode which I call The Grand Mausoleum which, I must admit, is probably the most heart-breaking move of my life from what was supposed to be one of enormous happiness. I cannot be blamed for dragging my feet on this, as the entire experience still weighs too heavily upon me, the foolish romantic that I am. I was helped by Andrew D., who organised the van hire which was an excellent vehicle but just a little too big for the carpark's height restrictions. Failing the Milgram experiment, we followed the recommendation and navigation of the concierge, who navigated us in, where we unpacked and then discovered we were stuck as the ballast was removed. Eventually, we escaped the confines of the building by reducing the air in the tires and having several residents getting in the back of the vehicle. An interesting way to meet the neighbours, and not a story that is easily forgotten!