Lev Lafayette's journal

It has been a very busy week. In part because I seem to have purchased an apartment in Southbank. It's a mere 500m from Flinders Street station, a massive 100m^2, and sold for quite a reasonable price. A bank has offered me an unconditional approval for a loan and, despite a minor error in the contract which all parties are happy with fixing (two different prices on two different pages), everything seems to be in order. My dislike of the real estate industry or the banks has not changed from the experience and really the less I have to do with either the better. Now is the process of paying the formal deposit (rather than the initial holding deposit), wrangling the actual cash from the banks, signing and swapping the transfer of title, and the longer process of moving in. After ten years in the same place, there's a fair bit of work to do. Oh, and as I have even submitted to Victorian parliamentary inquiries needs to be replaced by increased land taxes, in order to increase productivity, housing quantity and standards, and reduce homelessness.

The workweek was one of two days of conducting workshops, an introduction to High Performance Computing and Linux, following by Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC. Then there were three days of eResearch NZ 2021 where, sadly due to circumstances, my attendance and presentation was virtual. My presentation, "Interactive HPC Computation with Open OnDemand and FastX" was a little rushed due to the excessive amount of content I prepared, but better too much than too little. I find many conferences these days of this ilk a little too high-level to my liking, and this was no exception. Still, I will credit the organisers for putting on a pretty good conference under some very difficult circumstances. It was clear that the circumstances were less than optimal, and was certainly reflected in what appeared to be smaller conference numbers than what they normally experience. In-between sessions I also spend a fair bit of time building up the repository of HPC job submission examples for ANSYS, as a user wants to do a dependency relationship between ANSYS, MATLAB, and back to ANSYS again.

But that is not all; today I finished what has been a multi-year D&D campaign of Charlemagne's Paladins in my usual style of historical fantasy. The game ended using a re-worked version of "The Lost City" and a hunt for the Eagle of the XIX with an almighty battle against a Capricorn monster. For something completely different, I also completed a short introductory Epidemiology in Public Health course through John Hopkins University. I am on to the last session of transcripts for the Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat, so hopefully I have that done by tomorrow. All I have to do after that is get all the gaming scenarios in place.