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Last Saturday I hosted the Isocracy Annual General Meeting (FB), where I gave a presentation on "Climate Change and International Relations" which had a few people attend in person (who received a fairly reasonable Indian meal, produced by yours truly) and a few online as well. The content of this presentation will be put online in a few days, but in a nutshell, it dealt with the evidence of global warming, the significance and trends, responsibility, mitigation and adaption, costing, and international enforcement. That night I attended a social gathering organised by Young Labor Professionals, which was low-key on the politics, but quite excellent on a range of other topics. Also related, the following day I ended up tuning into the Fabian Society National AGM, which was addressed by the NSW Minister for climate change Penny Sharpe, who spoke on climate change politics (I rather suspect we should trade notes).

As for the food, attendees at my now thoroughly regular Friday evening at-home-restaurant had the first bite of the papadam, so to speak. I was pretty happy with how my butter faux chicken, saag paneer, and chakka (jackfruit) curry turned out, along with the mango-sago pudding with gulab jamun and coconut cream. As the evening war on we ended up playing a round of Munchkin and the ever-questionable Cards Against Humanity. It served as a lighthearted contrast to my increasingly intense Call of Cthulhu game which I ran on Thursday night, a visit to Rue's Crew on Saturday playing Root (I sat out this one, but it was good to see the May Fourth factions being employed), and most pleasingly on Sunday Karl B's playtest of a post-apocalyptic Melbourne setting with sapient rats and crows; appropriately I spent quite a bit of time with Liz and Karl's real rodents. Finally, as a somewhat asocial event, last week I also attended (as a last-minute decision) a local flute and bassoon concert entitled "Contrasts" by Simone Maurer and Lyndon Watts. It is handy to live so close where such good music is freely available.
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It appears that I have landed in Sydney to attend a particularly important nerd-fest, Supercomputing Asia 2024. I'll be giving two, thankfully short, presentations at this event: "HPC Certification Forum & Skill Tree: An Update" and "HPC Training Generates HPC Results". In accordance with my tastes, I'm staying in a budget hotel (Siesta Sydney) which is close to the conference and has good amenities, albeit with a bed that's far too soft. Today was spent entirely with the IBM Storage Scale User Group which discussed the many complexities involved in having storage that's big, fast, and robust. It all dovetails quite nicely with a visit from HPC sysadmins to our workplace from Princeton University, with whom we shared information about implementations of Mediaflux. Supercomputing is a curious profession I have fallen into for the last 17 years; it comes across as rather niche, at best. But it touches and improves our lives in so many ways across healthcare, materials, engineering, and more. The return - almost entirely externalities - is an extraordinary $44 per dollar invested. Supercomputing is perhaps the most remarkable form of social infrastructure that we can invest in and yet is also so indirect and distant from most people's lived experience.

Before my departure I managed to get a few social events in; Erica H., joined me on Saturday for my third visit to Triennial at the NGV, and I still think I could go again. On Friday, I was party to a delightful sunset dinner evening with Julie A., and Liana F. (Julie's cake was quite impressive!), and we ended up playing "Munchkin" until the small hours. Apropos such events, last Saturday week enjoyed a games-day with Chester and Balaram for the amusing and high-speed "silent cooperative" game, "Magic Maze". Further, this coming Saturday is the Annual General Meeting of the RPG Review Cooperative, Inc., at the Rose Hotel in Fitzroy; our AGMs are short, the social event is always enjoyable.
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As reported on FB (thank you all) my seventh degree arrived on Monday, namely the Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology, the goatskin parchment apparently designed to last five hundred years (no goats were harmed). In the current degree, there have been a presentation and a short essay written this week, along with two grades received that are keeping to my average. Next week a further two are being submitted and I'm particularly looking forward to the impact adaption for Pacific island nations, which is a significant interest of mine. Also this week I seemed to someone to the diamond league in Duolingo again, somewhat helped by a decision to expand my Chinese language, including French from Chinese; I would prefer to do the other way around but you do what the green owl provides.

Over the weekend and on Monday, I have three opportunities for gaming groups. The first was on Saturday with Carla's group of youngsters who I'm quite pleased to join; it was another game of Root, the game of anthropomorphic animal factions seeking their own victory conditions over the woodland. In this particular venture, the sneaky Vagabond managed to pip others to the post, including my own Marquise de Cat (surely that should be "Marquis du Chat"?). The following day Tim R., hosted a session of his own RPG, "Children of the Black Forest", an alien-horror SF exploration game that has a system that is both simple but adaptable. Finally, on Monday we ventured out to Clayton to the home of Andy S., for Justin A's Burning Wheel game set in the Thirty Years' War.

Alas, events struck me mid-week. After a late afternoon meeting with some data storage specialists where I found myself caught in the rain, the public transport trip back home witnessed everyone sniffling. By the following morning, it was evident that I had caught myself a cold and the sort that knocks you out entirely for three days. It has only been today that I've managed to drag my carcass out of bed for more than a couple of hours, and in this case make my way to the home of Alison B., for whom I had volunteered to do some cat-sitting in the leafy green surrounds of Eltham, while she and her progeny have their own events. The cats, Gizmo and Cosmo, are absolutely delightful beings and are making superb company for my convalescence. It promises to be a relaxing weekend.
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It appears that I have neglected my journal for just over a week, which is pretty lax for someone who typically updates at least twice a week. To be fair, three of the days were taken up almost entirely with Linux, HPC, and parallel programming courses, which had a good turnout and some pretty active participants. Of course, this has also necessitated a further review of the existing content, which slowly pushes the quantity of material I have to cover in each one. Apropos, I've made a bit of extra headway on my MHEd thesis and have resubmitted the abstract, post-reviewer comments, for the upcoming Higher Education Development Centre annual symposium at the University of Otago. Alas, I will only be able to participate virtually even if it is in my favourite little town, Dunedin. I am also fishing for additional interview subjects for part of my thesis, namely those who have some experience as learners, educators, administrators, or sysadmins for various online learning platforms, for their qualitative insights. If anyone comes to mind, please get them to contact me. I don't need many people, but I'd like a few more.

Over the weekend I went down an unusual path of spending "quite a few" hours playing Open Red Alert. It's several years since I've played this game, and of course, decades in the past when I was quite active in playing the original game (goodness, the late 1990s, and I still have the disks). I really impressed by how the contributors - some three hundred of them - have built something that is very close to the original in flavour and game-play but has made some default modifications to improve game balance and options. As a more social entertainment, [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya has introduced me to the 2016 TV series Maigret with Rowan Atkinson playing the eponymous character. For those more familiar with his comic roles (Black Adder, Mr. Bean), the serious Atkinson comes across well, although I have noticed he does retain some of his oft-amusing mannerisms. In the past, I have made no secret that I prefer the working-class French crime stories of Georges Simonen over the upper-class British stories from Agatha Christie. As a British series, the English voices are a bit jarring in context, and I'm less than happy with the fact there are only four episodes. Still, better than nothing.

I have been given some thought to this recent dive into past-times which is a little out of my typically driven character and have decided it must be at least in part due to my cathartic rant about the appalling public health bumblings of the New South Wales government. For all the marketing promotion of 70% or 80% as being magic numbers when we can "open up" again, the truth is a lot more complex (marketing people, of which many politicians must be counted, hate complexity). Whilst some political leaders are waving around claims that their proposed policies are based on research from the Doherty Institute, when one actually reads their report (how many can say they've done this?), one will discover their position comes with lots of caveats, including lockdowns. But don't take it from me, take the words of the Doherty Institute director, Professor Sharon Lewin who agrees that these targetted vaccinations alone could mean an additional 25,000 deaths: "The short answer is there is no freedom day here."
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Last night went to the Astor Theatre with [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya and [personal profile] funontheupfield to see Die Goethe-Institut show Nosfertu: A Symphony of Horror with the Ensemble Offspring providing a live score. It really was an incredible version of the film, constructed from surviving pieces (it was supposed to be destroyed) and enormous praise is deserving to Murnau's mise-en-scene. Although I was surprised that the place wasn't packed to the rafters. Who doesn't want to see a film of this calibre at an art deco cinema with a live score? I have been asked to write a short review of the event for Classic Melbourne for the event - that will have to wait until the weekend of course, there is a certain RuneQuest Glorantha conference that I have to attend.

Unsurprisingly said conference has been taking up a good portion of my spare time, with sending the conference journal to the printers, panicking over whether the swag bags will arrive in time, organising catering, and getting a plan B for the registration badges over NinjaDan's 3D printer caught on fire, which was pretty dramatic. Speaking of which NinjaDan has been absolutely legendary in helping out in all sorts of support roles in the badges, catering, and so forth. As a pre-conference event [livejournal.com profile] jdurall will be running a session of Call of Cthulhu at the asylum tonight. He was going to be staying here, but instead, we caught, a provided a tour of the grounds. Instead [livejournal.com profile] strangedave will be staying instead. Both of these people have contributed enormously to the Con, as speakers on multiple sessions for both days and as GMs for both days.

Speaking of games with friends, on the afternoon of the last post went to visit [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce's place for our irregular cheesequest and boardgames day. We played Broom Service a board-and-card game based on a potion delivery, along with the Glorantha-based Khan of Khans. Broom Service has an interesting feature of being designed by a German company with rules in French and English; there was a couple of times where the familiarity with both languages came in use, as the French rules were clearer than the English. Anyway, for what it's worth managed to come on top of both games, albeit by small margins.

After all this I'll be getting seriously stuck into my MSc Dissertation; I am already around a third through, but seriously continue effectively until formal acceptance of the full proposal. I mentioned in a recent journal entry that I was having problems with my supervisor's rather ornery behaviour; providing significantly incomplete responses, changing requirements, not reading the actual document, and having a lack of familiarity with the content. In any case, after the fourth such response, I asked the college for a new supervisor and, with a surprising lack of administrivia, processed the request within a week. I guess my previous supervisor didn't put up much of a fight on the issue.
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Surprising absolutely nobody, I have spent nearly all of the past several days preparing for my impending economics exams and, as is my want, have created an rather impressive set of study notes which, if I worked on them could be a textbook in their own. To be honest, I am still uncertain of taking the exams this year given that I started a few (up to five, depending on how you count it) months behind, and whilst I have learned a great deal in the subject it is not something that I had undertaken for almost 30 years. Despite this my biggest weakness here is not conceptual but rather mathematical - I simply don't have the experience or practise.

Despite having my nose almost entirely buried in books, (which is not an unusual state for me, it's just a question of depth), I have continued with my almost-daily 'blog of the Australian Federal Election. Major events of the campaign include a "Watergate" scandal of epic proportions, of which the former Deputy Prime Minister sounds like he had "a few drinks" prior to a Radio National interview on the matter, the multi-millionaire mining magnate preferencing the government, and the Labor opposition providing pathways from casual to full-time work.

It hasn't entirely been "all work and no play" however. Last Sunday played a session of RuneQuest Questworld, where our GM has placed us in the old "Griffin Island" region, and we successfully defended a town against some rather overwhelming odds. Last night played DungeonQuest for the first time (and somehow I survived in this rather deadly game), along with a session of Munchkin Cthulhu. In a further attempt not to go stir crazy visited the doctor a couple of days ago due to a stubborn skin infection in my lower leg (probably a minor case of cellulitis). The doctor's first reaction was "Oh no, this could be diabetes!". I felt like responding, "Nah, I'm just old and overweight", which of course is true, and my blood-sugar levels were quite normal. Almost forgot! Earlier this week received a "Ruby Feather" in Duolingo, with 7050 points for the week, which was #1 for the Asia-Pacific-European region, and maybe even the world? I don't need to do that again
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Australia has had an absolute political circus of a week with the bourgeois-liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeing off an attempted party-coup lead by hard-right minister Peter Dutton on August 21st, only to experience a second leadership spill two days later. This time Turnbull stepped down and surprisingly Scott Morrison has now taken up the role of Prime Minister of Australia; a more thorough account is provided by the good folk at Wikipedia. Turnbull had always been too willing to compromise with the crazy right-wingers of the Liberal Party and was so ignorant of the economic pain of ordinary people to ensure public support. It was, briefly, impressive to see how he fought back in the last days but it was all too late. As for the contenders, Peter Dutton is an obvious extreme-right dullard who is widely loathed, and Scott Morrison whilst slightly more pragmatic but has no public appeal, and also comes from the far-right of the party and comes with the same economic baggage. So whilst the liberal and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are at open war with each other (and the latter winning), the public are increasingly annoyed at a party that has no concern with their increasing levels of inequality, increases in the cost-of-living, wage stagnation, and their virilent anti-unionism. People are furious as their behaviour and the Tories are going to get smacked for six when the Federal election is finally called.

Whilst the circus was unavoidable, there were other events to participate in over the past few days. Notably delivered a training day on Parallel Programming on Wednesday which was well attended by an interested class. The evening beforehand I went wrote a couple more code debugging examples for Valgrind and the GNU Debugger which are appropriate for the class and will fine-tune those even further for the next classes - four have been set up for the coming month of September. Thursday started with yet another hearing at VCAT where an application was made to sell Rick B's house; given that there is no argument about the need and no opposition, it surprises me that this requires a court case rather than simply being an administrative procedure. Later that day participated in a session of Megatraveller where the PCs finally caught up with a nanite distributing scientist-gone-wrong only to discover that they were doing the right thing. The GM added in some major player-created plot elements as part of the chase which worked quite well. Finally, today attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria today with Wen Len presenting on Dual-Booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu, which was appropriately sub-titled "the fun, the pain, the joy". As he pointed out that actual process itself is reasonably easy - it's the planning that's painful. It's quite a busy few days, and next week in Perth will be busy as well. Still, perhaps one of the happiest moments of it all is that I received confirmation a short time ago that Kyral Castle will be available to host RuneQuest Con DownUnder on November 11th - so that's official. And guess who will be leading the organisation of that event?
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Yesterday presented at the Isocracy Network on The Future of Europe: Brexit, the EU, and More, which I've put up in non-verbatim form on the website. Whilst the bigger issue of the EU as a whole is at stake, the madness and proximity of Brexit is fast approaching and a hard-Brexit is a truly bad option, yet has a high degree of popularity. I also finally put on the website a shorter 'blog post concerning the behaviour of Ron Paul a few weeks ago (backdated); it's curious that anyone could seriously call him a "libertarian", as his interest in freedom is very slim indeed.

I've had a couple of gaming events this week which had been enjoyable after a month's absence. Thursday night's Megatraveller game went well, with not our first case of investigating an abandoned space-ship which is inhabited by unpleasant lifeforms. I must give a strong hat-tip to our GM, Andrew D., who is running a very crunchy game-system quite notorious for having a book of errata, with great competence. Today played in our regular RuneQuest-Questworld-Elderaad campaign, where we continue to extend our control over the chaotic city with various measures of civic improvement. In the coming week, I have two games to run, neither of which I have prepared myself for - Exalted Journey to the Far West and Eclipse Phase.

Yesterday I also received the sad news that an old university friend Emily L., had passed away. She was a colourful and fun character back on those days, more than two decades ago, to the point she'd be nicknamed by Bruce T., as "the happy little anarchist", and it suited her quite well, even if the finer points of said political theory weren't really something she had a deep interest in. A few years ago I remember looking at to Majorca where she lived in whilst I was in Barcelona sent a message suggesting that we should catch up somehow. It didn't happen of course; we probably both assumed that we each at least had a few decades left. But humans are fragile creatures, and the laws of averages have unexpected tails. Although our physical company had been separated for many years, we stayed in touch on social media. Her final message was: In a world where you can be anything, be kind. Valedictions Emily.
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My last day in New Zealand was spent giving my farewells to the good folk at Nyriad and then travelling to Auckland to give a presentation at the Auckland University of Technology. Since then there has been little opportunity to engage in much else except for my usual work, although the visit to NZ did have immediate benefits with discussions at the University about exactly where to host a proposed new GPU expansion and the relative benefits of Infiniband versus 100GE with RDMA. Nevertheless today has been busy with a preparation for a presentation tomorrow to The Philosophy Forum on "The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics", and attending a festival tonight where we will catch up with Polly Samuel. Next Tuesday I will also be presenting to Linux Users of Victoria on Multicore World 2017.

Being away for a couple of weeks and with another regular GM overseas in has meant some significant gaming withdrawals. Last night played Eclipse Phase with the regular distributed crew across multiple states and countries (will we get [livejournal.com profile] patchworkkid to join us once he moves to Canada?). Still, I have some recent nerd purchases - the facsimile of Thorin's map I picked up in Hobbiton for [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya will go well when framed, plus a recent purchase of a stromatolite dice set satisfies my long-standing desire for a "gem set" of gaming dice, and an interest in fossils and bacteria. In addition there has been a fair bit of work on Papers and Paychecks following last week's update, with a recent acquisition of illustrations from Dan 'Smif' Smith, which are looking very good.
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Attended the University of Melbourne Secular Society meeting on Tuesday which debated the often troubled relationship between Islam and the secular west and especially in relation with historical contexts and the prospects for change. Following evening was the annual general meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby at Parliament House with MLA Maree Edwards addressing the group on the Bendigo mosque issue. Afterwards we visited the Assembly where the state member for Yan Yean (who I used to work with) recognised me from the floor and, in perhaps most unparliamentary fashion, blew me a kiss (of course I reciprocated). At least some politicians haven't lost a sense of humour.

One person who had a great deal of humour about said profession was playwright and commentator Bob Ellis who recently died. I spent a fair bit of time in his company in the late 1990s, catching up with him in Hobart (ALP National Conference), Sydney, and Melbourne. It was in the former location that (after several drinks) a young journalism student introduced herself in a gushing manner: "Oh Mr. Ellis, I am so proud to meet you, I've read all your work" etc., etc. Bob, stood up, tucked his shirt in, shook her hand and responded with a boyish grin: "Don't worry dear, I won't get you pregnant". All this said, he was terrible at psephology; his political partisanship I fear managed to get in the way of pessimistic (but usually more correct) interpretations.

Last Sunday's GURPS Middle Earth game was cancelled so our group appropriately played the Lord of the Rings boardgame followed by the Lord of the Rings Trivia Game, both of which are really quite good. The former, a cooperative game, is known to be quite challenging, but we managed to destroy the Ring before becoming corrupted etc. In the latter, Michael C's., extraordinary knowledge on the subject left us all in utterly the dust. Of some (specialist) note is that the Yahoo Groups RuneQuest 3 list has moved to the RPG Review Cooperative - of wider interest is the horrid work required to extract the data from Yahoo!'s ugly and annoying format. Apropos last night was "season two" our Laundry Files game - where witchraft and computing has taken a very strange turn.

Work this week consisted of conducting a training course on Monday which was fairly well received, albeit with some teething problems with our beta-release cluster/cloud hybrid and a tag-team teaching agenda. Most of the rest of the week has consisted on keeping the clusters functioning and software installs. Today has brought some insight and amusement however with news of a person who deleted data from some 1500+ customers with a single command and a very honest IT job ad. Reminder to self: after recently having a bit of a chat with Peter Murray-Rest courtesy of some work-related activity several days ago, I must have a closer look at his journal aggregation and search project.
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A fair bit of work this week has been preparing for courses for an introduction to the Spartan hybrid HPC/Cloud and the NeCTAR cloud starting on Monday which will run weekly. My side of the material is available on github. Apropos, I've had another encounter with odd password policies from a university which has led to another 'blog post: Password Praise in the Future Tense. Tuesday night attended a BuzzConf technology meeting; interesting technologies but the presentations were at such a high level it made it an utterly low-quality advertorial.

Have been less than happy with the state of gaming this week; Sunday's Eclipse Phase game was less exciting than I hoped it to be (although explorations of character schizophrenia were promising), Thursday's session was cancelled, and this coming Sunday's GURPS Middle Earth session has been suspended. On the other hand, my review of Open Grave has been published on rpg.net, and I've penned a small piece on Pyrrhic victories in HeroQuest.

The Victorian Secular Lobby will be holding it's Annual General Meeting this Wednesday at Parliament House; the guest speaker will be Maree Edwards, the state member for Bendigo West, who will be talking on the politics of the Bendigo mosque. Many secularists were rather slow in defending the rights of Bendigo Muslims to worship peacefully when this was a major issue earlier this year, forgetting that secularism is not antithetical to religion, but independent of it (some more fundamentalist atheists, I would suggest, are not actually secularists). Hopefully Maree's presentation will illustrate why religious bigotry has no place in secularism.
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I've had two days off work this week, due to having over thirty days of outstdanding annual leave (not to mention long service leave) and a fair desire of the company to see this cut down to something reasonable. It would seem that my predictions of doom in my last entry had a degree of veracity with an the announcement that a few more of our staff (two programmers and a manager) are being made redundant. Taking the numbers, I am still of the opinion that we are way too "top heavy"; too many 'decision makers', not enough technical staff. Mind you, at the very same meeting a new HPC programme was announced which includes several more managed services in the higher education and research sector, along with some 'cloud-bursting' capacity from the login nodes. After some consideration, I am cautiously optimistic about the model. It features some areas of the business where we have been quite successful (managed services) and positions us well for other providers (cloud VMs). There is, of course, many additional opportunities to further develop our training programme which, to be honest, is limited but only due to a lack of qualified staff.

I've combined a few activities, including a bit of Ingress as I slowly move towards the top level of the game, visiting opportunity shops and the like. I've explored the Android SDK for improved storgae on a tablet, which is not an area I've had any familiarity with. Because I have a mountain of old PC games I've also taken the opportunity to install a stand-alone Windows XP box (some very old. Pretty strange to be installing a thirteen year old operating system, and a trip down memory lane to recollect the annoyances (ahh, sound and graphics drivers, did we really have to do that?). Couldn't be bothered registering the product (I have a legitimate CD) so used a regedit hack. Will turn the system into a point of sale device tomorrow.

I've had an very good week in terms of the RPG Review store with several customers this week contacting me for my entire Torg and Dark Heresy collections, some RuneQuest, Torg, and World of Darkness books. This, I may add, is without any recent promotion and entirely due to word of mouth among gamers, especially I've noted in regional areas of Australia, and especially for those seeking older (pre-2000) games. There has been some disappointments on the gaming front as well however; our regular Thursday night session was cancelled with plans to meet Julie G., who is over from the UK. It would have been the first time in about twenty years since I've seen her, however jet-lag got the better of her, so she had to cancel. Then, this evening, my regular session of Eclipse Phase was also cancelled, and Sunday's session of GURPS Middle Earth has required a change of system as well due to absent players. I am thinking of the relatively obscure Lord of the Rings Adventure Game.
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This has been a week of eating out (Wednesday excluded), with some excellent social gatherings, gaming, and meetings. Sunday started with a presentation at the Philosophy Forum on 'Star Wars' and The Universe as an Energy Force: An Ontological Claim. This followed with a session of Space 1889 which involved protecting a Venusian native village from German imperialists (as opposed to our British imperialists) with the aid of a Maxim machine gun. As Hilaire Belloc wrote: Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.. Afterwards had dinner at old favourite, Iliana's in Elwood. On Monday night had dinner with Richard OB., the most expecting Jade F., Denny C., and of course [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya. Rich's expertise on history and politics was certainly a highlight of conversation in the evening, some of which is collected for prosperity's sake.

Tuesday night was Linux User's of Victoria with excellent talks by Russell Coker on OpenSSL and Heartbleed (summary available) followed by Sean Crosby, on the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid which was followed by the enormous by delectable food and conversation of Maria's. Thursday night was another session of Masks of Nyarlathotep with the fine food from Thai Terrace. Tonight will be catching up Brendan E., his parents who are visiting from Perth with their awesom travel bus, and dining at Punjabi Cafe in Collingwood.

Have had a couple of good items of news work-wise this week. The first is organising an OpenMPI Hackathon where researchers will be able to bring out their serial code and we'll do our best to help them make it parallel code. This follows a group of researchers petitioning for more classes on the subject. The other is a Graduate Certificate course proposal for high performance computing that I wrote a short summary for about a month ago. It was intended for local universities to consider (e.g., RMIT, University of Melbourne), but I've also been informed that interstate universities, CSIRO, and the National Computational Infrastructure have also made extremely positive remarks towards the paper as well. Such acknowledgements does chip away at any tendencies towards imposter syndrome.
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A couple of days ago I started playing Ingress which has a nice alternative reality backstory involving the Higgs boson experiments and alien mind control (or enhancement, if you joined the good guys) with a global bi-factional conflict. Actual play, unlike many computer or 'phone games, requires one to go outside and even better still, locate (by foot usually) various sites of public interest or artistic merit. At its core it's a simple experience point and level advance system, but that's not really the important part of the game. At the moment I'm playing a bit "lone wolf", as I imagine a lot of starting players do, but it's quite clear that a significant degree of social coordination is required at higher levels.

On Saturday we rescued an injured common blackbird and took it to Lort Smith, just prior to dropping off [personal profile] caseopaya's mother at the airport. A few hours later her brother and nephew arrived, en route from New Zealand. We dined a La Notte followed by drinks at the Queensberry. Visited some Unitarian friends on Sunday for a post-xmas gathering, followed by another group for a game of Shanghai Trader, an enjoyable historical game of extortion and exploitation, albeit a little random in its mechanics. Afterwards visited Brendan E., for dinner and conversation, and watched another episode of the increasingly disappointing Walking Dead television series; it seems that only the first season is worth watching.

Next Saturday I'm off to Linux Conf AU 2014 in Perth, where I'll be attending in the role of "Diversity Officer", which basically means I keep an eye out to ensure that everyone (regardless of colour, creed, or kink) has "quiet enjoyment" of the conference. Not only will probably be an enjoyable and informative conference (at least based on the several I have been to since 2006), it is also great to have an excuse to visit Perth again, which I have not done so for several years. Between now and then I must organise an evening with some select friends as I will only be over for a week, and most of that will be conference work.

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