Lev Lafayette's journal

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.

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, 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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.