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'Strewth, it's been a truly Ocker past coupla days. With my move delayed yet again, ironically because of dodgy removalists, I have taken the opportunity to use some spare time restoring old wood. I have a number of furnishings that have seen better days, and the combination of sandpaper followed by stain and varnish has improved my well-used work desk, the entertainment unit, the deco chest of drawers, the coffee table, the old school bookcase, and even the dodgy antique dining chairs. Now obviously this is hardly a uniquely Australian experience, but such minimal restorations are pretty much in character. Even more so however, was rescuing a ring-tailed possum. I am fortunate to have a few veterinary scientists among my friends and the sensible advice of proper warmth and taking it to a wildlife carer was followed through the letter. I was charmed by the suggestion that the possum found me rather than the other way around. I do endeavour to provide sanctuary to those who come through my door. Finally, to finish the trifecta, I have started putting up various course notes for the Noongar language on my main website. In part it is derived from a course I took in 2019 (international year of indigenous languages) from Curtin University, but also with a complement of other sources (including some exposure to the language in my childhood and adolescence). Over the next few weeks, I plan to spend to put up a few hundred words a day on said subject.

I am not a big watcher of TV; once to twice a week is about my normal levels and almost invariably that is in the company of [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya. However, two series that I have watched with said person over the past year or so that I believe is worthy of mention is "The Blacklist", and "Stranger Things". The former I have mentioned at least once before and follows a nice combination of criminal investigation with a spy thriller with a little bit of drama (which is probably the weakest point). Anyway, yesterday (post-possum delivery) we watched the last two episodes of the eighth season which had some level of conclusion and enough not said for yet another run. The other series that we've delved into, Stranger Things, is a wondrous 1980s cultural sf-horror retrospective with both emerging adolescent and young adult perspectives. There are a couple of anachronisms, but the series manages to get a lot quite right about the period whilst at the same time drawing upon a number of classics from the time; sometimes it's like "Poltergeist", sometimes like "Aliens", sometimes like "Firestarter", and all with more than a little bit of Dungeons & Dragons thrown into the mix. Thoroughly recommended for those who had their formative years in such a period, and also those who want to find out what it was like.
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Settlement for my new apartment was on Friday, putting me in the frankly ridiculous situation of currently owning three places. Of course, I still have to move all my possessions and prepare the Willsmere house for sale, and I'm actually sufficiently cash poor at the moment that I can't do this right away (my conveyancing agent wanted their fees and stamp duty paid up-front, so that's $20K down the drain). Still, under our current law, buying is so much more sensible than renting if you have the up-front cash for a hefty deposit. Our housing and land system is so broken in favour of the landlord class, against new developments and renters, that it is almost always utterly irrational to rent as a matter of choice. All this could have changed for the better in the 2019 Federal election, but a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt put an end to that. It's all a very illustrative example to me of what I utterly hate about politics - the irrationality and rejection of public welfare, the lies by vested interests and their ignorant allies, the power games - and the recognition of the utter necessity of engagement in it. It is all very well to have good relationships with your friends and build helpful communities, but all of that can be undone with a stroke of a pen and even greater welfare could be generated with the same pen. As Martin Luther King Jnr said: "What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic."

Whilst on the topic of love and while I should be happy with the new life ahead of me, the opposite is the case. I have been struck by a horrible experience of utter emptiness from correspondence earlier this week. In a continued streak of tumultuousness in affairs of the heart, it is again mia koramikino (as the Esperantists say). It has left me feeling utterly gutted, leaving but an empty shell of a person. The sculpture in Geneva, Melancholie by Albert Gyorgy, quite captures how I feel. I find it particularly poignant that the head is still attached; the thinking stoic mind separated from the visceral romantic body. However, a day after this correspondence, we had an old friend in the form of Rob L., visit. Rob runs a brewery and as an expert on such matters and brought over some local beers. It turned into "German night", as I cooked up kaese spaetzle and pfitzauf, and concluded the evening with mummelsee geist alcohol. It was lovely conversation, providing a sense of physical and social fullness, and yet one that contrasted so strongly with my emotional state. Naturally enough, I will write more about the latter, when I have composed myself.

I must conclude on a work event that I was responsible for organising; "Sam Blake and the Zodiac Mindwarp". Whilst it was restricted to staff of Research Computing Services and some selected researchers close to that body some notes can be provided about the event. Sam was part of small international team that cracked the 340 Cipher after fifty years by the Zodiac Killer, and some of that work was done the Spartan HPC system. I remember the news quite well because it's not every day that the system you work with effectively has a news embargo requested by the FBI! Sam's presentation did cover a range of issues in cryptography and the cipher in particular, along with the significant international coverage of the news, and illustrated a few example scripts that he used on the system. I pointed out very quickly with a few tweaks we could have made them run them a couple of orders of magnitude quicker. Who knew that communication could be so important even in technical fields? Anyway, there is future work that could be carried out and I hope to work a lot closer with Sam to see this to realisation.
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My major news for the week is that I've apparently become a teacher, of intermediate and advanced English, at the University of Rojava. The pre-dawn orientation meeting via video-conference was quite enlightening, but the difficulties the students face in war-torn Syria are also as expected. It was also interesting to meet the other teachers of course, largely a group interested in politics, international relations, human rights law, etc. Given that Rojava is the closest thing that the world has to an anarchist government (no, that is not a contradiction in terms), if I was younger I would certainly prefer to be there on the front-line with these comrades. This is the least I can do under the circumstances.

Another modest action has been preparations for Bramble Cay Melomys Day, where Guardian cartoonist has, once again, given us a wonderful reminder for the day (and decent media coverage, a resource that I lack). I'll be hosting a small memorial picnic in the Carlton Gardens this Saturday. I hope a few other souls will come along to remember this species, the first mammal extinct due to climate change. I rather fear that there will be more.

Preparations for my new apartment continue. I have paid the deposit, I have the unconditional approval for a home loan, and I've argued with the banks and brokers trying to assure them that my living expenses really are as low as I say they are. Apparently, I live in this alternative reality where it is incredulous that I have minimal transport costs (I cycle everywhere), no modern consumer electronics, no streaming services, and a big night out is a once-a-week visit to the local pizza bar with a glass of wine. I do have something close to five thousand books, however. "You talk like a millionaire, but you shop at Aldi", a friend remarked recently. Maybe the two things are related.
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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.
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The past several days have been thoroughly enjoyable, both in terms of time spent in fine company (especially that of the lovely [livejournal.com profile] lei_loo) and in terms of getting some of my home environment organised. Whilst normally a public and external person, I will confess to also rather preferring a clean, and neat home environment. Part of that this past few days I've upgraded all the awful and cheap plastic Venetian blinds in the house for ten years to some rather nice curtains, and I have nothing but praise for them. Cool in summer, warm in winter, the window billows through them creating beautiful movements and dancing shadows which are a rather stark contrast to the banging sound that one gets, at best, with the blinds. The kitchen is getting more organised, cleaner, and neater (new kitchen appliances pending), and the bathroom has been given a good scrub and there's a bit of sparkle there. I would like to get the entire house in such a state, alas it's all a bit big for me to do, and always has been.

Today was the first day back at work after what was close to two weeks of end-of-year leave. I managed to resist the urge to logon to the cluster or even look at my work emails. Surprisingly, the quantity that had stored up in the days past was not nearly as large as I had expected, small mercies. I added a small vector addition program for OpenCL to the cluster's repository and spent much of the rest of the day working on a workflow for pan-genomic analysis on everyone's friend, E.coli. Currently, I have a problem with one of the applications (a) failing to run as expected and (b) deleting everything in the directory whilst it runs. It is just as well that I am keeping a backup of the code and data, as well as having a defensive directory structure.

Somewhat related, several days ago I wrote a script for batch processing watermarks for image files. This evening I wrote a couple of minor modifications, ran some final tests and posted it. I am sure it will be quite a time-saver for people who need such things with regularity. Finally, the day also witnessed me start the year by topping the diamond league in Duolingo, which is the second time I've done that in the past year, although they have added a small mountain of French lessons for me to catch up on. It's weird to hear that some people cheat for such win. What for? Having a fake language skill is not exactly going to be helpful in foreign lands, which really is the purpose of such training.
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The last four workdays I've been on annual leave, mainly because I've accumulated too many holidays and that makes the bureaucrats feel nervous. Most of the time I have spent at home, albeit with a couple of exceptional social outings, one of which I joked with the participants that I was "on a hot date with three girls" (they were all older women well into retirement age and beyond from the local Unitarian church; they thought the idea was quite amusing). Much of the time whilst on leave I've engaged in the exciting activity of cleaning out clothing items that had been in storage for over ten years (mostly not mine, I hasten to add), and putting various books, etc up for sale, including an enormous pile for the cyberpunk convention on December 27.

Which of course is how I have been spending another significant chunk of my free time. The convention is powering along quite well and there was a surprising flurry of registrations on Thursday, now pushing the 70 mark. There will be, of course, a big push in the final week (there always is for such things). I've contacted the panelists with some presentation prompts for their contributions and the GMs on running their sessions. The convention will also produce content for a double-issue of RPG Review, for both the proceedings and the RPG scenarios that are being run in the evening. Also, I am more than half way through the "Papers & Paychecks" cyberpunk supplement, "Emails & Direct Deposits", which I hope to be able to launch on the day of the convention.

I completely neglected in previous journal entries to mention that my application at the University of Auckland to do a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology has been accepted, which I will commence next year. If the timing is right that will make it degree number eight. Best still, I have a co-pilot in the subject, albeit with a different focus. Whilst I am concentrating in aggregates and organisational psychology (because I'm a sociology and institutions nerd), they're focussing more on clinical and positive approaches. These are obviously complementary rather than competing approaches as the overall interest in human behaviour and the mind remains common. It is really the sort of motivating and intellectual partnership that I thoroughly enjoy. It is interesting how intellectual enthusiasm inspires those who also have the same enthusiasm. I guess that's why philosophers end up forming so many clubs and associations.
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There are many occasions where I am quite pleased in my profession. A recent example is the cracking of the Zodiac cipher on Spartan, an announcement that has made quite an impact in the international news. I confess that I was aware of it a week ago, but for obvious reasons, I've waited for the official announcement by the FBI before commenting. Personally, I think medical and engineering research is more important, but this is something that attracts the public eye. Also on the work front on Friday, I hosted a staff meeting following an extensive and detailed survey on return-to-office arrangements for 2021. Not terribly surprising to me, most IT workers feel that their productivity improves when working-from-home which is borne out by most studies, especially due to a lack of interruptions. I understand that those workers (i.e., middle-management) who depend on visual supervision of a workforce and face-to-face conversations have found the circumstances difficult. Finally, I have spent a good portion of the past work-week testing, patching. and converting a rather impressive collection of bioinformatics tutorials from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences to HPC jobs. It's actually all been very rewarding, psychologically speaking.

As one could expect the next couple of weeks will comments about the Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention in each and every post. I was really happy to announce Jason Scott as a speaker. With two weeks to go, I am powering my way writing the second Papers & Paychecks supplement, "Emails & Direct Deposits", a biopunk-horror supplement that will be ready for the convention. The conference also gives the opportunity for two issues of RPG Review, one for the conference proceedings, and one for the RPG sessions and characters. In actual play, I'm about to engage in some Cyberpunk 2020 and RuneQuest today, following a face-to-face cardgame session on Thursday evening of Debunked and Guillotine. Further, my reviews of Star Trek (FASA edition) and Star Wars (WEG edition are both in rpg.net now.

Following the plastering of five-year-old holes in our ceiling and various chips in our stairwell, yesterday we had the same people over to sand and paint their work. Even with drop sheets and subsequent sweeping the place still has plaster dust everywhere generating some pretty horrible sinus headaches as a result. I suspect it's going to take me a good week or two to clean up. For her part, [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya is travelling to Western Australia on Tuesday for the Christmas break whilst I will remain here. Universities miss out on a lot of state public holidays doing a year and I have to take a couple of days annual leave meaning that I effectively have (with three days exception) a three-and-a-half week holiday coming up. Most of it, I suspect, I will be spending alone. However, despite my gregarious nature, I did discover some decades ago that I like my own company; "Si vous vous sentez seul quand vous êtes seul, vous êtes en mauvaise compagnie". Probably because I have so much that I still want to do.
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With just under three weeks to go, I am feeling quietly confident that everything is falling into place for the Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention, now with Fraser Simons, Rick Wayne, and Stephen Dedman as confirmed speakers. It will be quite a good way for the RPG Review Cooperative to end the year, especially that circumstances prevented us from running a RuneQuest Glorantha convention this time.

On related activities, RPG Review 48: Supernatural Places and Beings has finally been released, horrendously late, but here nonetheless. My own contributions includes reviews of To Hell and Back, In Nomine, Little Fears, and LexOccultum, plus an article on metaphysical-medieval perspectives on Incubi-Succubi with stats added for Ars Magica. Plus, I've had an old review on the Mongoose edition of Traveller posted on rpg.net; a few more sf classics will follow soon.

In actual play this weekend I ran a session of Eclipse Phase which saw the PC Proxies beat a hasty retreat from organised defenses of the European Union TITAN supercomputer in Stuttgart, complete with 22nd-century version of Mercedes Silver Arrows. It followed from an evening visiting Brendan E., where he treated us to more additions to my woeful lack of experience in popular culture include several episodes of Zomboat!, which frankly has brilliant narrative escalation and characterisation on a super-cheap budget, along with the light oddball charm of a kitten in the midst of criminal gangs with Keanu.

With the easing of social restrictions in Melbourne, [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya actually ate out at a restaurant tonight for the first time in perhaps nine months or so. Mind you, it is the same restaurant where we get a regular Friday night pizza from, but still, it was a good experience. Engaging in such an activity mid-week was a bit of a necessity, after we'd had plasterers in today fixing the hole in the ceiling that's been there for four years (it wasn't causing any harm). Although Mac the Cat is rather disappointed that his escape hole (left by a previous plumber) in the BIRs is no longer available.
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Apropos my last entry on seeing We Lost The Sea, I have two reviews up on Rocknerd of said band. The first is of the concert itself, where I do express my appreciation of the work. The second (posted on the same day!), is of their latest album, Truimph & Disaster which was released only a couple of months ago. My considered opinion is that it's pretty good, but not as good as their last album - which is a hard call, given how impressive that is. That should probably do for my reviews on Rocknerd this year, except for perhaps a review of Mark Burgess's View from A Hill, which I've been meaning to do for quite a while now. I already have some articles planned for next year, however.

Much of my spare time has been taken up with continuing home improvements. Probably dull as dishwater for any external readers of this 'blog, but pretty important for those who have to live here. Flooring people came over on Thursday and between the three of them managed to remove the skanky carpet and lay the floorboards in good time. It's looking much better, to say the least, and is going to be a lot easier to maintain. Now I have the task of shifting the mountains of furnishings back into their proper location, although as I'm doing so, taking the opportunity to make the necessary cull of various unnecessary possessions; "stuff accumulates". Next step after this is going through the questionable electrics, and then fixing the plastering, which is in dire need of repair, and finally the hydronics and kitchen.

Visited Linux Users of Victoria this week for their final meeting of the year and donated a small mountain of relevant magazines to the Library of LUV. Also have a small mountain of relevant books to give to said body (or anyone else). Prior to the meeting caught up with Shupu W., whom I haven't seen for over two years. A fine conversationalist, we discussed various workforce related matters, the challenges of democracy vis-à-vis China, and various old and good friends. Although relevant to the Linux topic, our cluster has had to extend its outage due to a failed external dependency; i.e., an issue with the network. I have taken the opportunity to work on several training documents, including Open OnDemand, numerous job submission scripts, and examples of Perl, Python, PHP, and Java regular expressions for the course I am running next week. To finish it all off, attended the 2600 Melbourne meet-up this evening. Been a while since I've been to one of those; good cynical conversation over drinks about what can and does go wrong in our profession.
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A good portion of the past few days have consisted of moving various furnishings around in preparation of getting part two of our flooring done; thirty plus years old carpet goes out, laminate floorboards go in. The problem of being a somewhat bookish person is that one ends up with literally dozens of bookcases, and these aren't much fun to carry upstairs. Playing furniture Tetris is an interesting game, as well as the contents of an additional three rooms, are squeezed into the already furnished two which have had their flooring done. After that, it'll be to get the questionable electrics in the place fixed. Capital depreciates, land increases in value, and that is why the earth should not be owned.

On that topic the Isocracy Network is having its annual general meeting (FB) in two weeks. Apart from discussing Nicolò Bellanca's book on the subject, there is also the Victorian Parliament's inquiry into homelessness, which we have more than a few issues to raise (land prices, public housing supply, harmful effects, etc). In my own adventures in landlordism, our tenant in Dunedin is moving out to get their own place (congratulations Dominic!). Against the advice of our estate agent, I am recommending that the rent should not be increased.

Despite the various time-dependent home activities (all work and no play etc), last night [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya went out to see We Lost The Sea, a Sydney-based band which I first encountered a couple of years ago. They started off a metal band until their vocalist committed suicide. After that they transmogrified into something that is a cross between math rock and metal, which some punters are calling "post-metal" (really? as if "post-rock" wasn't bad enough), with now two albums out in the new style (Departure Songs, Truimph & Disaster). Also caught up with [personal profile] funontheupfield who randomly turned up at the gig.

In a previous entry I mentioned the issues I was having with my MSc dissertation supervisor. I decided to apply for a new supervisor and, credit where it's due, the college organised one within a matter of days. After explaining the various issues I was facing the new supervisor accepted the extended proposal without any further additions or amendments, which suggests to me that it was fine as it is. I have joked about the funny McSweeny's article on the hilarious the snake-fight portion of your thesis defense, but there is some wry amusement to be derived by the fact that I had a poisonous snake of my very own. I assure you, the snakes are very real.
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Over the years I've written a few pieces (e.g., Australia's Carbon Price Legislation: Climate Responsibility with Social Justice (2011)) and given a few public presentations (e.g., The Future of Planet Earth (2007), The End Is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth (2018)). It is therefore unsurprising that I am pleased to see so many young people a few days ago take to the streets in some 2993 locations and 162 countries the world in support of action on climate change, the largest climate rally in history. It was very reminiscent of my own youth in the 1980s marching against the threat of nuclear war; we won that battle, we can win this one, too. Because we can assign a narrative to reality, it was also the date where I left the so-called "Australian Political Debate" Facebook group, which is basically a moderation-free wasteland for climate-change deniers to neo-Nazis and even flat-earthers. Essentially people who think that their ignorant opinions are at least as good as considered facts. As increasingly this distinction becomes politically partisan, we see a breakdown of non-partisan political discussion, which cannot bode well for the world.

I've had a few opportunities for my RPG hobby recently, too. Obviously the RuneQuest Glorantha Down Under Con has a certain priority, but have also been engaging in some actual play. Today was a session of RuneQuest Glorantha which was a bit of a dungeon-crawl dealing with Lunar bandits and chaos cultists (those cosmopolitan Lunars are always getting themselves into trouble). Yesterday was our irregular CheeseQuest session where I ran a session of D&D Charlemagne's Paladins as they ventured deeper in The Lost City of Cyrenaica. Apropos this, there was an oversupply of milk at work last week, so I took the opportunity to make some homemade farmer's cheese with thyme. It wasn't anything special, but at least I used up the milk (and used the whey for pottage stock). On Thursday night we skipped a session of our usual game and played DungeonQuest instead, with two characters getting out in a game that's meant to have a 15% survival rate.

Thursday and Friday last week I worked from home whilst tradies ripped up the 30-year old carpet upstairs, which had been pretty trashed by our old pets. The laminate replacement is pretty gorgeous I have to say, and was quite inexpensive. Anyway, the opportunity has been taken to do a bit of spring clean at the same time and work out we don't need in our somewhat excessive book collection; [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya does have a lot of adolescent fiction and urban fantasy, and there's quite a few rather marginal politcal and technology texts, and a lot of science fiction that I don't need either. So that's reduced the upstairs collection by close to 50%. That which we're not donating to the local Willsmere library will find its way to charity etc. We'll still have at least 28 bookcases along with a similar number of of storage containers for such items. I also took the opportunity to turf a bunch of old computer technology to hard rubbish that was well-passed it's use-by date - even if I still have more several desktop systems to deal with. Nevertheless, it's a pretty solid start for a pair of near-hoarders.
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It was a pretty gaming intensive weekend; on Saturday I needed to get over three thousand words written for RPG Review 34, a special issue on game design, which has now been released - there was about 1,000 words on Friday and Sunday as well, as well as the layout. Later on session ran a game of Eclipse Phase which has arced up with as the Sentinels confront the neo-fascist Ultimates on an L5 Neptune trojan. It followed from an evening with [livejournal.com profile] funontheupfield at a local bar where we played Forbidden Island (cooperative game, easily adaptable for an environmental rather than fantasy theme) and Quizzle. Aproporiately, a new issue of the RPG Review Cooperative Newletter, Crux Australi has just been released.

We've just change our Internet Service Provider. After many years with Optus, there were a couple of events (technical primarily) that were making the relationship shaky, but the clincher was when they wouldn't support Firefox on Linux with the given reason being that only a few people use it this "old" operating system. Well, we've shifted to iiNET, and although there was a bit of a hiccup with the setup, they've done the right thing in terms of compensation etc. In other home life news finished our tax today for the last financial year, a weird timetabling that apparently is ATO approved. Their administrative procedures are a mystery to us mere mortals. Finally, just in case anyone thought I wasn't nerdy enough, I've been using this great Android app which effectively gives one a command-line interface for operating one's phone. Accessing applications with the autocomplete shortcuts and easy of file system navigation I find are its principal advantages.
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In the global village, the local council election of the United States of America is certainly the most important. Like many others I was rather surprised (and quite horrified) by the election of Donald Trump this week. The psephologists were universally wrong. But at least they're doing the right thing and working out why. There has been a lot of silly opinion pieces trying to justify why the result occured, but the pre-election claims of Michael Moore turned out to be most prescient, not only for guessing that Trump would win but where he would win; namely by a failure to inspire the working-class states of the Great Lakes - that is really the only reason that Clinton lost; Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Unsurprisingly, I am currently in the midst of an article for the Isocracy Network on the election results with a few prescriptive solutions, the most obvious being don't ignore the working class. It also serves as a good focus for the Isocracy AGM (FB link) next Saturday at Trades Hall with Dr. Hans Baer speaking on the relationship between enviromentalism and socialism. This is certainly an issue which has relevance for the occasionally strained relationship here between the Australian Labor Party and the Greens. Similar lessons can be learned in this context; the importance of the environment may be paramount, but the protection of the enviroment will only occur with the support of the working class.

Speaking of work, in my fairly-well paid technocratic role it has been a very demanding week having returned from overseas. I fielded what I could what on the other side of the world, but the bulk of the effort was carried by NinjaDan who is really feeling the weight of what has been an increasingly quantity of technical requests, and certainly far beyond the capacity of 1 EFT looking after two HPC systems. In other work-related news [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya has received a new job offer with a good pay rise and engaged in the delightful act of handing a resignation letter to a firm which won the Golden Turd for poor work conditions.

In home life we still have the delightful Jane keeping us company at least for a few more days. There's big hole in the ceiling of our dining-room due to the effects of the water pipe issues from before we left for overseas and one in the back of the wardrobe in our attic bedroom which probably leads to Naria or somesuch. The Owners Corporation is currently having a debate on whether to keep the Courtesy Bus or not, which led me to make a post on the appropriate closed group on Facebook where I illustrated some of the unspoken costs of getting rid of it; it seems that most people who engaged in that discussion are also supportive in retaining the service. Finally, last night went to visit Brendan who has been having his usual unluck with housemates. It was good to catch up as always, and we laughed ourselves through the quite moving NZ film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which of course reminded me that I need to visit the home country again.
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Tonight we leave for Europe for a month (it took me a few minutes to pack). Our wonderful housesitter, Janie G., has arrived and familiarised herself with the environment. She has already proven her weight in gold by a timely discover of a resisentialist event; a water pipe on the second floor has burst, dripping through the ceiling plaster. That's going to be annoying and probably expensive to repair.

Currently at eResearchAustralasia, former co-worker Andrew Underwood is giving a very high-level keynote on artificial intelligence work at Dell. In the afternoon I'll be presenting on Spartan with a a further lightning presentation later on. The conference itself reminds a lot of Questnet, insofar there's big vendor input and a little light on the technical level.

Edit: Presentation went extremely well for such a short talk. Engaged and interested audience with a good turnout with people from several institutions expressing great interest on what we have done and considering adopting our model for their future implementations.

Appropriate for the Europe journey, I have joined The Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. The good folk at the Institut für Sozialforschung have done some searching for me for works by Frederich Pollock. The following morning will be visiting the Frankfurt Center for Scientific Computing, who have gotten back to me. I have managed to list several places that we should visit at each city in this whirlwind tour.
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This week I wrote or submitted three contributions to various government agencies. The first was a draft for Linux Users Victoria, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with particular attention drawn to intellectual property issues. The second was for the Victorian Secular Lobby, which was submitted to the Victorian parliamentary committee on end-of-life choices, based on last week's draft. The Isocracy Network is also considering a submission. The third was a submission to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to the Cultural Diversity Review, specifically on the classification of Unitarians as "Christian (Other)" in the Australian census. For the Victorian Secular Lobby, it's been a particularly good week with Special Religious Instruction taken out of the education curriculum.

I've had a busy end-of-week socially; on Thursday night [livejournal.com profile] strangedave and [livejournal.com profile] doctor_k_ were visiting Melbourne, so we organised dinner and a tour at the asylum for them and [livejournal.com profile] mortonhall and Trevor (LJ name?). Great conversation and a pleasant walk of the grounds. Did the same for visiting Westalian nephew Luke from Muzzle and his friend Nick on Saturday night. Also on Saturday went to see [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce and [livejournal.com profile] hathhalla for the grand final of the cheesequest; a contest between (substituted) white stilton, epoisses (fantastic soaked in champagne), and a small mountain of the garlic-and-herb boursin, made by yours truly, plus a few others just to complement. We also played Mice and Mystics, a cooperative storytelling boardgame, where we were seriously defeated twice. Also had an interesting political and plotting dinner on Friday with Anthony and Daye.

The final social activity of late this week was a session of 7th Sea where the PCs are increasingly coming to to terms with the scale of the political danger they've put them in; it's a fantasy version of a resource course. Apart form all this I've been playing house a fair bit, after purchasing a big antique sideboard, rearranging a variety of furnishings (especially bookcases) in the process. I don't really live in a house; it's more like a small library and museum. Or at least that's the plan.
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Spent much of Saturday stomping around Ikea for semi-disposable Swedish furniture. Having purchased an "almost new" queen-sized mattress from a neighbour earlier in the week, we also purchased a new queen sized bed frame, which didn't fit in our nook so back to the store it goes. So the old futon frame has been restored and that fits just snugly. Also purchased was three additional bookcases, making twenty-five through our homesmall library with still more yet to be shelved ("If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you" - Terry Pratchett). Blockout curtains are on the way to replace our cheap, bent, and ancient Venetian blinds. We're also looking at major upgrades to our increasingly dilapidated kitchen but that will have to wait for another day. The day concluded with my 4 G LG Optimus F5 ceasing to work after falling from a short height (will not turn on), so switching everything to a 3G HTC One; technically a generational downgrade, but with better technical specifications, it seems to be an improvement.

The next issue of RPG Review is due, with an overall subject matter of 'The Undead', and being late I am scrambling for articles. Unusually I am having a couple of quirky pieces on variations in the spectrum of dead and living, courtesy of some of the elaborations one finds in near-future games such as Eclipse Phase. It is fair to suggest that in the future what we largely consider a binary state (dead and alive) will be broken down more into a continuum, a proposal which Eclipse Phase takes to a speculative conclusion with the complete separation of mind and body into various skins with multiple backups and save points in consciousness. A very confusing situation indeed, and yet quite plausible. In other gaming news, played in Andrew's Laundry Files game on Thursday which involved several bureaucratic challenges (it is very like Paranoia sometimes) and today ran a session of 7th Sea which involved pretty much an battle with a (small) dragon for the entire session (discovery and battle write ups available).
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Pat Robertson has recently asked whether people who have sex with ducks are protected by hate crimes legislation; two young women engage take a satirical take with "sex with ducks". Both at Feminist Law Professors. It does remind me of a South Australian MP several years ago who argued that the decriminalisation of prostitution would lead to sex with ducks. What is it with ducks? Are they thinking of ducks with giant penises?

Recent addition to Casa di Lafayette/Hoehnhauss has been a video projector; a Hitachi XSGA CPSX5500. Several years ago these cost $10,000 and whilst the technology was superior to standard LCD, they were outrageously expensive; even a replacement globe costs over $1,000. So work bought three new projectors for their Access Grid room and I'm borrowing this old one. The resolution is very good, but the colour is a heavy shade of blue; hopeless for colour films, but excellent for our vast collection of black and white classic films (and [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya knows her classics) projecting a 'screen' of some 2m by 1.5m.

Other recent entertainment includes an excellent game on Friday eve of Insectes and Companie (PDF, French language, translation coming) run by Fabrice and on the Sunday session of GURPS Krononauts which involved Hernan Cortes capturing of Moctezuma in the middle of his own capital and his subsequent sortie of against the 1,000 Spanish soldiers sent to arrest him (Wikipedia summary available). Whilst I have little friendly to say about his imperialism (although they did put an end to religious human sacrifice) one cannot help but be thoroughly impressed by his strategic and tactical genius mixed with an extraordinary confidence in his own abilities.
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The South-East Australian bushfires continued to rage during the week. Estimates of the dead are now around three hundred, although the official toll has stood at 181 for some time. The number of animals that have died is estimated to be in the millions. Apparently one needs to be university researcher to blame trees and the Greens, and divine inspiration to blame the decriminalisation of abortion.

I have started a new public policy website in accord to my 2009 plan. The idea is to combine elements of liberal, socialist and anarchist theory into a practical and results-orientated perspective. The intention is to gradually build the movement, one person at a time, into something that is both far more interesting and independent than what passes for most political organisations. On a related topic, having become frustrated over the years by the inability of semi-professional organisations to deal with IT workplace issues (wages, OH&S, collective bargaining), I have joined the ACTU-affiliated APESMA.

For sequential unix timestamp day (hat-tip to [livejournal.com profile] tajna for the name), [livejournal.com profile] caseopaya and I went to the hills to look at housing to buy despite the smell and haze of smoke that covered the city. Our landlords have increased the rent on our apartment by almost 25% and we're in the situation when where we can buy a significantly larger property with a mortgage repayment of less than we're currently paying in rent. So we had a trip out to Belgrave, Sassafras, and Mt. Dandenong and had a very late lunch outside the William Ricketts Sanctuary. No firm decisions yet from the initial scouting mission.

During the week also had a visit from [livejournal.com profile] hathalla and [livejournal.com profile] ser_pounce; it was a belated birthday gathering for the latter. I provided him a signed copy of [livejournal.com profile] robin_d_laws's HeroQuest and made an enormous tiramisu using a famous [livejournal.com profile] frou_frou recipe.

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