Lev Lafayette's journal

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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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).

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 tajna for the name), 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 hathalla and ser_pounce; it was a belated birthday gathering for the latter. I provided him a signed copy of robin_d_laws's HeroQuest and made an enormous tiramisu using a famous frou_frou recipe.