Lev Lafayette's journal

The past two days have been taken up with delivering training workshops and the two days previous a hefty proportion of the time spent generating new content and revision for said courses, along with marking assignments for the university's Cluster and Cloud computing unit. From the latter there were a few assignments that made me think "What on earth are they doing?" and a few where the students quite clearly understood what was going on; which I would hope for a master's level course. As for the training workshops, the Parallel Processing was in need of a decent revision and I had new content for GNU Parallel in particular. Alas, this meant that the content that I had for the debugging and profiling part of the workshop was cut shorter than what I would have liked. Then, for the new course, HPC Databases, I delivered pretty good content on the file system, data management and resources, and especially embedded databases with job submission, but when it came to the rather major component of database servers I'd left out a line in the configuration in the midst of a live demonstration - so nothing worked after that.

In the midst of this, the kitchen sink suffered a blockage. I tried the usual methods - plunger, hot water, baking soda and vinegar, wire, caustic soda - before resigning myself to some home maintenance. I'm not afraid of such things having lived in houses with questionable plumbing in the past (ahh, those Accelerated House days), so working step-wise from the drain basket I removed the piping piece-by-piece to discover that there was a fine collection of immovable gunk in the trap that was causing the problem. It's a wet and messy business, so I put it all back together and thought the problem was solved. Alas, my enthusiasm for pipe removal meant that the twenty-year-old plumber's putty had given out and now I have leaking pipes, so a trip to collect some silicone as a replacement is in order.

I've taken both events in rather good humour. It all rather reminded me of one of my earliest forays into this profession (IT in a general sense) when I worked as a volunteer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Timor-Leste twenty years ago. That had more than a few challenging issues, to say the least, given the lack of basic infrastructure or even a semi-reliable electricity supply. In the early months I my time there I had the opportunity to spend some time with one Gabriel Accascina who was responsible for setting up the satellite link so that the (refounded) new country have at least some sort of link to the wider Internet. His previous background included developing a sewerage system in Bangladesh. "It's all shit through pipes", I quipped. But it really is; the data (like the spice) must flow. A lesson plan that doesn't quite work out, a blocked sink. All of these fade into the category of "first-world problems" in comparison to getting just basic infrastructure in place.

Early in the week I dropped into the local public vaccination clinic and picked up my booster shot (Moderna; mixing it up a bit and the queue was shorter). The Royal Exhibition Building is World Heritage-listed for good reason; it's quite beautiful and was Australia's first parliament. Of course, in the current omicron environment, it does seem that the eastern states have all but decided to ignore health institute warnings from just a few weeks ago that we could hit up to 200K cases per day by the end of the month. Of course, our Prime Minister of Marketing pointed that this was on the upper edge of their estimates. Not that he's done anything at all about it, or will. Appropriately, a good portion of the last days of 2021 and early 2022 was spent in discussion with an associate professor of psychology at a polytechnic in the United States who so happens to have some pretty interesting views on coronavirus and vaccines. I have finally compiled the discussion in essay form, for prosperity, "Education is an Imperfect Vaccine" as an example of how ideological selection biases cloud

Yesterday caseopaya ventured out to Willsmere as we were getting the last bit of scrubbing of the place done; it's been painted and plastered, it has been gardened, it has a new oven and cooktop, the electrics have been fixed, and now it's finally ready to go on sale. If anyone has an interest in buying our property (located on the grounds of the old Kew Asylum) you know how to contact us. The evening prior we watched "Don't Look Up" which are far as allegory and satire goes is not what one would call subtle, but is nevertheless a thoroughly appropriate commentary on the vacuous commentary and discussion that one finds on most mass or social media. A few days prior we had ventured out to The Astor to see Coen's "The Trag^H^H^H^HScottish Play", which reminded me of a 1950s style, accentuated with its black and white filming, but also with the dialogue of Shakespeare (rather like Luhrmann's "Romeo + Juliet" from the mid-90s).

The thirty-year-old carpet in our house has to go. Yesterday we took the drive out to a suburban flooring store, picked a laminate and paid a few thousand dollars for underlay, boards, and associated labour, the latter being the most expensive part. Even then it's going to take a fair bit of effort because, well, so many books and bookcases, and the fact we live in a townhouse. I don't so much live in a house but rather a library which, according to many of my friends, is some sort of utopia. I guess even libraries need their flooring changed on occasion and the place is about due for a spring-clean.

Last night was a quite a night out; went out with Brendan E., and new housemate, caught up with Morgan R., and partner visiting from Geelong, and Amy came along as well. We had dinner at the Grace Darling in Collingwood, which is nice decor, but stupidly and unpleasantly loud. Brendan's new housemate is doing a double major in criminology and philosophy, so as one can imagine having a great opportunity to discuss some of those finer points. Also watched a bit of Archer 1999 and the movie Bright, which dealt with some obvious themes in a fantasy-cum-cop-action story, very reminiscent of Shadowrun roleplaying game, as many have noted.

Speaking of such things, played Megatraveller on Thursday night with our switched-characters. The GM is building a narrative where our two-sets of characters, space pirates versus imperium marines, are skirting around each other. In a very different genre it could be like William S. Burroughs', Nova Express, but I don't think it will turn out that way. Today I have an Eclipse Phase session, where the sentinels and proxies have to deal with rogue AIs taking over anti-matter bombs and psionic and psychotic mutants. Also during the week started doing a lot of organisational work for RuneQuest Glorantha Con Down Under IV. Plenty more to be done, however, especially in the advertising and ticket-sales!