Lev Lafayette's journal

The European tour of 2019 begins today with nephew-in-common-law Luke once again stepping on up to look after the place, the cats, turtle, and fish. The journey will see an early morning stop-over in Abu Dhabi, before landing in Frankfurt bright-eyed and bushy-tailed early on the 3rd. After that, it is a journey down to Stuttgart for a few days to visit die familie, and alas, not going to Schwarzwald as the heating and hot-water system is undergoing repairs. After that it is of to Darmstadt to the European Space Agency/European Space Operations Centre, and then to Delft to catch up with Jett D., and a follow-to up journey the International Criminal Court (no, I'm neither on trial, nor as a witness). The next step is to Ghent to catch up with Qassem and Kenneth H, of Easybuild fame. The day after that it was to Paris for a couple of days, and will meet up with Gianna and maybe Laurent as well. I've also made a request to visit SF author Norman Spinrad, if he's available. From Paris it's a visit to Strausbourg, then to Freiburg to meet up with the people from that university, and then a period in Zurich for the MSc residency for several days. At that juncture it's a bit open; the trip may include a visit to Florence and Venice, or it may result in a direct trip to Vienna, then Bratislava, Prague, and finally back to Frankfurt.

Whilst all this is preparation there have been some endings of some long-term activities. Last night I visited the annual general meeting of Linux Users of Victoria and, for the first time in fourteen successive years, I decided not to stand for committee election, thus ending a period where I have been an ordinary committee member, treasurer, vice-president, public officer, and president (for four years), and then as a committee member. It's been quite a trip, and in many ways, helped a great in the development of my own (second) career. Too be honest, I haven't been that active since I finished my term as president at the end of 2014 and the words wrote then are probably most appropriate. Another long-term end for the day was more recreational, that is the augmented reality game, Ingress. I have written in the past my concerns of the new interface and where the game is going and now the enforced scanner has been sufficient reason to abandon the game, which I've been playing now for several years. The end of the month was also the end of George the Talking Clock in Austalia, after 66 years in service.

But between beginnings and endings there is continuity. There is, of course, plenty in my life which represents continuity. Yesterday I finished writing a submission for the Victorian Secular Lobby on the proposed "religious freedom" legislation drafted by the Australian government. As you can imagine, the VSL follows the opinion of most legal and human rights advocates who point out that the proposed legislation is downright dangerous - a sword to attack others, not a shield to protect their metaphysical beliefs. There is also the Isocracy Network, whose AGM I have planned just after my return, as it already two months late. Whilst I am away, I will still be organising to the best I can the RuneQuest Glorantha Down Under Conference - and the past few days did witness a session of Eclipse Phase (write-up of the previous session available), and a new scene in HeroQuest Glorantha pbem, which I admit I neglected quite badly over the previous month.

I've had several late nights in succession this week and it all came to a head today when I was running my Introduction to Parallel Programming course. By the time I got to the debugging section (right at the end of the day) my head was in a complete fog and I found myself making trivial mistakes. On a related topic had an video interview with the University of Otago concerning my enrolment in the Master of Higher Education degree; they seem very keen on having me and especially as I already have a GradCert in a related subject, have many years of teaching experience, and involved in the International HPC Certification programme. Unusually for someone who spends a good portion on their time in the operations and administration side of the equation, I cracked out some old-fashion HTML/Javascript work this week as well, building all sorts of complex options for a fork of bjmoran's jobscript_generator, before falling back to a simpler version.

Which reminds me, yet again, that I really should get around to doing the Javascript programs for ship and world generation for Megatraveller. We played a session on Thursday night which went well for our team once again as we convinced a charismatic religious leader to take the opportunity to take control of a collapsing church and a society which had lost its faith in church, because there will still be such things in the far, far future. I'm looking forward to seeing how GM handles the rebellion, as we've managed to avoid it so far, and especially Hard Times, which must one of the most depressing RPG scenarios ever put into print. In other RPG-related activity, ticket sales for RuneQuest Con DownUnder 3 have slowed down to a crawl, which makes me nervous again about reaching the required number. At the same time I've asked a few of the old guard to contribute to the special issue of RPG Review whilst composing a couple of pieces myself.

I've had a couple of disappointing product experiences this week; actually one has been running for over a month, namely a purchase from laptop.com.au, which turned out to have the wrong specificiations (and broke shortly afterwards) and now the owner is insisting on a replacement rather than a refund. I've summarised the experience and have initiated proceedings at Consumer Affairs Victoria, along with the bank for a chargeback. The retailer in question has had form for years. The other product issue has been Ingress, which I recently noticed broke my 800+ day streak whilst I was in Perth. This is impossible as I hacked every day, several times a day, with glyphs and received items. Niantic support have been reading from a script making remarks about poor network connectivity etc (I'm on Optus Mobile). What is especially annoying is their insistence is that their software is perfect; despite the fact I suspect that they do not log hacks. It might prove the kicker for me to finally retire from Ingress - or kickstart my idea of "Operation Declare Victory".

I haven't posted for several days. But what a week it has been. Saturday was the meeting for Linux Users of Victoria with Russell Coker leading a hands-on demonstration for building a mail-server. The technical content was good, but his sessions would be better if he was more of a teacher and took the time to elaborate each point to provide grounding among the learners. Afterwards it was the annual general meeting of the Isocracy Network with Damien Kingsbury speaking on plans to reform asylum seeker policies. It has led to me to reflect on the 15 years of reluctant involvement I have had with this issue.

On Sunday's 7th Sea Freiburg gaming session followed on from The Great Fire of Freiburg to the financial rebuilding of the equivalent of the establishment of the Bank of England. In other gaming news, on Tuesday reached the highest level attainable in Ingress. I can imagine that much of the time that I used to spend on Ingress will now be spent on Duolingo, where I am progressing quite well in German, French, and Esperanto (I find French the easiest, quelle surprise). Needless to say, we are still attending our weekly German lessons at the College of Advanced Education.

There has been some work-related issues of the past few days that have led to some serious reverberations throughout the company, which I am not at great liberty to elaborate on. It has however left a number of good people quite shell-shocked even if it is not immediately obvious, and has certainly led to demotivation on the part of others. I raise the question on whether the Board has acted - and I mean this in the full legal sense - "in the best interests of the corporation". This aside, next week I will be presenting at the Open Source Developers Conference in Tasmania, and then return to conduct courses for RMIT, then La Trobe University, then Deakin University.

It was Thoreau who wrote the wonderful essay on walking, and there is much in it that I do find most agreeable. I do not engage in the twenty miles or four hours per day that he recommends, and I usually do travel with a purpose and direction in mind unlike the transcendentalist. But I am incredibly fortunate to live with a remarkable level of nature and yet only several kilometres from the centre of the city. The foliage around the Yarra River is beautifully dense with a huge number of bats, many species of bird (local and introduced), numerous possums, the occasional kangaroo, and recently I spotted a pair of foxes. Yet it also saddens me with the realisation that as I look at satellite imagery that I live in a tiny sliver of green, as the grey scar of human suburban habitation is the dominant feature. Once upon a time, all of Melbourne was as rich in non-human life, if not more so, as where I live now.

My enjoyment of walking has led me to recently download an pedometer application for my 'phone with consideration of health benefits that comes from a daily ten thousand steps regimen. As expected it took little change from my normal activity to reach such a daily target, although ironically a few days afterwards I was knocked out of action by a cold. Not a terrible one, but enough to put me largely out of any substantional activity for a while (and enough to take a day off work). In addition to the limits on walking, it also has limited by Ingress journeys. On the first night that I picked up the application, I walked Victoria Street, from the far west of Carlton to the far east of Richmond, taking out every single enemy portal, all of which were L7 and L8. It was about 60 in total, and it cost about 500 L8 bursters and around 100 ultrastrikes. Eventually I ran out of power cubes and battery, but was saved at the end of the journey by another agent who provided me with a bit of both.

In other gaming events the long-awaited (i.e., very late) double issue of RPG Review 26-27 has been released, 128 pages of pirate and swashbuckler goodness. It's a huge publication and I'm hoping the next issue will have several more people contributing a few extra articles with its nominated subject of "The Undead". In other gaming goodness, engaged in a very enjoyable game of Laundry Files during the week, along with a satisfactory conclusion to a chapter in our GURPS Middle-Earth game. Today we visited ser_pounce and hathhalla for another day of cheesequest (semi-finals between port salut and boursin) and played Small World and Small World Underground, both fairly well-designed games with strategic and tactical elements.

On Saturday caseopaya and I attended another part of round #2 of cheesequest with hathhalla and ser_pounce; I made liptauer, but I suspect the wensleydale/stilton with cranberry will win the round. We also played Pandemic a great cooperative game - the disease defeated our collective efforts twice, along with Nuns on the Run, an impressively well-themed 'hide and seek'.

In the world of the Ingress augmented reality, have picked up a rather impressive Enlightened hoodie courtesy of agent ozmusic. It has a battery powered glow-trim, which is quite amusing. Hit level 11 in the game today, which has been quite a wait. However due to the achievment requirements, I'm expecting to hit level 12 next week, and 13 by the end of the year. After a year of play, I have will be considering how much more I continue with it. For a long time it has been more habitual than anything else.

Although the timetable is habitual, roleplaying is anything but in content. Last Thursday was another episode of Masks of Nyarlathotep where the foreign investigators did much better than the previous session in piecing together various leads in their journeys in 1925 Shanghai. Sunday was GURPS Middle-Earth, where we flushed out a demon. My character's overconfidence led to to try to challenge this creature in single-combat on top of a peaked tower; my strategic sense led me to duck away whilst it was peppered with missile fire. In other roleplaying matters, I somehow completely neglected to mention my review on rpg.net last month of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach. Tonight, have just finished a review of a Yaquinto classic from the early 80s, Pirates and Plunder.

There was a shooting a few hundred metres down the road last night, which is quite unusual for this leafy middle-class inner suburb. To say the least it seems rather targetted, but it does make me give second-thoughts to my late night Ingress walks. I was pulled up by the police the other night who were wondering what I was doing in the wandering around the Yarra Bend Bat Colony in the middle of the night. When I rather sheepishly explained that I was playing a game, they knew exactly what it was all about.

Sunday consisted of visiting the Unitarians to hear Hans Baer speak on "democratic eco-socialism". I am not particularly convinced of the latching of environmentalism to a fairly orthodox Marxism. A richer tradition could be found in the romantic socialism (e.g., William Morris), or anarchism (e.g., Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy). After the service, a well-attended meeting of the Philosophy Forum witnessed Rohan McLeod give a presentation on Radical Self-Responsibility followed by good discussion. On topic, the ANZUUA newsletter Quest was released which included letters by myself and Nigel Sinnott in response to a pro-astrology address by Rev. Darlison, who gave the keynote address to the ANZUUA 2013 conference.

RPG Review issue 23 has been both delayed and combined into a double-sized issue. A more-than-requisite number of pages has been received for a late release but I need a couple more articles for variety. There's a Skyrealms of Jorune article forthcoming, and I was hoping for an Earthdawn/Shadowrun article as well, however the proposed author has not responded to recent correspondence. I'd like an article on the Star Wars universe as well from a TRPG gaming perspective, but am not sufficiently familiar with the details of the setting's implementation, despite a small mountain of gaming material for that universe (one day I'll run the epic where Luke and Darth join forces and rule the Empire together). On topic, GURPS Middle Earth was played on Sunday, with a new player bringing the group to seven and Pendragon is ready for tomorrow night with the Waste Land adventures continuing.

Although it hasn't been mentioned on this journal for some months, I continue to play Ingress with regularity (hooray, level 10), mainly during travel time to and from work, and with a post-lunch walk around the local area, and an occassional mad cycle on the weekends around Kew. I've had my moment of frustration with the game (it is designed by mapping experts, not game designers) and stopped playing for a week or so. But the good parts of the game were well worth continuing (discovery, exploration, socialisation). Due to the design, it is absolutely necessary to recruit people who associate with regularly. I have done this at work and as a result south Carlton and RMIT is pretty much an Enlightened stronghold these days. Last night briefly visited wildilocks and _fustian who seem to have cleverly incorporated the game as part of regular out-of-home activities. It certainly gets a person out of the house and visiting interesting places.