Lev Lafayette's journal

"This holiday sucks!", I exclaimed earlier this week as the continuing and requisite movement restrictions are applied in lieu of travel and the social interactions that I would otherwise be taking. But one must adapt to our circumstances and make the best of The Plague conditions. Some people have become obsessive cooks, others have broadened their experience of the best cultural products (music, film, etc), or have engaged in home improvements, or have tried to retain visual social interaction through various contemporary technologies. There is also the time-honoured Internet tradition of arguing with ignorant strangers from the other side of the world. And yes, of course, people (including myself) have taken a little from all these options.

Then there is the path of the scholar, which I have largely taken. These circumstances are actually a good opportunity for scholarship, possibly even the best, although I would rather be doing this at Manapouri, staring out over the mountains of Fiordland; my heart remains deep in The South Island. So instead of a holiday in the vacational sense, I have psychologically turned the week into one of study leave. This has primarily meant formal study for my Masters in Higher Education and preparation, some weeks in advance, for an upcoming symposium on mentorship and leadership, where I will provide a detailed outline of a proposed mentorship programme. In addition to this, there have also been further studies from the MOOC on pharmacology from the University of Ohio course; by the end of the week I should be half-way through.

There has also been progress on my linguistic pursuits; as a native speaker and dear friend, Shupu W., is assisting me in an attempt (yet again) to learn standard Chinese which non-Chinese Australians are poorly represented. I have also made significant headway of several thousand words in a project Esperanto for Anarchists, which has been sitting as a background project for some time. It's a fascinating and rich topic that hasn't really has been documented in this manner, as a learning tool for both Esperanto and anarchism. And finally, because of longer-term plans, I have finally started learning Te reo Māori. These were all part of the "linguistics" section of my Five Year Plan (yes, of course, I have such a thing). Circumstances mean that some I am starting a bit earlier than planned.

One of those items on my Five Year Plan was to learn some music theory. For more than three decades I have not just been an active listener of music, and friends of many musicians, but a reviewer and critic, all of which I have done "by ear". Not so long ago a friend asked for my review of New Order published in METIOR, the Murdoch University Guild newspaper from 1987 - that's how far back it goes. Anyway, I'm in an extensive theory course with content from the Augsburg University in Minneapolis, and I've dived in thick and fast. There is an explicit orientation to applying the theory as composition, which is another of my longer-term goals. I've written some notes on this in the past and why one reviews and learns theory; "It is aesthetic criticism that rescues us from the claims that all taste is subjective" but also inspired from Victor Hugo's remark; "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent".

Recently a meeting with an early career person earlier this week on their future career in IT - and it became a 'blog post on careers and purpose in its own right. For my own part going to IT was a career change some fifteen years ago from politics, and with a short transition period. As evident, it seems that one doesn't really leave a subject they are passionate about - life just gets more complex. Continuing the passion and profession synthesis, next Tuesday I'll be speaking at Linux Users of Victoria on OpenStack and the Barcelona Open Stack Summit. Following a similar theme have also made a good start on my talk for Multicore World on HPC/cloud hybrids. Slight hiccup of the week; whilst turning off the compute nodes for Edward a tech pulled the cable for the head node as well, just after a "please move your data" email went out - oops.

There's nothing like the election of a disruptive and destructive leader to get people motivated in politics. There's been multiple 'blog posts relating to Lord Dampnut in the past week on the Isocracy Network, including my own summary of his activities, The Shambling Mound's Second Week. Part of this weekend will be spent preparing material for the Isocracy Labor-Green Alliance strategy meeting (FB) next Friday. Whilst not usually a political organisation, the RPG Review Cooperative has agreed to respond to PETA's insane complaint over Warhammer 40K characters wearing fur.

Having completed the skill trees on Duolingo in the past year for Esperanto, French, German, and Spanish, I have found the daily challenge is keeping them all lessons at "gold" status. Most recently, whilst keeping such a level, I've decided to take more "offline" lessons on those languages via texbook learning to give a more conversational grasp of the languages, something with Duolingo is not good at. Nevertheless will also continue the extensive learning via that medium of Russian, and Mandarin on Memrise. The new month also reminds me that it is time re-establish my interests in the "Scandinavian languages", partially in preparation for ISC and subsequent journeys afterwards, but also to extend my grasp of Germanic linguistics.

It's pretty clear that I'm going to have to get back into the habit of posting to this journal at least twice a week, for the sheer sake of having a somewhat succinct personal record of events and links to various thoughts and considerations. Today apparently is the point of my forty-ninth revolution around the sun, which I'm hardly going to celebrate hard; a small lunch gathering at Timiao courtesy of my manager at work. Received some great books from caseopaya, which will keep me busy for a while. The day however will live in some infamy however - not for the inauguration and speech of President Trump (which happens at 4am January 21st AEDST), but rather of rampage in the Melbourne CBD (caseopaya's office was in lockdown).

This aside the week has had some other highlights. Last Saturday's Cheesquest day with ser_pounce and hathhalla went very well. I made two cheesecakes, with the baked vegan one surprisingly working out quite well (crazy but true, I can cook vegan food with some competence). It was also the first attempt at porron drinking games, being an item I'd picked up the week prior. We played Asterix: Das Kartenspiel, a rather clever and quick bidding game. The following day was the AGM and BBQ for the RPG Review Cooperative, which was very much enjoyed by all present. Other gaming related events for the week included Laundry Files on Wednesday evening. Tomorrow is another BBQ I'm preparing for; this time for Linux Users of Victoria.

The week Zhou Youguang died, known as "the father of pinyin". His passing providing a psychological impetus (this often happens for me) to start learning Mandarin on Memrise which I must admit is bloody hard. Unlike European languages (even Russian, which I started again this week) there is nothing in terms of lexical similarity. Then there is the simplified logographic script and hanyu pinyin to learn with the vowel tones ("mā ma mà mǎ", "mother scolds the horse") which can lead some stunning writing (e.g., Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den). I've been led to believe that the grammatical structures are a lot less complex than English (let alone German etc) but I'm hardly at that level yet.