Lev Lafayette's journal

As the title says, computing and politics have been quite prevalent in my life over the past several days. This included three days of particularly well-attended high-performance computing training workshops, including one on Mathematical Applications and Programming. It's been a year since I've run this particular workshop, and I always feel a little rusty when I do so (which compares against the monthly provision of the HPC essentials and scripting workshops). Nevertheless, the feedback I received suggests that the smorgasbord approach (shell, expr, datamash, R, Octave, Maxima, Julia, Gretl) with "common best practices" seems to work. These are probably the last courses for the year with the exception of getting a mentorship programme up and running and getting the content onto the University canvas system.

There is, of course, an election coming up in the fine state of Victoria and I have made some very rough comments about probabilities. Whilst the opinion polls show some narrowing, there are still serious concerns with the fitness of the opposition to govern, or at the very least there should be. There is the question of Matthew Guy's chief-of-staff regarding a questionable donation, continuing problems with the takeover by theocrats in the party, outright racists, all a combination leading the Liberals to be "in ruins". One only has to look at Guy's behaviour when he was actually in power as Planning Minister to think of what it would be like if he would ever be Premier.

Apropos the political, with a social aspect, I attended the FriendlyJordies floods fundraiser event entitled "A Tale As Old As Rome" (best seats in the house, courtesy of some epic networking skills of lei_loo). I was delighted with his scholarly knowledge of Roman history and how significant to the European culture and economy the Republic and Empire was, along with supportive recognition that Julius Caesar's opposition from the "optimates" was largely due to Caeaser ensuring public lands for the "populares". A dictator he may have been, but Caeser's opposition were slumlords and land speculators and when they were in control matters were often worse for most people. The fact that this was all mixed with a truly clever delivery ensures that next time there is an event I will attend again.

This Sunday (11am, 110 Grey St, East Melbourne) I'm speaking at the local Unitarian Church on "The Inspirational Malala Yousafzai", which will have a couple of surprises in it. This will be followed by The Philosophy Forum with Rohan McLeod on "Theories of Language and Definitions", which will cover the pragmatic, semantic, etc. On a further education-related matter, the new course in Tertiary and Adult Education policy goes well. Have completed the first five weeks of readings before the end of week one. Written some notes on the first week's readings, Knowledge Economy and Tertiary Education. Finally, in education related matters, have completed the "Chapter Octave" in the Mathematical Programming book that I'm writing - next will be finishing off "Chapter R". Haven't decided what order to put these in. The next year at work is looking like that it will at least double the training courses that we offer with yours truly doing nearly all of the work (in addition to internal auditing of the company, HPC systems administration, project management, internal information management etc).

Played an excellent and entertaining game of Eclipse Phase last night, involving a linguistic virus that has infected half the party already. I've been very fortunate to pick up another copy of the core rulebook, along with supplements Gatecrashing, Sunward, and Panoptican. Of course, the good folk at Posthuman Studios release much of their material for free, under a Creative Commons license, which is just another feather in the cap of how awesome they are. My Quicksales store continues to do well with the site living up to its name. It is such a gradual process, but people are expressing interest and buying, possibly because the prices are at the less expensive end of the "buy me now" prices for comparative condition. Not sure what this Sunday's game is going to be; Michael is running a Lake-Town Middle Earth game but there seems unsure whether it will be Rolemaster, MERP, or Fantasy Craft.

Oh, and Lucky Rat has had a benign tumor removed. The aptly-named rodent that has avoided becoming snake food, cat food, and now dodged the big c, continues to travel along blithely as if there isn't a care in the world. Except for the time she lost the tip of her tail (could have been worse, it could have been a paw, I suppose).