Lev Lafayette's journal

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".