Lev Lafayette's journal

A pleasing result of the week was the publication of Chimera and The Cyborg with colleagues at the University of Freibug on HPC/Cloud hybrid systems (and more). Today (and tomorrow) I've been teaching a c50 person group of postgraduate mechanical engineering students on HPC and Linux, and to be honest, I thought they would have more of a background on the latter. I am sympathetic on what must be a steep learning curve, as today we combined my usual introductory and advanced courses in a single six-hour session, which was pretty gruelling for me and it would have be very hard for those unfamiliar with the basic content.

Despite time pressures, I have taken the opportunity to attend to a few social events this week. Gaming-wise there was Megatraveller last week, with Lexoccultum tonight (mid-17th century western Europe plus supernatural). Last Sunday was our regular RuneQuest game where we continue to push aside increasingly challenging opposition. Plus, visited Brendan E., on Sunday (as we'd missed each others birthdays), and he treated us to a couple of SF-action films, Oblivion and Spectral. The gender-roles in the first were irksome and the science behind the second was flimsy, but this aside, both sit into the mixed to good range. Which, interestingly, is where I put the Jesus & Mary Chain concert we attended at The Forum on Tuesday. It was well-performed, but I wasn't really taken by setlist, which was a really curious combination of choices.

There was once a movement that said we should have 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, and 8 hours recreation. The sense of balance is notable and subtracting the rest component it basically argues that there should be a 50%/50% work-life balance. Of course that doesn't include transit time to work, the prevalance of unpaid overtime (call it "wage theft"). but nor do is include weekends either. By these metrics I am currently running on (0.5 work + 0.5 associations + 0.5 GradDip + 0.5 MSc + 0.25 MHed) = 2.25 full-time lives. Although to be fair, a lot of the the latter two is material I am familiar with. I just hope I can keep it going for a couple more months as to complete degree number five. All the degrees, you see. Actually, my intention is retire with ten; putting "lifelong learning" intp practise. Maybe then I'll actually be confident enough to write more.

Unmentioned in my most recent posts was two excellent talks at the last week's well-attended LUV main meeting on completely different topics: Adam Bolte provided a good overview of the absolutely terrible suggestions of introducing DRM in HTML5, whereas Malcolm Herbert gave a great introduction to GNU Screen. It was an ideal combination of the free software social advocacy and the deep technical implementations that LUV remains famous for. Also, on request of the committee (I'm not so keen, but that's democracy for you) we have established a Meetup group and even revived our old linux_victoria livejournal account. There is rumour afoot that we're about to have a fourth regional chapter. Amusing related news is that Mark Shuttleworth has closed Bug #1 "Microsoft has a majority market share" of computational devices, as it is now longer true.

Over the past week have been bringing together a range of historical posts from some very disparate sources to my 'blog pages on the Isocracy Network (really have to prod some other people to contribute there) and to the Lightbringers website. Next step will be to bring in my many reviews on RPG.net to the RPG Review website and various tech and academic pieces to my main website (including some old tutorials on discrete mathematics and news items that I used to publish). Keeping track of one's writings is challenging when one puts together at least a thousand words a day, but not impossible.

Have had a couple of excellent gaming sessions in the past week for Eclipse Phase and Twilight 2000. Former game saw the explosive conclusion of a lunar singing cult with antimatter bombs and the latter saw the first stages in the Battle for Warsaw (2001) between a self-styled Baron and a disparate group of former Soviet soldiers and a free Polish community, all of which saw the need to introduce some more rules patches. Also have recently had reviews of GURPS Cthulhupunk, and H.P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands published on RPG.net. In preparation of next Thursday's Pendragon game (re)watched Kingdom of Heaven an excellent story and theme with an interesting collection of historical accuracies and inaccuracies) along with Mists of Avalon, a fairly good rendition of the reinterpretation of Arthurian legend in the novel of the same name.

Went briefly to Continuum, Melbourne's science fiction convention, on Friday evening. One day in the far-flung future, I'll throw myself back into sf fandom but not quite yet. Nevertheless briefly caught up with a number of old friends including Narelle H., physics lecturer and Gaelic-speaker ariaflame, the ever studious (but taking a break) claudine_c, and the superorganiser, mortonhall, before heading off to dinner with the wonderfully exuberant callistra and friends, where there was fine philosophical conversation and consumption of Korean food. Apropos this, many in this community are mourning the loss of one of their recent greats, Iain Banks, founder of The Culture in science fiction, and a variety of challenging literary fiction. Favourite books from said author for myself include Use of Weapons and Complicity.