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Australia has had an absolute political circus of a week with the bourgeois-liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeing off an attempted party-coup lead by hard-right minister Peter Dutton on August 21st, only to experience a second leadership spill two days later. This time Turnbull stepped down and surprisingly Scott Morrison has now taken up the role of Prime Minister of Australia; a more thorough account is provided by the good folk at Wikipedia. Turnbull had always been too willing to compromise with the crazy right-wingers of the Liberal Party and was so ignorant of the economic pain of ordinary people to ensure public support. It was, briefly, impressive to see how he fought back in the last days but it was all too late. As for the contenders, Peter Dutton is an obvious extreme-right dullard who is widely loathed, and Scott Morrison whilst slightly more pragmatic but has no public appeal, and also comes from the far-right of the party and comes with the same economic baggage. So whilst the liberal and conservative wings of the Liberal Party are at open war with each other (and the latter winning), the public are increasingly annoyed at a party that has no concern with their increasing levels of inequality, increases in the cost-of-living, wage stagnation, and their virilent anti-unionism. People are furious as their behaviour and the Tories are going to get smacked for six when the Federal election is finally called.

Whilst the circus was unavoidable, there were other events to participate in over the past few days. Notably delivered a training day on Parallel Programming on Wednesday which was well attended by an interested class. The evening beforehand I went wrote a couple more code debugging examples for Valgrind and the GNU Debugger which are appropriate for the class and will fine-tune those even further for the next classes - four have been set up for the coming month of September. Thursday started with yet another hearing at VCAT where an application was made to sell Rick B's house; given that there is no argument about the need and no opposition, it surprises me that this requires a court case rather than simply being an administrative procedure. Later that day participated in a session of Megatraveller where the PCs finally caught up with a nanite distributing scientist-gone-wrong only to discover that they were doing the right thing. The GM added in some major player-created plot elements as part of the chase which worked quite well. Finally, today attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria today with Wen Len presenting on Dual-Booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu, which was appropriately sub-titled "the fun, the pain, the joy". As he pointed out that actual process itself is reasonably easy - it's the planning that's painful. It's quite a busy few days, and next week in Perth will be busy as well. Still, perhaps one of the happiest moments of it all is that I received confirmation a short time ago that Kyral Castle will be available to host RuneQuest Con DownUnder on November 11th - so that's official. And guess who will be leading the organisation of that event?
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It was over two years ago that [personal profile] caseopaya's mother was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma. At the time she was given mere weeks to live. Well she made an additional two years, with [personal profile] caseopaya calling me in the early hours of this morning to say that she'd passed away, after being taken off her usual medications, then off food and water until she was just on pain killers. It was from all accounts, an easy death as much as such a thing could be said to occur. I have sung Maria's praises in the past and there is not much more that can be added. The immediate family in WA is making funeral arrangements and have had the synchronicity of a niece's birthday. Tomorrow I leave to join the clan; Andrew D., has kindly offered to look after our menagerie, which is somehwat more modest these days.

So that was the start of the day. The next activity was attending VCAT so I can have power of financial attorney for Rick B., whom has been initially diagnosed as having frontaltemporal dementia. The one-person tribunal was more than satisfied that I would be a sound person to manage his finances and the presence of another of Rick's close friends as well as two character letters (one from a psychiatric nurse and the other from a psychologist) certainly helped. Much of the meeting was going through the details and ensuring that I understood the powers and responsibilities that come with such a role, and the reporting requirements. A nice fat book has been provided to aid me in this new endeavour.

After that took a trip out to a couple of inner suburbs for a couple of hours to put up posters to encourage a 'yes' vote in Australia's ridiculous marriage equality postal survey. Had a few people ask for a couple to add to their home windows etc., including an older Dutch lesbian activist, who was a member of the Matrix Guild. It's tiring work for one person, juggling posters and tape, but the response was good.

After that returned to the city to the Victorian Secular Lobby meeting on the Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill which is being presented to the Victorian parliament. The meeting was addressed by Lesley Vick, president of Dying with Dignity Victoria who pointed out the national changes and an overall change towards greater patient-centered care. I would have liked to have had a few more people in attendance, but that's how it goes. Lesley was a great speaker and packed in a lot of information, even though she was more than a little under the weather.

And that was quite a day, even by my own standards.

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