Lev Lafayette's journal

The Victorian state election delivered a thumping victory to Daniel Andrews and the governing Labor Party. Whilst as the prepolls are coming in the margin of victory is not nearly the same as it was on the night, it is still pretty incredible that some of the safest Liberal seats in the state are now marginal and the rusted-on National party seats in rural Victoria are being taken by independents. Yet, it is as it should be. The Labor Party, whilst far from perfect, delivered what it promised to do, showed a genuine commitment to infrastructure development, made some principled socially progressive decisions, and promised to do more of the same in health, education, and transport. The opposition campaign, almost always negative, focussed on ill-conceived "law and order" policies and religious appeals, simply couldn't carry in either what were the marginal "sandbelt" seats or even their supposed core supporters of Deakinite-liberals in the eastern suburbs. I shall write more about this on the Isocracy Network website in coming days, especially the attempt by conservatives who, incredibly, argue that the opposition's campaign was not right-wing enough.

Two IT events of note have occurred in the past few days. The first was on election day when I went to a farewell lunch for Chris Samuel who is leaving the country and is on his way to NERSC. I thank Chris for putting me on my career path of high-performance computing and for offering many words of wisdom along the way. An unfazeable fatalist, Chris has exactly the right demeanor for a profession that is often somewhere between the extremely challenging and almost incredulous; and that's just the users. The other event was the Victorian Directors of IT Forum which was held today. I'm not a Director, but I get invited along anyway and whilst a lot of it is at a very high-level, I was particularly interested in the presentation by Trish McCluskey and David Day from Victoria University on the "block curriculum" approach.

Ran a session of Eclipse Phase on Sunday where the Sentinels made their necessary resleevings as part of their journey to Antarctica, specifically the beautiful Halley Research Station (Youtube). Next week we're taking a break (shock!) from our regular gaming agenda, which would have been RuneQuest. I get the idea that some people are a bit RuneQuest-ed out, if such a thing could happen. It is perhaps just as well; next Sunday, December 2, I'm giving an address at the Unitarian Church on "The End is Nigh: Poor Stewardship of Planet Earth", where I compare some of the crazy apocalyptic fantasties of religious metaphysics to crazy probabilities of anthropogenic climate change of secular reality.