Lev Lafayette's journal

The past several days have been almost entirely dominated by scholarly pursuits, the most important (at least personally) was handing in my MHEd thesis on Monday; I've already mentioned this on Facebook with some rather lovely comments and recognition from friends. Assuming I pass that will be the end of two and half years of studying this subject, with numerous essays on the nature of advanced technical education, public economics and systems engineering, and university leadership. I am very thankful for those who engaged in the qualitative interviews for the thesis and also to Kayo who really provided superb insight and experience on the subject matter and recruiting of subjects. I honestly could not have ended up with the thesis that I did without their support and participation. Not one to let something like a thesis stop me, I have also been working on my next essay for my GradDip in Applied Psychology which, with no sense of temporal irony, is an experiment in qualitative interview techniques. That degree should be finished in the middle of next year.

Apropos, coming up tomorrow I am giving a talk at the Sea of Faith in Australia on Saturday at 2pm on "Is Moral Reasoning Innate or Learned?"; contact me for a Zoom link. The following day is also the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, an organisation I helped found in 2010, and that I have been president for most of this time. I will be standing down from this role at the meeting and there is the possibility that the organisation will disband; that will be up to the members and whether someone else takes up the role of the convenor. Despite this possibility, I think the organisation did pretty well over the years; we had stated objectives and we pretty much saw most of them actually come to pass. The biggest issues remain the School Chaplaincy project and the automatic status of religious bodies as charities.

Work has also been a site of some teaching and learning this week as well. For the past two days I have been conducting workshops on Linux, HPC job submission, and shell scripting as is typical every month or so. Further, however, the Cultural Working Group hosted one of our regular researcher presentations, this time with Associate Professor Adrian Bickerstaffe from the Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics discussing how Research Computing Services has provided assistance in the study participant engagement, application hosting, management of very large datasets, and genomic analyses. It is this sort of thing that gets me up in the morning; working with supercomputers is great and all with plenty of interesting technical challenges, but knowing that they are used to improve and save lives is my primary motivator.

In the past few days, I've spent my copious free time in getting two parliamentary submissions in before their deadlines. For Federal government and on behalf of the Victorian Secular Lobby I completed a submission on the second draft of religious freedom bills. These effectively enshrine the right of discrimination as long as it's religiously motivated. The second submission, for the State government on homelessness issues, was on behalf of the Isocracy Network. Just as I completed the latter the committee extended the deadline for submission; so perhaps my personal submission can wait until a later date; to be honest I have no yet consolidated in my own mind what to write about my own experiences as a homeless teenager finishing his high school graduation.

About a fortnight ago we at Research Computing Services moved to our new offices on Leicester Street; we're all settled in now and the general facilities are an improvement to what we had before. A welcome drinks and nibbles gathering was held yesterday and found myself one of the last to leave having engaged in some conversation with the people from Space Management who had come to visit. Also on a similar trajectory, the night previous visited the local Aldi to purchase eleven bottles of their Oliver Cromwell, which had finally made to Australia. This is of note as it has won a few serious awards in that category. I cannot say I'm a big consumer of gin by any stretch of the imagination (caseopaya has a greater interest in that direction), but this was opportune. So having a good stock of the stuff shouldn't go astray.

Due to function clashes, our fortnightly Megatraveller game was shifted to Wednesday evening, where we had to deal with a crazed crew-member (there's always one, right?). I was quite intrigued by the organochloride native sapient lifeform of the hell world planet, but alas the plot didn't deviate in that direction. Nevertheless, it does provide material for the next "Monsters" issue of RPG Review which I am working on, with a desperate need for articles. Tomorrow I'll be running a session of Eclipse Phase, where the mutated exsurgent ex-proxies are going toe-to-toe with insane killer robots. Actually, quite impressed with how well the PCs played their new obsessive-compulsive behaviour in the last session.

It's been quite a busy past few days and across a multitude of activities. At 1am in the morning no less I had an online meeting with some colleagues in some European universities for developing an international certification for high performance computing. It comes just after the university finally decided to confirm my trip to the International Supercomputing Conference, but all the other activities I will have to take as leave, which isn't great, but I can live with it. Flights have been booked and conference registration fees paid. That itself comes after the NTEU organised a strike at the University over agreements, superannuation, and academic freedom. The strike coincided with others, and ended up being part of 100,000 people strong march through the city; I've penned a few words on labour markets and the importance of unions.

On a related topic the Victorian Secular Lobby held its annual general meeting today with Meredith Doig from Reason, a new political party. A great deal of discussion was generated on the current takeover of the Victorian Liberal Party by Christian theocrats, and the tax exemptions that religious organisations receive for their commercial activities, which really is an extraordinary situation. The Victorian Liberal issue is quite a worry as it suggests that they're going for a polarising and rather nasty election, which will target the safe schools programme, voluntary euthanasia, abortion decriminalisation etc, which is really going to make things uncomfortable for traditional liberals in the party.

I've managed to get a bit of gaming in the past few days as well. Played Megatraveller on Wednesday where we allocated our six-ship fleet on various tasks and set up the next target for our expanding commercial and military protectorate. Last night played Eclipse Phase dealing with some especially explosively cold environs. For my own EC game which I'll run tomorrow, did a write-up today of the last session; I've gotten into the habit of making puns for the chapter and subchapter headings. Also, in fairly big news, have released RPG Review Issue 38 which has Space Opera subject, and with Terry K. Amthor as the interview subject. My own contributions include a Spacemaster scenario, and reviews of several SF RPGs, including FASA's Star Trek (1983), ICE's Spacemaster (1988), WEG's Star Wars (1996), Mongoose's Traveller (2008), and Piazo's Starfinder (2017).

Finally, a number of people expressed their condolences for the loss of Tojo, which was the topic of my last post. In that, I expressed concern for the state of his cat, Sabre. Well, being the big soft sucker that I am, I couldn't bear the thought of homeless ageing cat so we've taken her in. As it turns out this is going to take some work - she's never seen another cat since her kittenhood and she freaked out a bit when she discovered Mac was cat number one. Mac, of course, is confused by her reaction. She's currently staying in the bathroom, having hissy fits if anyone approaches her. Hopefully, she'll calm down in a few days as she's suffered a bit of a shock. But I can tell this might take a while.

It was over two years ago that 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 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.

Major work change this week was moving offices; we've left the old warehouse on Lincoln Sq and moved to the Doug McDonnell building. Had a farewell lunch with some of the people at the Sustainability office before we left, and today was working from home whilst the removalists did their thing. Took the opportunity to write the paper I'm presenting at OpenStack Australia Day and which will be replicated a few days later at Telstra. In addition to all this, have also just announced new course for HPC and Linux along with Shell Scripting for HPC, and had a meeting with some Microsoft representatives for setting up an Azure cloud burst partition to Spartan.

Other preparations in the coming week include the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby with John Bade from the Liberal Party talking on that body's difficult relationship with secularism as the reactionary Christians are on the ascendancy in that body. I wonder at their lack of practical concern for the impoverished sectors of society, asylum seekers and so forth. It's curious how some people are prepared to manipulate the genuine desire for moral character among others and a sense of wonder with existence to acquire power and wealth. I can't imagine that Jesus would have been very impressed with such behaviour.

Wednesday evening was Papers & Paychecks, where the PCs made good progress to Save Our Borderlands, and the puns were flowing thick and fast. There also has been a good deal of work building resistentialist "monsters" for the game. Tonight is Justin A's Eclipse Phase and will be preparing for my version of the same on Sunday. Also have received a copy of the quickstart rules for the new edition of RuneQuest for FreeRPG day.

Last Sunday's presentation to the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Changing Definitions of Marriage: Past, Present, and Future, was very well received. It was followed by a meeting of The Philosophy Forum where Graeme Lindenmayer spoke on The Nature and Existence of Time. This coming week have organised a meeting with Harriet Singh and the Victorian Secular Lobby to discuss the future of the Safe Schools Programme. The following Saturday I've also organised a meeting with Equal Love Australia to speak to the Isocracy Network to discuss the issue of a plebiscite or a free parliamentary vote on marriage equality, and issue which I introduced in the address to the Unitarians.

Politically of course, secularism is a liberal and modern concern, which does not only argue for the separation of religious beliefs from evidence in public policy and religious appointments in public institutions, but tangentially the development of post-metaphysical reasoning. It is difficult, to say the least, to imagine how fundamentalist beliefs will succeed in a world transformed both by technology and the breakdown of cultural differences. Racial and religious inspired violence is the last and pathetic attempt to impossibly impose a worldview that is already completely out of date.

On Tuesday night I gave a presentation at Linux Users of Victoria on Spartan: An HPC-Cloud Hybrid. Following day presented for the Edward to Spartan Workshop; a good class, albeit with a wide variance in skill levels, but all of whom were quite engaged in the subject. A big change this week was a switchover in storage and DNS for the venerable Edward system, primarily by imajica_lj and NinjaDan respectively.

Interesting collection of gaming events over the past week as well. Sunday, a busy day, was a session of Eclipse Phase which concluded with the discovery of On Monday night played some Ingress with a Sydney visitor whose IT-related agent name (Zilog80) I recognised from one of last year's visit to that town. Thursday night was the second session of Mimesis Delta Green which involved putting together the pieces of a grisly murders and concluded with an encounter with a Byakhee.

Europe plans are going very well. Meeting at CERN was confirmed this week, so now only waiting on confirmations from Frankfurt and Montpellier Universities. This morning caseopaya discovered that the greatest band of this century, 65daysofstatic, are playing in Barcelona on the first night of the OpenStack conference. Naturally enough I purchased tickets immediately. Now with but four weeks to go, the finer details of the intinery need to be sorted out. In many ways I've waited my entire life for a trip like this, and whilst a month is far too short to fully immerse oneself in what remains the centre of human history and intellectual - Geisteswissenschaften, as the Deutsche would say - it is coming to fruition.

Monday night was at The Astor Theatre to see the John Carpenter double, Escape from New York, and The Fog. The former I had not seen since it came out (1981) and the latter I had not seen at all. The films were pretty cheesy, but very good cheese at that. Quite glad that I decided to go - I also had the opportunity to introduce myself to the new theatre cat, Duke. I do like visiting the Astor with its beautiful deco features and propensity for classic and arthouse films, and its very inexpensive as well. Tempted to see their upcoming vampire double that's coming up.

On Tuesday went to the first meeting of the year of the University of Melbourne Secular Society and have followed up with a media release from the Victorian Secular Lobby on the rather silly idea that MPs should register their religious affiliation. The Lobby is planning on having its AGM at Parliament House in mid-April with Maree Edwards, the state member for Bendigo West to discuss the politics of the Bendigo Mosque.

Sunday was a game of the classic and original Cosmic Encounter from the 1970s; a very simple game to pick up but with some rather subtle strategies. Afterwards we did a playest of Nic Moll's (of Owlman Press new superhero game, Verge. It needs work, but has a good core feature of having the characters with a strong relationship with each other. In addition, my review of Libris Mortis has been republished on rpg.net.

This week I wrote or submitted three contributions to various government agencies. The first was a draft for Linux Users Victoria, on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, with particular attention drawn to intellectual property issues. The second was for the Victorian Secular Lobby, which was submitted to the Victorian parliamentary committee on end-of-life choices, based on last week's draft. The Isocracy Network is also considering a submission. The third was a submission to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to the Cultural Diversity Review, specifically on the classification of Unitarians as "Christian (Other)" in the Australian census. For the Victorian Secular Lobby, it's been a particularly good week with Special Religious Instruction taken out of the education curriculum.

I've had a busy end-of-week socially; on Thursday night strangedave and doctor_k_ were visiting Melbourne, so we organised dinner and a tour at the asylum for them and mortonhall and Trevor (LJ name?). Great conversation and a pleasant walk of the grounds. Did the same for visiting Westalian nephew Luke from Muzzle and his friend Nick on Saturday night. Also on Saturday went to see ser_pounce and hathhalla for the grand final of the cheesequest; a contest between (substituted) white stilton, epoisses (fantastic soaked in champagne), and a small mountain of the garlic-and-herb boursin, made by yours truly, plus a few others just to complement. We also played Mice and Mystics, a cooperative storytelling boardgame, where we were seriously defeated twice. Also had an interesting political and plotting dinner on Friday with Anthony and Daye.

The final social activity of late this week was a session of 7th Sea where the PCs are increasingly coming to to terms with the scale of the political danger they've put them in; it's a fantasy version of a resource course. Apart form all this I've been playing house a fair bit, after purchasing a big antique sideboard, rearranging a variety of furnishings (especially bookcases) in the process. I don't really live in a house; it's more like a small library and museum. Or at least that's the plan.

Last weekend experienced a particularly secular Saturday. By this, what is meant is that it was the "Darwin Day" Freethinkers gathering at the Fitzroy gardens, organised by the University of Melbourne Secular Society (who have invited me to speak at their club on March 10th). It was younger crowd, as expected, but with excellent conversation. This was followed by the annual general meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby at Trades Hall, which has a good turnout and an impressive guest speaker in the form of the recently elected member of parliament, Fiona Patten, who spoke on religious exemptions to the equal opportunity act, but also on public funding to faith-based schools who engage in discriminatory practices.

Finished three days of training at La Trobe University today for Linux, high performance computing, and MPI programming. A larger class than usual (about double), mostly researchers from the rather impressive Institute for Molecular Science and with different operating systems, which meant that it was a little harder than the usual downright exhausting. Feedback from this week's courses was from good to very good, a little down from the usual very good to excellent, but perhaps to be expected given the circumstances. Tomorrow will be on the big silver bird to head to the other side of the country, where will be attending the nuptials of caseopaya's niece at Yallingup. After that will be running a two-day course at the University of Western Australia, for a small cluster there; one day consisting of aimed at sysadmins and containing a lot of new material, and the second aimed at researchers. After that there is a few days before travelling to the University of Sydney to conduct a dozen days of training there over a month, with a trip to eResearchNZ in Queenstown somehow squeezed in among all that. I'm also supposed to submit the full paper for peer review and publication for THETA by Friday. I suspect I'll be writing that one on the plane!

For one future project I have recently received a review of training material by people who have absolutely no clue about the content. As a result, there is a lot of bikeshedding over trivial comments, remarks which display extraordinary ignorance about both high performance computing and advanced andragogical techniques and content simultaneously, remarks that are simply plain wrong (and obviously so if the reviewer had actually read the content), and inevitably, comments which are Not Even Wrong. I have become unusually angered by the response. Whilst normally I live by the mantra of not letting the aggravating factors of any workplace get to me (it's not worth it), this case is different. I think what is really troubling me is that the reviewer in question has the authority, but not the competence to make the judgements that they have, and they lack the intellectual humility and honesty to admit this (in other words, they are stuck at the unconscious incompetence stage of skill development). Ultimately I have to steel myself to only pay attention to the people who really matter in this processes - those who are the direct recipients of training in HPC systems (i.e., postgraduate and postdoctoral scientific researchers) - and place the comments of the glorified administrative assistants into the dustbin.

Sunday was the poetry and music service at the Unitarians; I presented Cows with Guns with a special dedication. Afterwards ran a session of 7th Sea Freiburg, which included a "haunted house" styled adventure along with casing a gang stronghouse. The former ended with the unexpected requirement of fishing for books, in a literal sense. After that (it was a very busy Sunday) attended a Jesus and Mary Chain tribute gig, which I reviewed for The Dwarf. Apropos have just completed a review of the Campaign Classic Pirates supplement, which will also be on rpg.net soon. Very pleased to have an upcoming interview opportunity with Mark Pettigrew, author of Flashing Blades.

On Monday evening caseopaya and I had dinner with Anthony L., and Robyn M at Quan 88. Absolutely superb food at a very low price, albeit with very simple decor. We spent the evening primarily discussing political strategy for the coming year, with a particular interest on the inherent requirements test in the Equal Opportunity Act. Our plans include illustrating some issues with the "right" of religious organisations to discriminate via some rather harsh short videos

Slight panic at work yesterday as one of the NFS storage devices fell over and for a period of time approximately half our users were unable to access their home directories, apparently all caused by a single-user's file transfers causing the controller to lose its head. As always, a gentle reminder that computational devices, being set-theory based creatures, have some limits. Today was unable to resist any further temptations from the local pet store and purchased three new rats, as yet unnamed. They're of varying ages, and I was feeling particularly for the oldest who was heading towards a life in a pet store charge. They're settling in, but will require some time. They haven't been handled a great deal and seem even unaware of chocoloate. However I suspect they're learn soon.