June 2025 – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

A decadent dinner out on a school night!

Today I spent most of the day marking university assessments for the Data Engineering course. I started a few days ago and wanted to finish it off today. I had a report to read through and then three presentation videos to watch and assign marks for. It took much of the day.

I had a break at lunch to take Scully out. I didn’t mention that last Friday I went for an annual checkup to the optometrist, and I got a new prescription for glasses to wear while using a computer screen. I left one pair of glasses there to get new lenses made, and they said this morning they were ready to pick up. But when I got there and tried them on, it we immediately clear that they’d been made for book reading distance, not computer screen distance. They checked and sure enough the wrong prescription had been used. So I had to leave the glasses there and take my second pair back home again. I’d intended to swap them and have the prescription updated in the second pair as well. Oh well.

I grabbed some sushi rolls for lunch and sat with Scully in the nearby park while I ate.

In the afternoon I realised we didn’t have enough fresh vegetables at home to really cook anything interesting. So I took Scully out for another walk and we went to the local neighbourhood supermarket. On the way we walked past this vacant lot, where a house was standing just a week or two ago:

They demolished and removed that sucker really quickly! Presumably a new, more modern house will be built there soon. It’s a nice bit of land, on the top of a hill with a view south towards the city. The centre of Sydney is just out of sight behind the other house to the left, but you’d have a good view of it from a rear balcony on a house on this block.

I bought mushrooms from the supermarket, but when my wife got home this evening, I was feeling a bit uninspired to cook anything and I suggested we do something wild, that we never normally do: eat out on a mid-week night! I suggested we drive over to our favourite French crêpe and galette place. She liked the sound of that, so we hustled over there. Being a Tuesday night, it was nice and quiet. I had a “terre et mer” galette, with chorizo, garlic prawns, cheese, and cherry tomatoes:

With a traditional cup of French cider. It was delicious, and felt really decadent, having a fancy restaurant meal on a weeknight. We also shared a salted caramel sauce crêpe for dessert, which was also great.

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!

Starting on marking assignments

This morning I did another 5k run. But after yesterday’s fast effort I took it easier and also my muscles hadn’t fully recovered, so I ended up being quite a lot slower. Never mind, the important thing is to do the exercise, not to be great at it.

I started work on marking the student assessment reports for Data Engineering. I need to get written reports and video presentations marked this week, so used my Sunday to get started. I only got one marked before my ethics classes in the afternoon, but at least I’ve started.

Not much else to talk about today – I didn’t go anywhere.