A new car!

It's been exactly 4 years and 2.5 months since I last had a working car, but since Tuesday I finally have my own wheels again!

I got a used 2018 Nissan Rogue (<50k miles), in the gorgeous "Monarch Orange" you see above.

It's actually been a bit of a shock driving again after four years of not driving in Australia (except for a single time in early 2018). My previous car was a 2013 Honda Civic, and while only five years elapsed between the production of that and my current car—well, SUV—it feels somewhat like I've just emerged from the Stone Age only to take the controls of the Space Shuttle.

This vehicle is chock-full of what feel to me like extremely futuristic features. It's got a touch screen, for one thing. It's got cameras around it giving a 360-degree panoramic view. It's got a push-to-start system—not even a physical key hole for ignition. It's got remote start, and an "Intelligent Key" system that makes locking and unlocking it without taking the keys out of your pocket a snap, a rear-window wiper, a huge powered moonroof, a powered, remote-triggerable back hatch, and a host of other little conveniences and exciting features. My previous car had a digital speedometer, and that felt like a serious innovation at the time (to the point where every person I gave a ride to commented on it), but compared to this SUV it retroactively feels like driving a horse-and-buggy.

A shot of the cameras when reversing, showing the stitched-together panoramic view.

Now I know cars have been slowly getting new features throughout my life, but never have I had so many new (to me) features all at once in a car that I own. The first time I saw a push-to-start ignition system was just back in September while I was spending a week with my family on my to Hilo, in my brother's car. I've seen cars with rear-view cameras before, but never the panoramic 360-degree view that this one has. Cars with key fobs that can lock and unlock them are familiar at this point, but this SUV can detect if the key is close to the door or back hatch, and if so, you can press a button on the handle to automatically lock or unlock the door as appropriate without even touching the key. I've seen cars with in-built navigation screens before, but never owned one, and the list goes on (though I don't think I've personally seen a car with remote start before).

I could keep gushing about all the many features that I'm still discovering a few days later (the heated seats and steering wheel might be nice when I get up at altitude), but for the sake of brevity I'll spare you. Needless to say I'm quite blessed to have been able to find such an impressive vehicle in this period of car shortages. I was really glad to get one with AWD drive, which'll allow me to get some places I wouldn't want to take my 2WD Civic—I can finally drive to the summit of Maunakea, for example, and I've got some other places in mind that I might see about exploring. And I'm certainly pleased with the color; I quite like orange (as evidenced by this blog), so when I found a car matching what I was looking for in such a beautifully striking shade I could hardly believe my good fortune. (Funnily enough, yesterday I saw a vehicle that could've been the identical twin of mine—same model, same color!) Anyway, I'll spare you further gushing from me for now. A hui hou!

An October update for 2021

I've been pretty busy since starting my new job on the 10th between the job itself and my continued efforts to procure a car and place to live, so this'll just be a quick note to say, "Yes, I'm still alive!" The good news is that I'm enjoying my job so far. This week I found my first (very minor) bug in DRAGONS and submitted a fix, so I feel like a real programmer now. It's also quite relaxed and non-stressful, which is great, because the bad news is that I'm still busy getting a car and a place to stay. 'Tis a long tale so I won't go into it now, but it's also kept me pretty stressed out, which isn't conducive to writing interesting blog posts. For various reasons I'm hopeful that this week might see some progress on one or both fronts, so hopefully I'll have some more good news to report soon. Anyway, that's it for now. A hui hou!

Pandemic! Earthquakes! Thesis submission!

It's been a long time coming—four years and one very long week, to be exact—but today I finally, finally submitted my thesis. It's an odd feeling, now, having...free time again. I've been living with the sword of Damocles over my head for so long at this point that I've forgotten what it's like to not have something I should be doing at the back of my mind every waking moment. It's a pleasant feeling.

To be fair, two years—almost a full half of my thesis—was spent in a (hopefully) once-in-a-century pandemic. It's hard to tell if that contributed to the delay (remember, this was originally supposed to be a 3 or 3.5 year program), but it certainly didn't make that extra time very fun. I'm incredibly thankful I've been able to move back to Hilo, because I'm honestly not sure I could face moving somewhere new with all the additional stresses of moving during the pandemic. (Like needing to get a negative COVID-19 test both to fly back to California, and to fly to Hawaii, and the extra hassle and stress that came with that.)

This last week in particular has been pretty brutal. Most of that is the stressful-but-ultimately-mundane work of endlessly writing, editing, re-writing, addressing comments, writing, surprise updating thesis \(\LaTeX\) template, and, you guessed it, more writing that I'm guessing accompanies the race to the finish for every graduate student. Part of it was realizing on Thursday that I needed to update the official title of my thesis on record with Swinburne (untouched since I scribbled something down in my admission paperwork four years ago, before I'd even settled on a project). Another part was realizing on Friday (Saturday in Australia) that I didn't have access to a critical Turnitin module on Swinburne's online student management system, which provides a report that must be included at submission time. Yes, this module is critical for students to actually submit their theses. No, I don't know why it isn't enabled for default for all graduate students (I wasn't the only student it'd happened to, I learned). It worked out, at least, in the end. However, I also had a few slightly less...usual things to contend with this week. (To set the stage, I should briefly mention that Gemini has very graciously set me up with a rental car and a temporary apartment for the first month I'm here, while I'm finding more permanent forms of both for myself.)

1. Sunday I went back to the church I attended before leaving Hilo (where I had a very warm welcome back), then afterwards went grocery shopping. When I came out, my rental car wouldn't start due to a dead battery. I was able to call roadside assistance, and they got someone over to give me a jump after about an hour and a half. I once drained the battery on the car I had when I lived here before, so, like that time, I went for a long drive to charge the battery up figuring that would be the end of the matter. (It wasn't.)
2. Tuesday I felt a little earthquake as I was sitting in my sixth-floor apartment, just strong enough that I wasn't entirely sure it'd even been an earthquake. (It was magnitude-4.6, officially.)  I only remember feeling two earthquakes in the eight years I lived in Hilo before (and none in Melbourne, though I actually missed out on a magnitude-5.9 earthquake that rattled Victoria less than a week after I left) so this was an interesting event. (And, like the car problem, I thought that was the last of it...)
3. Friday I went for a quick pre-breakfast shopping trip to Target, and my car battery died again in the parking lot. This time—I kid you not—it took over six hours before I was able to get someone to come by for the 30-second job of getting a jump start. Thankfully in the meantime I'd talked to my contact at Gemini and they'd talked to the rental car company, so as soon as I had a working car again I high-tailed it up the road to the airport and got it exchanged for one without a dud battery. This wasn't a particularly pleasant experience on its own, but I also had the added "fun" of losing six hours of prime working time two days before my thesis was due for submission. (At least the new car—SUV, actually—is nice, and working so far.)
4. Finally, today, Sunday again, we had another earthquake, meaning I've now felt as many in the last fortnight since arriving in Hilo as I did in eight years previously. This one was a lot bigger, at magnitude-6.2, though at least the epicenter was off the southern coast of the island and about a hundred miles away. That didn't stop my sixth-floor apartment from swaying alarmingly for a few seconds, though! I haven't heard any reports of damage or injuries, thankfully, but I'm definitely looking forward to having an abode back on the ground again; I don't mind earthquakes half as much when I'm not vividly thinking about how just how high up in the air I am.

However, at the end, after a gruelling week of writing to the point where I could barely put two concepts together in a coherent fashion anymore, my thesis is submitted. I'm free. Well, until tomorrow morning, when I start my new job with Gemini, but hopefully that'll be a bit less demanding. The beauty of a normal job is that when you're off the clock, you're actually off the clock. And with that, I should wrap this post up. Perhaps I'll have some more happy things to blog about before too long! A hui hou!

In Hilo!

 It's been four long years, and a circuitous route to get here, but I'm finally back in Hilo!

I arrived yesterday, on Tuesday, after a bit more excitement than I prefer in my traveling when I missed my original flight on Monday. (It was a combination of unexpected slowdowns in Bay Area traffic and the fast pre-flight COVID-19 check needed to avoid quarantine in Hawaii taking longer than advertised online; either alone would probably still have been surmountable, but together they torpedoed my chance of making my flight. Thankfully I was able to reschedule for almost the exact same flights the next day.) Yesterday was overcast with intermittent showers, but this morning dawned bright and clear as you can see in the photo above (at least over the island, it was pretty cloudy off to the east). I'm temporarily in the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel, right next to Moku Ola or Coconut Island, so I popped down to take a look before breakfast and was greeted by the ever-breathtaking sight above of Mauna Loa, Maunakea, and Hilo nested between them all around the bay.

I've got plenty to do now that I'm finally here before I start my new job with Gemini in a week and a half (finding a car and a place to live, finishing and submitting my thesis, etc.), but it feels...relaxed. Non-stressful. I even saw that just today Kīlauea's started erupting again in Halemaʻumaʻu crater, so who knows, there might be some interesting volcanic activity to investigate soon! For now, however, I'm feeling the effects of jetlag, so I'll keep this short. A hui hou! I mua!

In transit

As foretold in my previous post, I'm currently cooling my heels in a hotel next to Sydney airport, from whence I'll depart tomorrow on the second leg of my journey back to the US. Thankfully, everything's been going smoothly so far, which is saying something in a global pandemic. I got my second COVID-19 shot on Thursday, then a travel test so I can get on an airplane to enter the US. Friday was a helter-skelter race to get everything I'm bringing with me packed so that I could hand everything else off to the movers (who were really efficient, by the way, taking just about an hour and a quarter to get everything packed up and loaded). Then I spent the night with friends, got a ride to the airport bright and early, and flew out of Melbourne at 6:30am. (I've seen some less-than-busy airports in my time, but Melbourne airport at 5:30am during a global pandemic takes the cake.)

Here's the view from the hotel Gemini put me up in, looking out over the Sydney airport.

I could think of several things to say here, reflecting on my just-shy-of-four-years in Australia, but I'm rather tired from sleeping poorly the past two nights, so I'll leave this post short. Hopefully I'll have time and energy to get something more substantial up in the next week or so. A hui hou!

An idealized Australian afternoon

As of today, it's one week until I fly out of Melbourne. Seven days from now at this time, assuming everything goes swimmingly, I'll be in Sydney, followed—at some point afterward which times zones and the International Date Line make more confusing to calculate than I feel like doing at the moment—by being back in California to visit my family for a week, before flying on to Hilo. This next week is going to be a whirlwind of activity as I get everything ready to move.

For today, however, I wanted to share a painting—well, two paintings—which I'll be mailing to my grandparents this week as a souvenir. I've been informally calling this the “Grandparental Diptych,” but let's go with “Australian Afternoon” as a formal title. I'm almost certainly not going to have time to paint this week, so these'll be the last paintings I finish here in Australia.

“Australian Afternoon,” 60×15 cm, acrylic on canvas.

It's an idealized Australian landscape rather than a specific place, with a few eucalyptus trees in the foreground (and a few Australian animals in them). To represent the hundreds of species of eucalyptus trees in Australia, I painted all three trees with different techniques for the leaves and different combinations of colors make them unique (though trees in general and eucalyptus in particular are still something I could use a lot of practice on!). I've discovered I really like doing these multi-panel pieces, such as to explore more extreme aspect ratios than you would normally find, like the 4:1 ratio here. I've got a few ideas for future works utilizing such techniques squirreled away in the back of my mind, though I'll probably have to put any painting on hold for a few months while my art supplies make their way across the Pacific.

I thought for this work it'd be interesting to try to create two pieces which could each stand on their own as an independent composition, but also work combined as you see here. I'm not entirely sure how well either aim worked out, but it was an interesting learning experience all the same—I certainly still have much to learn about composition! Anyway, time to get back to the million and one things to do before I leave. A hui hou!

Happy 30th birthday, Linux!

I'm a few days late for this (much like the last time, five years ago), but it was Linux's 30th birthday this past week! I've been using Linux for a bit over seven years now, though back in 2010 when I was first getting introduced to it I didn't like it very much. Still, just a few short years later and I was installing it on my new custom-built gaming desktop…which I'm still using today, though I'll have to say good-bye to it for a few months in just under three weeks while it's being shipped.

What brought me around to Linux in a few years after such a negative initial impression? I've mentioned parts of it before, and this will not be a comprehensive list, but here's a few things:

1. Native package manager. The ability to install software with a simple sudo apt-get install is magical and so refreshing after manually downloading installers on Windows and macOS. Being able to update everything with a couple of commands is also amazing after having to manually check each thing I wanted to update and downloading a new version of it. I'll never be able to go back to an OS that doesn't have a package manager again.
2. I feel like I rave about this frequently, but the second automatic clipboard that copies text you highlight automatically and pastes is on middle-mouse-click is so, so handy. I now get actively annoyed every time I try to use it on another operating system and discover it's not available. (macOS almost has a “worst-of-both-worlds” thing going on, where it is available…but only in the terminal, nowhere else.)
3. General stability. Crashes are incredibly rare (certainly much more so than with Windows or macOS), and I almost never need to restart my computer. System upgrades happen in the background, with graphics driver updates being pretty much the only reason to restart (and even then I could get around it by restarting the graphical evnironment, it's just less work to restart.) Updates happen when I want them to, and I never have to worry about the things I've heard about Windows 10 choosing to update and restart at the worst possible times for people. Linux comes with more responsibility to manage my own upgrades, but also more freedom to do so. And that's really the biggest draw, though it can be hard to convey: the freedom Linux gives, freedom from corporations intent on getting more money out of you, freedom to set up your computer the way you want, for it to actually be your computer.
4. Lots of other little convenience and quality-of-life things that I can't think of now, but notice the absence of acutely when using other operating systems.

One of the downsides of choosing Linux back in 2014 was the comparatively limited number of games that'd run on it, at least easily (though still in the low hundreds, even at that point). While you could try using Wine to run Windows software, including games, it definitely wasn't an intuitive or simple process. What I couldn't have foreseen back then was Valve incorporating Wine into Steam via a fork called Proton a few years later, making it trivial to attempt to run a game without a Linux version through Steam. That doesn't mean it'll always work at the moment, but I've been able to play quite a number of games that would otherwise have been unplayable. Valve are also promising that every game will “just work” with Proton come December when the Steam Deck launches, and while I remain a bit skeptical they'll be able to get 100% compatibility any increase they can pull off will be nice. If Valve stopped working on Proton today I'd still have thousands of games available to me, besides all the ones that are providing Linux versions. Basically, I feel like my jump to Linux was unintentionally timed pretty well, and it's looking positive for the future. Here's to the next 30 years of Linux! A hui hou!

Immunization update the first

Yesterday I was finally able to get my first COVID-19 vaccination shot! And yes, that probably sounds strange to my fellow Americans who've been able to get one for months now, but it's been a lot slower here in Australia. The government last year went big on AstraZeneca (which could be produced locally) with a smaller amount of Pfizer, only to run into a problem of not having nearly enough supply to vaccinate everyone in a reasonable time frame. (Two months ago, when something like 60% of Americans had received at least one dose, the rate for Australia was around 12%.)

To make matters worse, the AstraZeneca vaccine was discovered to have some extremely rare but serious blood-clotting side-effects, to the tune of 1–2 deaths per million recipients. There's always a risk with any vaccine, of course, but the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation declined to recommend it for people under some age limit, I think 50 or 60. So despite there actually being a decent (if still insufficient) supply of AstraZeneca shots, the perception developed that it was inferior to Pfizer, leading to a lot of people (even those above the age limit) putting off being vaccinated until they could get a Pfizer shot. And the much more limited Pfizer supply was initially going to more high-priority people like health workers (partly since it only had a 3-week cadence for both shots instead of AstraZeneca's 6 weeks so people could get fully immunized faster).

I wasn't eligible for a shot at all until the premier of Victoria announced AstraZeneca as being available to under-40s a few weeks ago (only took 6 lockdowns!). Though interestingly I seem to have unintentionally gamed the system: last week I signed up for an appointment for an AstraZeneca shot under the logic that even a single shot before I flew out was better than nothing, with an intention of getting a second shot in the US. This past Monday however it was announced that due to a recent delivery Pfizer was now available to under-40s, though not wanting to be one of the (literal) myriads of people canceling appointments for AstraZeneca in favor of Pfizer I didn't pay it much attention.

When I got to my appointment yesterday, various people kept asking me to my great confusion whether I wanted a Pfizer shot instead of AstraZeneca (at least six or seven times!). I didn't know that the day before it had also been announced that people who'd signed up for AstraZeneca would be offered Pfizer (at least for a short period of time, I'm not sure of the exact details). Anyway, I wasn't aware at the time that Pfizer had a 3-week waiting period, since it's been being delivered at a 6-week cadence (like AstraZeneca) here in Australia to help relieve supply shortages.

I thus figured I'd just get the shot I came for, until I mentioned in response to the nurse's small talk that I was finishing up my PhD and flying back to the US in a few weeks. She immediately mentioned that Pfizer only actually had a 3-week wait instead of 6-weeks like AstraZeneca, and that they could set me up for a second appointment in 3 weeks (which is two days before I fly out!). When I realized I could be fully vaccinated instead of just half, I finally changed my mind and accepted the offer.

So that's how I ended up unintentionally gaming the vaccination system and will be fully vaccinated before flying back to the US next month. I'm still a bit amazed how it worked out, but it's certainly a huge relief. I'm still a bit tired like last night (which I spent feeling like I was either coming down with or recovering from a mild-but-weird cold), so I should end this here and get to bed. A hui hou!

Terraforming Mars

While I've been here in Australia I was introduced to the board game Terraforming Mars by a friend at one of the student board game nights. It came out in 2016 and has received both a number of awards and five expansions to date. In it, two to five players take on the role of corporations (each with a unique specialty) competing to, well, terraform Mars, accomplished by raising three parameters (global temperature, oxygen level, and oceans). Many actions are accomplished by playing cards, which are randomly drawn throughout the game (and there are literally hundreds with all the expansions); choosing a winning strategy from among the cards you get is a big part of the appeal. I also like it because, while you're competing for points at the end of the game (after Mars has been completely terraformed), there's little direct competition within the game itself other than a few cards that let you steal or remove (small amounts of) resources from other players.

Now while I've enjoyed the board game a lot, I've held off on buying it so far as it's pretty pricey (and bulky) with all the expansions and I'd just have to move it anyway (though it's definitely got a place in my ideal future board game collection). I did, however, buy a digital version of it (which released in 2018) on Steam a few months ago and have been playing a lot of games against the computer. (Though both the board and digital version also have a single-player challenge where you need to terraform Mars in a certain amount of time.)

I've noticed a particular pattern recurring in games, and today I decided to see if I could show its existence. The game takes place over a number of “Generations,” within each of which players take turns performing actions until all players have passed their turn, at which point resource production happens and the next generation starts. Each player can take one action and skip the rest of their turn, two actions, or pass on taking any turns for the remainder of that generation. Actions can be many things, though the most common involve paying for and playing a card. (Many cards also allow you to take certain rare or unique actions once per generation.)

Here's a screen shot during a game in generation 4, though not the one I mention later on, showing the (rather lovely) map along with some of the tiles players have placed on it. On the bottom left you can see the resources in the game: money, steel, titanium, plants, energy, and heat. On the right are the terraforming parameters; oxygen is just over half-way, heat's about a third done, and 3 of 9 ocean tiles have been placed.

Anyway, the pattern I'd noticed is that players tend to take a bunch of actions in the very first generation, but drop off steeply in the second, before climbing back up over the rest of the game. (For reference, a five-player game might be over in seven to nine generations; a two-player game might need twelve to fourteen.) This is because each corporation has an amount of money (and potentially other resources) that it starts the game with, and the Prelude expansion from 2018 also allows players to choose two other bonus cards in the set-up phase. Much of the game is about investing in production which increases over time, but since the average player resource output is still going to be much lower on generation 2 than the initial resources available, the number of actions players can take (which are constrained by costs) generally nosedives on that second generation.

Today I decided to finally quantify this observation by recording the number of actions each player took in each generation and plotting it. I started a game with myself and four medium AI players, and proceeded to take careful notes for the entire game. And here's the results:

I've plotted each player by the color used in the game (I'm green, if you're curious) with the number of actions in a generation on the y-axis, and generation number on the x-axis. We can clearly see that every single player has a drop of one or two actions in the second generation compared to their first generation, which starts to slowly rise again over the next five generations. Cards can have very different costs, which partly explains why players had anywhere from one to seven actions in this game. Interestingly, despite being fairly middle-of-the-pack in actions (and rather distracted), I still won this game, which I suppose demonstrates the importance of quality over quantity of actions.

Here's the same game as in the above screenshot (though not the one in the plot) in generation 7. Here you can see that the terraforming parameters on the right have been raised a bit, and there are some more tiles placed on the board. The player order changes each generation since going first offers some advantages.

Anyway, this was a fun little experiment to verify a pattern I'd seen across a lot of games. I can definitely recommend the board game version of Terraforming Mars, though note that it typically takes several hours to play—it's not difficult, but there can be a lot of things to consider with all the nigh-infinite combinations of cards that players can get, so it definitely requires some free time and concentration. While the digital adaptation is serviceable, and I've been enjoying it, it's a bit limited in comparison, with only the Prelude expansion available despite being out for three years at this point. I'm really hoping that additional expansions get released soon (especially Colonies is fun and adds some interesting choices), so if you're used to playing with the expansions just be aware that they're not available digitally yet. If you're fine with that limitation (and even with just the base game and Prelude there's still a decent amount of stuff), it's a good way to get some practice in playing on your own or to play over the internet with friends. A hui hou!

If lockdown == 5; lockdown++;

Well, I wasn't expecting to write this post so soon after the last one! We exited lockdown 5.0 here in Melbourne on July 27 as expected, two days after my previous post, but less than two weeks later we're back in lockdown #6. Quite suddenly, too; we had a day of zero cases on Wednesday (I think), then six surprise cases of the Delta variant on Thursday, and by 8:00 PM we were back in lockdown for a week. With good reason, as it turns out today, as there were 29 new cases reported this morning, most (all?) of which were out and about while infectious. That's the largest case number reported for Victoria so far this year, by the way—we haven't had case numbers that high since probably September or October last year. 

For comparison, Sydney, too, had a record-case-number day today, with 319 cases reported, which provides a distressing reminder of where we could be if this outbreak gets out of hand. We're unfortunately still chugging slowly along on vaccinations in Australia (because of low vaccine supply, to clarify, not vaccine hesitancy, at least not yet), and I have no idea if I'll be able to get a shot before I leave.

Speaking of which, I now have flights booked! If everything goes according to plan (a dangerous assumption in a once-in-a-century pandemic, but a necessary one) I'll be flying out of Melbourne on September 19th, spend a week with my family in California (perhaps getting a shot there), then fly into Hilo on the 27th. Which, coincidentally, is exactly four years to the day from when I flew out to go to Australia (and no I didn't actually plan it like that, I only noticed just now).

In the meantime I've started doing a bit of planning for moving, looking at things to toss or otherwise leave behind. Even though I'll be getting my moving expenses paid for I won't actually be bringing all that much stuff with me on this move; basically all my furniture is second-hand graduate-student-on-a-budget quality stuff, nothing of sentimental importance. Plus, it could be a few months before everything gets delivered with the state of shipping right now, so it'll be more practical to just buy anything that I need back in Hawaii. (I will be bringing some of my paintings with me, though I'll also be leaving some here, including the ones hanging in the stairwell at Swinburne.)

Anyway, that's probably enough for this post. Hopefully we'll be back out of lockdown before too long after quashing this latest outbreak and I start clearing out my desk at uni. I'll try to get a few posts out in the intervening weeks even as things get busy, but we'll see how things go. A hui hou!