The dying throes of the Cheap Lamp Made in China

#@$% it, I'm tired of everything around me breaking.

As far as I know...

This is the floor plan for where we are going to be living. Actually, it's not. It's a guess as far as I know, from the limited photos available from Jorghnassen, the inspector, and the realtor's web site. I seriously have no idea what it looks like.

Anyway, there's three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, and a finished basement. Not only that, but there's enough patio and patio windows to complain that there's too much. Oh, what will we do with so much BBQ space??? Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!

Jorgh mentioned that there's a possibility of making a third washroom in the basement, thereby completing the trifecta of places to run for toilet emergencies when your two other washrooms are occupied for some reason when there's only two people living in the whole house. I am against this prospective washroom because then that would make it three toilets to scrub. I already hate doing one.

---

In the meantime, while Jorgh and his parents have been busy taking care of absolutely everything else about the house, I've been assigned the task of finding a mover who will not break our stuff transporting it to Gatineau. On one hand, it's not hard to find a mover. On the other hand, it's quite difficult to find the mover who will agree to:

• Not be a douche and move our shit across the provincial boundary (I know, Ottawa-Gatineau?)


• Come to the apartment and actually look at the stuff to be moved to give an estimate


• Come over to our apartment to give a written estimate that isn't ridiculously huge


• Call back after the estimate and say that their written estimate will be ready to be emailed, even though it was written down in front of you while they were here.

I'm just about ready to pick the movers once they actually do the last point.

---

It's very odd to find polite people wherever you go in a city, but (as long as I'm not driving) everyone here has been exceptionally friendly and wonderfully courteous. There really is a small-town feel when I'm going around town, even though it's been reported that this area is actually expanding too quickly for its water supply to catch up with.

If there's anything I'd miss about Waterloo, it's the way people actually regarded each other in their everyday interactions. Except while driving. They're polite, patient, and very friendly. Except while driving. They're very quaint, what with their Mennonites and farmers markets and small community strawberry and apple festivals and their warped ideas about cheeses... so adorable. Except while driving. They go as far as helping a stupid woman take care of her windshield wipers, bringing her to a "mall" when asked, and tolerating our every single critique when we were looking for edible food.

On the other hand, the one thing I will not miss is the food and restaurant choices. This guy puts it more succinctly: "More than half the times I think I haven't got the energy to cook, N suggests we eat out, I run over the possibilities in my mind, and then I get up and cook a meal."

Mind you, I enjoy the few places that Jorgh and I visited, like Raintree Cafe and Sakura Island, but for mind-blowingly awesome you'd really have to go back to larger and/or more diverse cities. Or where they know what a loaf of bread looks like.

Thank you, Waterloo, for teaching me to be less lazy in cooking meals at home because you have no viable alternatives.

And thank you, Waterloo, for teaching me that drivers are just as crazy here as they are in Quebec. I don't feel so bad anymore.

The dying throes of the GPS Unit

I have the video of the exact moment the GPS unit's switch broke. That was the time that I gave the keynote speech for graduation. At the end of the speech, I played a song (if you still don't know what it is, you fail HARD) with an mp3 accompaniment playing on the GPS unit. The unit is notoriously hard to turn on and off because the face of the switch is like a floating pancake with a toothpick under it, and the electronic component of the switch is like a ROCK. The toothpick has to push the rock hard enough not to break.

Well, right at that last time I turned off the accompaniment to the song, the rock got unseated from its circuit board, and now no pressing of the pancake will ever turn it on unless someone managed to resolder the stupid thing.

It also turns out that nobody in Canada will service this thing, and the only way that this gift from Jorgh's father (through credit card rewards) can be fixed is if we exchange it at the point-of-sale. Which would be great if there were a point-of-sale. Nobody sells this unit.

Once my batteries have finished charging, I will show you what miracles have (temporarily) revived the GPS unit, and you can decide whether it should be used like this from now on or not.

The dying throes of the Breadmaker

Another stupid thing that happened just last night was that one of the two paddles of the breadmaker decided to not want to turn anymore. I know, you're wondering, "How does an appliance decide it doesn't want to work for you anymore?" It's simple - appliances are designed to not give a flying fork about humans. They are programmed by their masters (inhuman human beings) to flip you the birdie when the time is right: while you are using them.

Anyway, I withheld taking it apart today to see what is wrong until I can find out if I can get this thing serviced.

The dying throes of the Tablet

Strangely enough, a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet mouse can last a million falling-on-the-hard-ground episodes, can be clicked hard enough to become slightly inoperable if not for a convenient jimmy with a piece of paper, and can be used for nearly 8 years... but if you use the scroll wheel just a little too much it suddenly doesn't want to work for you no more. :(

Here's a brief review of my tablet's condition:

Its pen works perfectly fine, but I discovered that the pen mouse driver for this computer doesn't work for DOS games that have mouse capabilities. Its tablet interface is still quite workable, if only for a few scratches and the plastic covering wearing down over the last several years. Its mouse, as stated above, even keeps trucking along while pieces of plastic slowly degrade over time.

I periodically explore the possibilities of buying spare parts for my tablet, but it really hasn't been in need of one until today. It seems that Wacom discontinued the Graphire-with-the-wire line a long time ago. On top of that, nobody sells the Graphire 2, 3, or 4 parts, in favour of the newer Bamboo or Cintiq models. I don't even know if they have Intuos parts but it doesn't matter as none of those are even compatible with my tablet.

There was a time when Wacom's direct site did sell parts but only to the US. No possibility of shipping to Canada, even though we're closer to ship here than if someone wanted to order from, oh, say Alaska or something just as logical.

Nobody sells it online either, even on eBay (if I had ever been inclined to buy from there having had a brain transplant or hell froze over).

It looks like I might have to bid my mouse farewell. All over a stupid scroll wheel... :(

ADDENDUM: After taking it apart and looking very intently at the innards, I discovered that it is indeed unrepairable unless I suddenly gained the ability to mold unbreakable plastic and rubber parts about 5 mm in diameter.

EDIT: The Wacom eStore is still down. :(:(

Summer Camp 2008

Before I talk about the huge party up in Quebec City after the school term ended (since I lament the fact that I came back from there probably 2 weeks too soon), I must speak of the Summer Enrichment Program(c). The school put together students mainly from Ghana in the dorms of the universities and then give them a month of workshops, trips, and other exploration activities. Tokulah put it best when I arrived back last Monday, in that it wasn't called a "summer camp," but an "enrichment program."

Thus, I was asked to give two workshops last week on "enriching" students in the wily ways of mathematics and computers. I could have done absolutely anything I wanted, but having seen the things I did with the kids during the last two years, he wanted to have them build paper polyhedra, and also to play with the computer parts that I accumulated over the last two years.

Fortunately I didn't have to do much planning, except to make sure the parts and things were all there and allow some educational lecture time. And I got paid so it was all good.

In the first workshop on Monday, I gave a short lecture on fractals (the Sierpinski triangle), and then talked about making tetrahedra. Then I had them build a Sierpinski pyramid.

I had half hoped they'd finish the whole thing by the end of the first two hours, but they seemed to have gave up steam and totally fell short by about 10 of the 64 needed. To top it off, I had made sure there were 72 photocopies (18 times 4 different colours, I'm so thoughtful) so there should have been extras of each colour, but some went missing and I had to fish out some ruined ones from the garbage can to finish the damn thing myself.

Do I have any pictures of it? Nope. It didn't hold up properly because the kids (ranging from 8 to 16 probably) didn't have any experience making paper models and so some of the tetrahedra were completely messed up. When I returned on Friday to give the computer workshop, the whole pyramid had fallen apart and I had to stick it together. It makes me sad when things are broken for a long period of time with nobody to fix them... :(

The funny thing about Monday was that I was unaware until I got there that the afternoon writing workshop had been cancelled and they wanted me to keep going with the math workshop. So I had to improvise - they spent the second two hour session making origami cubes. By that point, most of them were running on empty and they basically nodded off like the kids that you'd expect, sitting indoors in nice weather and folding paper into stupid shapes.

But the amazing thing later on Friday I discovered, that made things all the better in my perspective, was that the kids had painted some little panels during that week after the pyramid was complete - and one of them whom I had pegged as kind of ambivalent to the whole deal (which he was, actually) had painted the pyramid. Some of them had very cute paintings of their trip to Toronto, houses, flags, or whatnot, but that one kid painted the pyramid. I was touched. :)

What did they do on Friday? Massacre system units. Then I had to spend another hour after their workshop putting them back together properly.

At least it was "enriching." TO MY WALLET! :O

"Wait, when did you make this tetrahedron 5-compound?"

Wow!
Originally uploaded by chowmaylay

Waaay back a few months ago when I was making all sorts of polyhedra for my classroom, I printed out the templates from korthalsaltes.com. This one was seriously awesome. :D

Tomorrow was two weeks ago.

And thus concluded the tenure at my school. It is unfortunate that the speech was not recorded. I mean fortunate. So here I present to you the text version of my keynote speech, which according to my colleagues was pretty good. I think it could have been shorter.

My fellow teachers, the administrative team, Mr Tokulah, and the parents, siblings, relatives of, most of all, my dear students.

I am most honored by the (fairly exceptional) request by Dr. Bohez, who asked me to speak many inspiring words to you. It’s not like me, actually. I’m not a person of many words. Unless I’m teaching. Or supposed to be teaching.

But I can understand why Dr. Bohez asked me to speak to you. Who better to be up here than the teacher, who witnessed your progression as students – from the point of you being newly enrolled CIC students entering through those front doors (or hitting the doorbell to enter), up to the point you became newly admitted university students about to leave our doors? Who better to speak to you?

Yes, of course, the math teacher. The dry, unexciting, critical math teacher.

So as the dry, unexciting, critical math teacher, I’ll start all over from the basics. But this time I won’t take two hours, I promise.

When you enter school, you’re not certain of the notion that is mathematics. "It’s a scary subject to be feared because it’s hard!" You have no concept of fractions. You have no idea what to do with exponents. You don’t know what the difference is between a derivative and a determinant. All these math-y words are terrifying you as I speak, aren’t they?

You know what? It doesn’t matter. Here, it's not the point. Mathematics is not "something that is practiced until it is done perfectly right." It’s not exercises, textbooks, quizzes, tests and projects. It’s not something done. Just like English is not a subject to be done. Or sciences. Or business, history, art, music... or any subject.

You enter school because you want to experience. Not just do. Or have done to you. It’s because you haven’t come across certain experiences before, so you made the decision, for most of you from far, far, far away, to enter this school. And then you came across us: Ms. Chow, the staff at CIC, and Mr. Tokulah.

Mathematics, English, Sciences, Business, Social Sciences, and so on, are not done, they’re discovered and experienced. They are not ends in themselves - they are just means to a deep understanding, means to reach a higher level of knowledge.

You’ve now experienced Ms. Chow’s math classes.

To you, families and relatives, my dear students will tell you that my classes are hard. It’s not because I find some terrible pleasure in your disappointments, or that I do not personally like you.

It is the complete opposite. I have the utmost respect for my students. You are my lifeblood and I would do anything to guide you towards your academic success. [For some inexplicable reason my kids all applauded right here.] You make me shed in anxiety. And judging by the pile of hair around my desk, it’s a lot of anxiety.

I let you experience one thing in particular in my class, which makes it so much harder than what you had to do before; you have the potential to reason the world around you, but it has been abstracted into almost meaningless symbols like plusses, minuses, division signs, integrals, and so on. You were doing those things to bits, without any real meaning to them. Then suddenly, Ms. Chow doesn’t ask you to give her the answer to 2 + 2, she asks you to explain it. (Oh, how philosophical!)

Mathematics is not the process of doing – it is how humans reason the world. The world holds many mysteries and such beauty. It is easy to superficially appreciate the world. But it is much more rewarding to discover anew different ways to contemplate its nature.

For instance, [Here I held up a tetrahedron 5-compound figure] this is indeed quite interesting. At a quick glance, I can appreciate it visually. I’m sure you can as well. It took a long time for me to make. I hope you appreciate it.

But if I told you it is a composition of five of these [Here I held up a tetrahedron], and has a particular rotational symmetry, and each point matches up with the faces of a dodecahedron (What’s that? It’s another figure I made.) and all sorts of other things mathematical, then you have just learned to appreciate it, mathematically.

If I told you that M.C. Escher, (the man who drew all sorts of amazing mathematical pictures) made wood carvings of this shape to explore it, you just learned to appreciate it deeper artistically. If I told you that these kinds of figures were studied to no end by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, you have learned to appreciate it historically.

So now you have just experienced, in a nutshell, this figure. You’ve now experienced (again) Ms. Chow’s math class. That wasn’t scary was it? (It only gets better...!)

The world is full of these experiences. You have the choice to get by this life superficially, without considering any of the meaning behind it, or to really try to live it, experience it, and make it make sense to you.

You are about to leave our school having experienced, not having done. And you are about to enter the "real world," now having learned to experience.

It has been an honour to be speaking to you, as I will also be leaving CIC – I hate long goodbyes, but I am choosing now to announce to you that with great reluctance, I will be moving to Ottawa this summer. So I will also be taking another step forward into the unknown with you.

Regardless of where you go, you have your own way to experience the world. Here at CIC, my colleagues and I showed you some of these ways to experience. We want you to go out there and experience. And we are most hopeful that your experiences will be the most meaningful to you.

To be truthful, some experiences will be difficult, and scary, and some will be painful; but I (and everyone here gathered today) hope that the majority of these will be exciting, fulfilling, fun, beautiful, numerous and wonderful.

And that, my dears, is what I hope to have taught you – in the words of Louis Armstrong in his famous song – that it is indeed, a Wonderful World.

[Ms. Chow jams.]

If you need to ask what I played at the end, it means you didn't read the last paragraph. YOU FAIL.