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.

OH YEAH!!! :D:D:D:D

I finally finished marking everything in the gigantic backlog, and it only took ... uh... more time than it should have. But it's done!!!

Jorghnassen's coming back from Ottawa tomorrow evening. He's been on the search for a condo/house, and it seems there are a few choices he's about to make his grand decision upon. :o OK, not yet, because I haven't seen any of them. Personally, I have no idea what to look for except I don't want to be pressured into overpaying for something that isn't worth it. I mean it's not like a mediocre meal at a restaurant - I can't just grin and bear it while people are sucking the money from your wallet (and weird things are happening to your intestine). Anyway we'll see. It's a bit too early to say there's any decision there yet.

I'll have more to say tomorrow after giving the KEYNOTE SPEECH at the graduation tomorrow that nobody told me I was going to be giving until last Friday. Well, you'll have to wait and see if I manage to get anyone to film it. Then we'll all point and laugh at my mediocre speaking skills. Point and laugh. Point. And. Laugh.

Home Stretch

Here are my new tomatoes for this summer. Unfortunately, they will probably peak after we leave here, but I still can't resist!


Also, I decided only to have one plant this summer instead of two, because they take so long to harvest. Instead, what I decided one day on a whim was to toss a potato eye (from one of the potatoes in the sack that went awry) and let it grow. And boy has it grown - it literally grew three inches over a day!

Will there be potatoes? I doubt it.

Counting this day, I have only 9 days of work left. (For those of you who keep count of "work days" as M-F, in the teaching world it's M-Sun.) It's the home stretch! After the graduation ceremony on the 30th, I plan to jet (train) off to Quebec City for a week, after 6 months of not having visited. It's going to be the BIG BIRTHDAY BASH on the 3rd. I don't know what the celebrations have been like so far this year in QC, but I hope they'll be FREE.

So if anyone wants to come with me (which Jorghnassen can't do because he has to stay here and teach), I'd be so happy. :D:D:D

Then I have to return to Waterloo to get preparations going. And give two workshops for the summer camp at the school. >_<

So lonely :(

HAI POE-PLE!1!

If you have time to travel and would like to see... uh... a lot of horse farms and Mennonites... come visit us! The VIA Rail 59$ sale is on, between Montreal and Toronto, and Ottawa and Toronto. It's another 20 bucks or so to get to Waterloo from Toronto, and that can be done by train or bus probably just as easily.

Come tour the region famous for Blackberries that can't be eaten, pyjama and sweat pants, and a lot of sourdough blobs of flour. Marvel at hordes of altogether six cars during rush hour, farmer's markets with fresh crops from Mexico and South America, and Exciting Quilts!!!!!!

And come see Guelph. Yeah, THAT Guelph.