Homeschooling Software: Addition Worksheets

Saturday, July 10, 2010

I made this application in order to write some printer routines (I’ve never needed to create software that printed anything directly before, let alone doing things like print previews), but it’s also a pretty useful program for teachers or homeschoolers for printing math — addition — worksheets. You can tweak the settings to allow for any difficulty level, and it automatically arranges everything in an optimal pattern for your printer, assuming I’ve done everything right.

Download it here: zenmath-add.exe (just run it)

Nefarious helped me debug it, by doing a few sheets of math with an eye for finding errors, and she found a mistake in the sheet below in the way that hints were given for carry digits. That’s been fixed in the download link above.

zenmath

Feedback on bugs is appreciated, when it’s all debugged I’ll give it a permanent link, because I really do think it’s useful. As always I’m happy to share the source code and will post the final version when the time comes.

Other than that, Caitlin got me some wheatberries and soaked them for me, so I’ve been making delicious salads out of them which I find easy to eat… I’m still having some trouble with nausea and while it’s good that I’ve lost forty or so pounds (not that anyone can tell because having a big beard masks the weight you carry in your face I think), it’s also not so good. I dropped Nefarious off at a friend’s house today and her mother asked me, “how are you feeling”, and you know, I get that the question comes from a kind place but I wish people would never ask that. I don’t like having to lie and say “oh, fine, thank you,” or whatever nicety the social contract demands — it’s not as if I can say “fucking awful, do you mind hitting me on the head with that axe over there so the pain will stop?” But anyway, yummy wheatberry salad, made with said grain, along with cranberries, walnuts, green onion, shredded carrot and radish, a mix of all sorts of beans, lemon, chutney, and various other things. So delicious.

wheatberry-salad

I also whipped out my limited sewing skills (last used to sew clothes in high school) and repaired “Big Dog”. Nefarious thought he was looking a bit thin, so she cut him open to add some more stuffing, but didn’t really get as far in her planning as how she’d close him back up. She has a giant bag of thread/thin rope of different colours, so she found some that matched his fur and I closed the wound. He has a bit of a scar from the surgery, but no longer has a scary hole in his neck.

Plus I gave him a tattoo.

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And finally, other than that, a little advice…

dont-panic

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Canada’s Wonderland

Thursday, July 8, 2010

It bothers me a lot that the police can break the law indiscriminately, and even brag about their ability to do so, without any apparent consequences. At G20, we had police beating up the handicapped, raping and torturing women, and general disregard of the law, and I can pretty much guarantee you that there will be zero consequences, let alone the criminal charges that would ensue if anyone other than the pigs were the ones doing it. Of course, the law enforcers and law makers have always been above the law, so why am I surprised? Because I kidded myself into thinking that Canada isn’t as corrupt as every other top-of-the-class-system nation out there?

No surprise admission: I like driving fast. However, driving fast is largely illegal. So the police camp out at spots where the letter-of-the-law and the public’s driving habits are out of sync when they feel like making some money, and I’ve been caught more than a few times. But what I don’t get is why speeding is aggressively policed, but no one seems to care about smoking? Smoking kills a lot more people than cars, and if we’re going to have laws to protect the public from second hand smoke, it seems reasonable to say that they ought to be enforced. But any day I go to the park or any other no-smoking space, there are always people puffing away, stinking up the area… And the police just drive right on past, ignoring it, and I’m a little confused as to why one law is enforced but the other isn’t.

smoking-and-pregnant

Today I went to Canada’s Wonderland with Nefarious. This is the first year that she’s 48″ tall, meaning that she can finally go on all the big roller coasters, so we had plenty of fun doing just that, as you can see below. The picture above was also taken at Wonderland, and as you can see, these lovely classy ladies not only are chain-smoking as they’re pushing little kids around in strollers, but the one is and carrying another baby around in their belly. Ah, pregnant smokers. Really nice… And again, even though it’s a no-smoking facility, no one bothers doing anything to stop this child abuse.

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The good news about Wonderland today was that the lines were really short, so for many of the rides we only had to wait two or three minutes to get on… I’m not sure that I would have had the endurance to stand in the sun for an hour to get a thirty second high-G beating. We have seasons passes though, which means there’s no need to make the most of a single visit — the nice thing about the passes is that we can go for a couple hours, have fun but not get tired out, and then go again a few days later.

Oh, and while I’m thinking of health issues, holy WOW are there a lot of fat kids these days. When I go to Ontario Place or Wonderland, I’m completely floored by the number of grotesquely overweight children there are, both male and female. When I was a kid, being fat had a stigma to it, and was rare (so on average a given class of thirty kids would have at most one “fat kid” and they’d be “THE fat kid” as a result), but these days it seems like it’s the norm. On one hand it’s great that no one is suffering and living in shame, but on the other hand, how sad that being morbidly obese is so normal that no one notices. But I was just blown away by the number of little boys with huge breasts moving in on two hundred pounds, and ten year old girls with bellys overflowing into a term that should never be applied to children — BBW… It’s really sad, and I don’t understand why the parents haven’t stepped up to help their kids, because the consequences that being fat as a child has on adulthood is profound.

The foundation is the most important part of a building, and the foundation that one builds for one’s life as a child is the most important factor in determining how your adult life will unfold, and in determining the limits of its potential. As has been remarked on many times before, how have we evolved to the point where the generation currently growing up is expected to have a shorter lifespan than its parents? I mean, it’s nothing but slow suicide.

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Two visits to Ontario Place

Sunday, July 4, 2010

This week has been fairly active, with many activities in addition to the normal games and reading and swimming and all… On Friday, Nefarious and I stomped all over Ontario Place with a friend of hers (with a season pass I’m sure we’ll go many times with many friends). I took lots of breaks and relaxed while they played, and I even had the strength at the end of the day to climb the spiral staircase all the way to the top of the tower and take a couple rides on the water slides with them. By the end of the day everyone was completely wiped out, and, to my delight, the worst part of it was not my legs, but my sunburn.

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It was a lot of fun though, and I think this week we’ll make a trip to Canada’s Wonderland as well, since Nefarious is now tall enough to go on a majority of the rides… I love roller coasters, and I think she will as well, since thrill-seeking-behavior is so thoroughly encoded in her DNA.

Last night, in addition to the big fight, Caitlin and I went to see Iron Maiden (also at Ontario Place incidentally). It’s really a surreal experience going to see a metal school, because it pulls the strangest people out of the woodwork. I mean, where do all these oldschool metalheads come from? Judging by their real-deal hair, it’s not like they’re just playing dress up for the concert. Security were being dicks at the door — I’d just bought a big mango smoothy at the venue, but outside the security check and they insisted that I throw it away and buy a Molson product inside. But that wasn’t as bad as the guy in front of us, who they told couldn’t bring in his ancient portable CD player (which clearly wasn’t capable of recording, and it’s not as if they were stopping phones anyway). For me, I just waited a minute until they were distracted and had forgotten me, and walked in with my drink anyway. Inside security was mostly taking away kids’ joints, and checking ID of beer drinkers (appropriate since not long after we got there the kid in front of us spent a couple minutes puking).

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Anyway, I also did some animation work (entry below this one), although it’s such a time killer that I really need to stop, because I have a pressing need to finish my writing projects which have been on hold since I discovered Pencil (the free software I use for flip-book animation)… I’ve also started working on some home-schooling software that prints out worksheets. It’s nothing special — mostly just something to make sure that my programming skills stay sharp. That said, now that I have an iPhone after years of having bottom-of-the-line junker phones, I kind of feel like doing some programming for it as well.

Other than that — well, there’s a lot other than that, but I don’t feel like writing much, to say nothing of my memory of the week being hazy — I had yet another frustrating visit with the doctor… Frustrating because I feel stuck in limbo again, waiting for the results of tests that were done many months ago. The lab sent me a letter telling me to be patient and that I’m in the queue, not that this does anything but annoy me. The biggest reason that I hate being in limbo like this is that I desperately need to get into a physical therapy program, and it would be massively easier if I could walk in with those results. And it sucks that I, the patient, have to constantly be calling and hounding my doctors to keep the process from stalling… I shouldn’t have to, and more importantly, at the times when I’m at my sickest, I’m not physically or mentally able to do so anyway.

Quite seriously, there are many times when I think I would be better off buying an RV and just spend the rest of my days exploring and living free (I’m sure Nefarious would vote for not going to school — although I would be a far tougher teacher with very high expectations were I to homeschool), and then when the time comes, jump into the Grand Canyon and never be heard of again. Last time I was there, I talked to a park ranger about jumpers and she told me that it’s a regular occurrence, and they often don’t find the body — all they find is a suicide note in a motel.

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Two Quick Movie Embeds

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Even though they’re not complete, I uploaded a couple of ongoing video projects to YouTube. First is a little animation I’ve been playing with for Can’s “Pnoom” (from 1968′s Delay) — again, a work in progress. If you’d like to watch it in HD, you can do so on Youtube because I rendered it at 1280×720 (ie. 720p). I recommend doing this by the way, and this video is best with sound.

Here’s a little stop-motion that Nefarious did with some help from me. Unfortunately Youtube cropped off the last two or three seconds for some reason, meaning you don’t get to see the conclusion of the jailbreak… She found doing this more than a little boring, so I doubt you’ll see another from her any time soon (and don’t worry, she watched the end result without the sound of Dr. Octagon)…

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Putting the “Crazy” back in “Crazy Eights”

Friday, June 25, 2010

I’ve really had a remarkable amount of energy today and all things considered, I feel good, good enough not just for real life but for online life as well. Fingers crossed that it continues, but either way it’s a welcome and enjoyed change. I had some emails from friends who were concerned that I’d given up on life and I just wanted to say that when I cut my blogging to zero during the difficult periods, it just means that blogging is low on my priority list, not life altogether. Please don’t worry. Although the clock is ticking faster than I would like — and it is for all of us I suppose — I still have a joy filled life.

And today some of that joy came from having a set of plastic playing cards.

playing-cards-in-the-pool

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