Taught H.o.p. the Base 2 mathematical system Monday using “The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat” for introduction only. Penrose the cat certainly opened the door to his being inteested but it wasn’t thorough enough. H.o.p. was all excited about the idea of a cat that could do math and then I had to burst the bubble by telling him that the cat was just a way of teaching through story and that it didn’t really do math. If Koko the gorilla can learn sign language he had no doubt a cat could do math. He said that was all right that the cat didn’t really do math and was in a mood to please and conveyed a sense of excitement over there being a Base 2 math system. Penrose had put him in that mood to please.
The evening’s listening fare, Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D minor, for which he drew up an animation storyboard while watching. We’ve made up a list of opera he wants. H.o.p. thinks (for now) opera is the perfect accompaniment for animation. Looks like we’re going to be getting more Mozart and some Rossini because of the Woody Woodpecker cartoon that used The Barber of Seville.
We’re keeping all these Netflix videos longer than I’d anticipated so Netflix isn’t going to have to worry about making its money off us. Kept “The Magic School Bus: Space Adventures” for over a week. Need to get that back.
Have another one by the Standard Deviants on geography we need to get back. I’d read some bad reviews and wasn’t expecting much but H.o.p. turned out to like it. For some reason it really caught his attention though I found it really boring and rather annoying. I hoped it would be a decent intro for him and he watched it through, captivated, but it is a bit thick for an eight-year-old. All right for someone a bit older. After several years of telling H.o.p. where the U.S. is (not to mention any number of other countries) if I ask him to point it out to me he usually vaguely gestures in the direction of Russia, but finally he points (though still somehow indiscriminately) to the proper area.
He’s having a frustrating time of it right now as he’s not patient enough to let me try to tutor him on how to use his new Digicel animation program. He played around with it some more tonight and announced at one point he thought he was getting it. But he only made a smidgen of progress and abandoning it he went back to drawing storyboards and watching animations by others. He will learn it and I read it’s a good program but I worry about the learning curve being too steep right now. So in the meanwhile I spent several hours researching agagin 2D animation programs, downloaded the trial version of another that I immediately realized wouldn’t do the trick, then found finally Tapptoons has a free trial version of their animation program which only permits a small frame size and no high definition. Fine. I downloaded that on my machine, experimented with it and the learning curve will be less steep I think. However, the program froze up on me pretty quickly and I have a pretty decent machine now, one that should handle this. So I downloaded the program on his machine and showed him the very basics of how to use it, and eventually (shortly) it froze up on his machine as well. Which really concerns me, that he may end up losing hours of work this way. I warned him and told him he needed to save frequently but I’m still worried. Now I’m printing out their voluminous tutorial. H.o.p.’s so excited about it he hasn’t been able to sleep though I told him he couldn’t play with the new animation software until he got up. This is like Christmas to him.
And in the meanwhile I kept trying to submit a tech support request to Dell about my less than a year old monitor which is becoming discolored at the top of the screen, turning dark. I read now that some Dell monitors have a problem with persistent afterimage? But this follows no pattern, it is just a significantly darkened irregular area which doesn’t encroach yet on my workspace but is of course troublesome. To get free tech support you have to submit a service number off your equipment and it isn’t accepting my service number as valid, and without the service number they don’t give you a screen from which you can even email them. If I call them then they will charge me.
Marty gets up and we look for the sugar for coca. We never use sugar. It’s around here somewhere. The refrigerator is set before an old door with an irregular space in the wall to the side of that and he discovers back there all kinds of stuff that has fallen off the refrigerator. I locate the sugar and in the process I knock a jug back behind the refrigerator.
(Later.)
I really should start a separate nonpublished blog of this stuff. No one except family is inclined to read it and only a couple of family members at that. Except that I somehow feel I’m perfroming a public service for the person who will eventually happen upon this blog, read and feel better for having found some middling accounts of no drama less interesting than what they believed was their own. (Actually, I would only become confused if I had two blogs. And it doesn’t bother me a bit for you to know things like how my cactus, which have grown too tall for their own good, look now like long prickly green beans performing yoga back bends. At least it doesn’t bother me at the moment.)
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