Week Notes 81: Driver's License, eBooks, and Hackery

I got my G2 license! This has been a project of mine since midsummer. I did 30 hours of online driver’s education, took 10 hours of in-car lessons, failed¹ the drive test last month, and passed it this week.

Driving is so much a part of urban living in Canada. It feels like Toronto is primarily built for cars with a few people in between. I remember a former colleague being shocked that I didn’t know how to drive.

Learning to drive as an adult is odd. One forgets about test anxiety, the embarassment of learning, and the fear of failure. The whole process was really humbling. I’m glad that I went through it, as it really helps me sympathize with my students.

I’m excited to go driving alone for the first time ever. This summer, I’ll be co-leading a working group at CMESG in Fredericton, and I’ll be able to drive myself to visit family outside Moncton. I know that this is a totally normal thing for many adults in Canada, but I am really excited about it.

Reading #

Mira and I have read this one a couple times in the morning before school. There is some neat stuff about power corrupting people, the senselessness of bigotry, and the power of friendship. At times, it feels a bit muddled. My favourite character was the galaxy weaver spider.

For myself, I’m reading La Kunularo de L’Ringo (The Fellowship of the Ring) in Esperanto and loving it. Auld’s translation is crystal clear. It is full of clever turns of phrase. He translated Lord of the Rings towards the end of his life when he was at the height of his powers and had lots of writing and translation behind him.

Writing #

It seems that my website has passed two hundred thousand words. At the time of writing, Hugo reports: 209,538 words. There is some amount of repetition in the Bookmarks and various week notes owing to transclusion. I feel pretty confident that the overlap is less than 9000 words. And so, my website is about as long as as a resonable novel.

Teaching #

This week, a lot of my teaching has been around setting up a test for next week. I’m trying out pre-matched booklets in Crowdmark. This means that every student will have their name printed on the test booklet.

To my great surprise, the PDF that Crowdmark generates is in randomized order. I wrote back and forth with Crowdmark’s technical support about this. It turns out that the randomization is intentional so that graders² can’t infer a student’s name from their booklet number. However, our department’s workflow for hosting term tests involves allocating students to rooms based on last names.

To save our adminstrative assistant’s sanity, and not ask them to manually sort +700 papers in to alphabetical order, I vibe-coded a PDF descrambler: https://github.com/pgadey/crowdmark-alphabetize

Playing #

I’ve had a bunch of low-resolution PDF scans on my computer and never quite knew what to do with them. Previously, I made little hack to amber on black-ify PDFs to read on the Kobo. Reading PDFs with the Kobo’s default PDF reader is not pleasant: one is constantly zooming and scrolling around the page.

This week, I asked Claude to make some nice ebooks out of them using Standard Ebooks as a guide. The results are really nice to read. These are not intended for public distribution but anyone is welcome to shoot me an e-mail.

There are still a few volumes of Grooks that I haven’t got my hands on yet. One of my biggest blunders as a book collector was lending out my complete set of Grooks when I was a teenager. I never got them back. It took me a few years to even realize that they were gone, and by that time I had lost track of the friend that I lent them to.

I also got a pair of Esperanto to English dictionaries working. The hack to do so was silly: add additional dictionaries, in my case IT → EN and NL → EN, and then overwrite them with the Esperanto dictionaries. This has been helpful for looking up words like saliko (willow) and miozoto (forget me not).

Links #

The first test was super cursed. Our car battery started failing on the morning of the test, I parked in the wrong spot at the test center, I messed up my signature on the form, and I almost hit a pedestrian on the very first turn of the test. The examiner, pedestrian, and I all gasped. It was an immediate fail. I knew that that drive test would just be a learning experience. As we say to the kids all the time: “We’re all learning.”
This time, when I made that turn, a kid on a bike and his mom were crossing the intersection. I said to the examiner: “I’m going to take this super slow and just wait for them to fully cross the intersection.” The examiner was like: “That’s all we’re looking for, mate.” After that, I knew things would go well and indeed they did. ↩︎
As my tests are all multiple choice, there are no human graders involved, so this isn’t an issue. ↩︎