Month: December 2024

Oh What Fun to Ride and Sing a Slaying Song Tonight

We’re in the midst of a long and languid holiday break.  I’ve been off work for a whole week and a day, and don’t go back until Thursday.  I finished off work on a high note, having successfully merged my R&D branch of the codebase back into the main branch, deployed it and all.  The project is turning the corner from R&D into productization, always a fun part of the curve.  Also lots of planning meetings for big ambitious new features and new R&D threads in the coming year.  After a long uphill slog into strong headwinds I now feel that the tide has turned, the wind is at our backs and filling our sail, and we’re gaining momentum as we cruise downhill.

Michelle came home from school a week before Christmas, and Lizzy a few days later along with Josh.  We even got snow a couple times and it remained cold enough for the snow to stick around for a white Christmas.  We did Jeannie’s family party the Saturday before Christmas, and went to Mary’s on Christmas day.  In between was lots of food and drink, movies and games, music, wrapping presents, opening presents, hanging out and getting things done at a relaxed pace.

We’re shaping up for a new release of the Global Jukebox in the new year.  Nick has come up to speed as my new second software engineer, which is great.  I still miss Martin whenever I work on the jukebox.  He wrote so much amazing code and did so much of the devops stuff too.  I’m always inside his thoughts and mind when I read thru the code.  Anyway, Nick is now filling that role and bringing his own approach and perspective.  The major new feature we’ve been working on converting the existing Cantometric codings for all the songs to a new simplified schema, to make it easier to train new coders and to eliminate some ambiguities in the original system.  Nick wrote the script to do the conversion, which required understanding alot of domain knowledge as well as the architecture of the web application.  Meanwhile I created the spec for the new schema and did all the UI and UX work on the client side.  Now it’s all on the staging server and we’re looking at finishing off some P2 features to get into the next release.

I bought a drum mic kit as a present to myself.  It’s bundle of eight microphones for all the different drums plus overheads, along with stands and cables.  I’ve decided I want to use more real drums on my next record (more on that soon) and so it’s essential to be able to mic it up.  Next step is to get it all set up and learn how to use it.  Oh, and I’m going to upgrade to a 16-input preamp/DAC unit as well.

Oh, and Jeannie got a Nintendo Switch, so I’m gonna get some games for that too!

We went up to Buffalo for a few days after Christmas.  They had a ton of snow when we arrived, but while we were up there it got warm and started to melt. Kathleen and the kids came up too.  It was a little sad because we all felt Martin’s absence, but we also felt his presence. There was coming together and healing energy, and it was good to see everyone.  I’ve been trying to bond with the kids and get closer to them.  I took them out for a long walk around the neighborhood one morning to the park and the lake and all the local playgrounds.  Played some chess with Match and Abbie. We also had dinner with Larry and Jackie and place in Allentown called Mother’s which was really good.  To top it all off, the Bills demolished the Jets on Sunday.  Looking good for the playoffs.

I’ve started a D&D campaign with Martin’s kids as a fun way to try and be a presence in their lives.  We’ve had three sessions so far over the last three weeks.  The first week we rolled up characters, the second we did a warm-up wilderness encounter en route the the start of the main adventure, and this last weekend the party got the the base town, met some of the locals, stocked up on provisions and all that, and set out for the ruins of the Sunless Citadel, where the adventure begins in earnest.  They climbed down into a ravine and are now at the front door of the main dungeon (where a trap awaits, unbeknownst to them).  The party consists of the three oldest kids, Charlie, Matthew and Abbie, as well as their cousin Rylee, all aged 12 to 16.  Also joining in are Michelle and Jeannie.  It’s a good mix of races, classes and alignments.  Rylee is and Elfin Fighter, and Charlie and Elfin Ranger.  Match is a Dwarven Barbarian, and Abbie a Gnomish Bard who rides around on a giant rabbit.  Michelle is playing a Halfling Cleric and Jeannie a human Sorceress.  I’m DM’ing, which is something I really enjoy.  Everyone is first level, and their alignments are centered on chaotic neutral, which fits with their general attitude. 

We’re using a combination of software.  It’s amazing how all this stuff has advanced since I first started playing D&D online twenty years ago with Nick.  We’re using google meet for the video conference.  This mostly works great by the call only lasts and hour, so I have to start a new meeting halfway thru.  We’re using DND Beyond for the character sheets, stats, and related stuff like spells, weapons, bonuses, modifiers, and hit points.  And we’re using Owlbear Rodeo for maps and combat.  All free apps that run in the browser, very convenient. 

So far it’s lots of fun, and good to be able to spend time with everyone in a casual, semi-structured way.  They’re all definitely enjoying it.  My plan is to keep it going thru the winter at least, and maybe longer if everyone remains into it. 

Be of Good Cheer

Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays.  I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here.  The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back.  Tons of fun.

We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music.  I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare.  I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast.  We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids.  Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.

I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! https://origamiusa.org/holidaytree/2024

I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before.  It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan.  I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there.  Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.

The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar.  They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp.  The show was most excellent.  The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material.  Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts.  Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro/bridge to Frame by Frame.  On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything.  His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.

Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants.  Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness.  Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players.  I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design.  Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man.  Small world, go figure.

Next up: D&D

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend.  I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks.  The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November.  Looking forward to starting again next spring.  Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days.  On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that.  Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much.  So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days.  This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime.  In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less.  If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west.  Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking.  We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside.  I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time. 

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns.  Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin.  Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it.  If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season.  Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat.  Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week.  The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids.  Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone.  More on that as it develops.  Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies. 

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents.  She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time.  Good to be around family. 

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all.  This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla.  After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away.  The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely.  He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok.  He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler.  It went amazingly well and was alot of fun.  Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars.  Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things.  Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends.  This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion.  And everyone seemed to really dig the music.  They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance.  We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car.  We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals.  She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff.  She’s really good.  So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas.  Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say.  We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours.  We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good.  We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements.  A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group.  This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip.  Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night.  No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax.  The Bills game was on TV.  The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see.   This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game.  Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship.  Woo-hoo!