Author: zingblog

Let’s Pick Up the Pieces

Today is the first really hot day of the year, and hot night too. Sitting around with the windows open and the fans on trying cool down.

Work has been going well. Only one more homework left in the Scala class and then it’s onto learning web frameworks. We’ve had two perfect sprints in a row, beating the previous record we set last month of one perfect sprint ever. Today my team’s boss called a meeting to discuss what’s going right. I told her “We’re awesome.” I also told her good code begets better code. I’ve been working quietly to improve our code quality for some time now, and I think it finally got to a tipping point where we’re spending less time on bugs and technical debt and more on getting it right the first time.

I tracked the bass part to Your Dancing Shoes. It took a few attempts because there’s very few places to punch in, so I had to get it essentially in one take. Had to practice it to the point where it was tight and grooves well.

My new rock group seems like it might be a thing. It’s made up of two guys from the Relix, two guys from another band, and the drummer who had been in both. The new guys are Michael on vocals and Jeff on guitar. Both sound really good. We got together last week and jammed a solid two hours of music, twenty songs or so. So there’s one set already. We’re picking a bunch more songs for this week. So I’m learning a bunch more new songs again, which is always fun. Now the challenge becomes getting them to learn a few songs I want to sing, because my songs tend to be a bit harder and not everyone is as fast at learning songs as me.

Meanwhile in jazzland, I got my tenor sax fixed, and it plays great, especially on the low notes. Last week we had a really excellent jam with the group. This dude Charlie sat in on guitar, and he was really good, reminded me of Keith Martini. Everyone’s playing seemed up a level from usual that night and we had some great moments. Left with a really good feeling. Charlie invited me to sit in with his group, which rehearses on Monday and has a few of the same players as my Wednesday group. I met this really smokin’ alto player Omar, who really had the Charlie Parker bag down. Very melodic with that bebop slink, reminded me of Ron Palidino. Best sax player I’ve heard in a while.

Random Reflections

Let’s see … lots of bits and pieces these days.

I spent the weekend hanging out with Seth and Mark at Seth’s cabin in the Berkshires. Good to get away from the wife and kids for a spell and eat lots of barbecue. We went on a nice hike to a waterfall. You should know that Mark is an amazing musician and leads the band Cracklin’ Foxy out of Saranac Lake, NY. I learned the only music Mark hates more than Happy is anything from the soundtrack to Frozen. Also Mark has grown a mountain man beard. I think it was 20 years ago this weekend Seth invited my out on his dad’s sailboat and we cruised up an down the Hudson.

I’m over the hump on my Scala class. It’s actually making sense now. I submitted the homework on Huffman encoding and got a perfect score. I’ll admit I googled the problem, but hey, that’s what you do in real life when faced with a programming challenge. Rather than just copy what I found, I took several different solutions and read them and compared them until I understood what they were saying, and then created my own solution that best expressed it to my sensibilities. This week I finished the last lecture, and there’s two more homeworks to go, but the last one is another double, pushing up against OUSA.

Jeannie is back at work, starting a new job after switching jobs followed by a spectacular flameout a couple months ago. Woo-hoo. Meanwhile the kids are counting the days until the end of school.

I’ve been rockin’ my own work of lately. Ever since Olga got sacked it’s been so much easier to concentrate. Today at work I wrote over 200 lines of code! Also I came across a situation (marshalling data parsed out of an xml response) where the Scala approach is better than the way I’ve been doing it in Java all these years. Would have been far less code.

My train reading these days has been the Conan the Barbarian series by Robert Howard. It turns out these were originally published in Weird Stories magazine in the 1930’s alongside the first C’htuulhu stories, and Howard and H. P. Lovecraft were friends similar to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Conan is perfect train reading. I had to give up Game of Thrones because it got to be so rambling and pointless. The Conan stories OTOH are nice and short, with tight plots, heavy on action and with a supernatural twist. I can usually read a whole novella between my morning and evening commute.

The Relix are officially defunct. Our drummer Gus finally quit last week, frustrated with auditioning new singers. He’s now trying to start a new group with Mike and me from the Relix and some guys from his other band, which also crashed and burned. We’re getting together later this week. I learned Space Truckin’ tonight in honor of the occasion.

Meanwhile I’ve written and begun recording two new tunes. One is called Your Dancing Shoes, and it’s a catchy blue-eyed-soul number with a big horn break in the mode of Domino or Sir Duke. I’ve asked Lee, the erstwhile Relix guitarist – the jazzy one – to lay down a guitar track for me, and he enthusiastically agreed. Now I just have to get the bass part clean enough that I’m satisfied with a take. I’m going for no punch-ins on this one because the there’s not very many gaps in the part, and it’ll just groove better.

The other song is called To Be a Rock, and I plan on asking Frank, the other – straight ahead rock – Relix guitarist to sit on that one, cuz it matches his style. In fact I wrote these two songs with these guys in mind. I hope he agrees because even though I could probably play the part myself, I want to capture his sound, which I have no idea of how to reproduce. This song still needs some development; I feel like it’s missing a part toward the end.

Since I’ve become a regular member of my Jazz combo I feel like I should learn the tunes. I have an older version of the Real Book (1980’s) than everyone else, and it’s just chock full of errors. I also want to get my chops of for slaloming changes of the bebop and bossa nova numbers. I finally had a chance to practice sax this week. I’d been noticing for some time that it’s been getting harder to pop out those low notes. I went over the horn with a leak light but the low notes are all tight. They ought to be; I just had the horn repadded two years ago. I finally discovered the problem is the octave key. So tomorrow I’m gonna call up Virgil Scott and see when I can get the horn in. For now I’ve fixed it with electrical tape. I noticed it’s the third spot on my horn fixed in such a way.

Live update – four firetrucks pulled up to my neighbor’s house a little while ago. They loitered four about an hour and just took off.

The last topic for tonight is origami. I finished my Dimpled Dodecahedron, wetfolded it and all, and it came out very nicely. Only one step away from the Stellated Dodec, v2. The closing is working out different than the previous model since I can’t remember how I did it before. I still have two weeks before the convention and hopefully I’ll be able to finishe a few more ideas. The big problem now is that my folding style has grown so complex it’s very difficult to fold these models even for me.

Dance of Origami Art and Science

I usually don’t repost links to news articles, but here’s one about Uyen’s upcoming origami exhibit at Copper Union later this month. She seems to be getting a lot of good deal of publicity and they have great things to say. Happy to be a part of it.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/30/world/astonishing-origami-exhibit/index.html

While we’re at it, I found a related link about the MIT Origami Club from a few months ago that features one of my turkeys. I don’t know who folded it but they did a nice job.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/28/tech/mit-geeks-origami-thanksgiving/

Never Gonna Do It Without My Fez On

Friday night the Relix played a great show at The Fez in Stamford, CT. It turned out to be a really happening place and our best show so far. The Fez is a Moroccan restaurant on what must be the party block in downtown Stamford. Every place on the block is a restaurant or bar, and there’s tons of people, especially college kids and lots of hot chicks, walking up and down the whole time. We seemed to draw a good number of people off the street with our music. The owner of the Fez turned out to be a really nice guy who really cares about live music. There was a piano player up front when we arrived, doing Body and Soul and that kind of thing, and the joint was already full from the dinner crowd.

We didn’t go on until ten or so. The owner even emceed and gave us an intro. The place stayed full thru our first two sets, which ran until after midnight. As I said, this was our best gig so far. We now have alot of songs covering a broad range of styles, which we know well and can string together into a solid entertaining program. It really felt like we were hitting on cylinders. It helped too, that the place has a good PA and the stage was small, which meant was could hear each other really well. The third set was a bit more loose and jammin’ but still quite good and a lot of people stayed with us to the end, around 1:30.

Just as we were finishing up the cops showed up. It wasn’t clear why they were there – apparently just to exercise their donut privileges – but they had three cars and they parked right in front to block us from loading out. Anyway Dude invited us back. I want the band to learn The Fez by Steely Dan for the next show.

Surface to Structure: Folded Forms

I’ve been invited to contribute a few models to an upcoming origami exhibition. I’ve loaned them my Stellated Dodecahedron and Great Dodecahedron. Since I only ever folded one Stellated Dodecahedron I’m now folding another to have for OUSA. This one is going a good deal faster. I’m already done the precreasing and am starting the collapsing.

The exhibit is called Surface to Structure: Folded Forms. It will include over 120 contemporary origami creations folded using a broad spectrum of styles and techniques. Surface to Structure will take place at The Cooper Union, located at 41 Cooper Square, New York, NY, 10003. The exhibition will be free and open to the public from June 19 thru July 4, 2014. It is being organized and curated by Uyen Nguyen.

I went down to Cooper Union today to drop of my models. It was a lovely day for a walk, and I haven’t been to the East Village in a while. I used to live right in that neighborhood only a few block away and used to walk past CU every day. Well now there’s a new Cooper Union building across the street from the old one, which wasn’t there before. The old one is stately brown stone, and the new one is crushed-beer-can postmodernist sheet metal. confusing but very cool. Looks like a good space for an art exhibition.

You can learn more here about the exhibit here:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/surface-to-structure-folded-forms

Music Site Update

I thought I’d get all this bidniz done around Xmas but it’s taken thru the winter and into the spring to find the time. I finally updated my music site with the Elixr EP info and links to all the places you can buy it on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon. Also updated my Amazon artist page for Buzzy Tonic (they won’t let me link to my author page for my origami books), and updated the links from my older records, Face the Heat and The Brothers Zing.

So side one is up and for sale now. Side two is shaping up nicely. I have five new songs on the slate: To Be a Rock, Your Dancing Shoes, Soul on Fire, Plague of Frogs, and The Ballad of Galadriel. The first three I’ve already begun tracking.

The Beat Goes On

Amazingly enough, it snowed last night. There was a good two inches on the ground and everywhere, although it mostly melted by noon.

Saturday night the Relix played a great gig at the Vintage Lounge in White Plains. This was our first gig in a while and our second gig at the Vintage since I joined the band. It’s a great place to do a show, a big room and large stage and a great bar. Also it was a good crowd, the room was full and the people were really digging it.

We’ve added a lot of new songs since our last show (eighteen I think), including Good Times Bad Times by Led Zeppelin, Burnin’ for You and Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Öyster Cult, Touch Me by the Doors, Domino by Van Morrison (both great sax songs), You May Be Right by Billy Joel, as well as the soul classics I Can’t Help Myself and This Old Heart of Mine. I’m feeling much more relaxed now than I was when I first joined the group. Not worried about remembering the chords anymore, more focused on listening and performing. Also my vocals have gotten alot stronger and more confident. I feel like I’m well on my way to finding my voice, as they say, both literally and figuratively. I really love singing harmony and we have quite a few really good songs for that, so that part of our sound is coming along nicely too.

You never know what’s going to go over with an audience, although we front-loaded our set with some sure-fire crowd pleasers which we know well. Midway thru the set we were hitting on all cylinders with the Zeppelin and BÖC. I was a bit surprised by the strong response to Reaper since even though it’s a great song it’s also a bit of a downer. We finished the set with a soul medley, which brought the energy up to the next level and got everyone up and dancing.

We had more soul numbers on the list for the second and third set, which also happen to be a lot of the sax tunes. We’ve been organizing our songs in to blocks of three or four of a similar mood and vibe. So we just burned thru all the soul numbers for the first half of the second set. Then it was onto 60’s psychedelic rock and an 80’s medley. By the third set the list was completely our the window and we were just calling tunes on the fly. I think I sang the first five songs in a row, to give Paul a rest after all that Motown. But it was fine, we had way more tunes than we had time to play so we just went with the best stuff for the last set. It was a great show and a really good time.

In other news the weather was beautiful and we got the major part of the spring yardwork done over weekend, at least until it’s time to start the trimming and mowing and putting in the garden. I have a few days of from work coming up and hope to get caught up on my rest and a long list of random tasks.

Forward Yardage

It hasn’t really been warm outside yet, but this weekend was finally nice enough to start in on the spring things. I scraped away all the debris and filled in the craters in my yard made by logs falling out of the sky when they cut down my elm tree over the winter. Then I covered the dirt with the blue stuff so new grass will grow. Today’s rainy so I guess that’s good news for the grass. The town told us they’d come pull up the stump with two weeks; that was three weeks ago. I also expanded the flowerbed in the back corner of my yard to run the length of my neighbor’s garage and rearranged the edging stones. This means one less awkward corner that I have to get the lawnmower into.

I also got my Mustang on the road for the first time over the season. It started right up and ran like a charm, all systems look good.

Reminder: my band THE RELIX are playing this coming Saturday at Vintage Lounge in White Plains. Lots of great new material and the sound is tighter and better than ever. Show starts at 8:30. Playing three sets. Hope to see you there.

Fotoz Update Part 1

Spring teases us with false promises and winter holds on with one final desperate gasp. Over the weekend enough snow had melted that I was finally able to clean up the debris left behind by the removal of my old elm tree. The good news is the town is supposed to come and grind out the stump and plant a new tree. We’ll see if they keep their word.

Meanwhile, as we begin to make plans to go aout and play in the coming year, can there be a better time go back thru last year’s pictures and make some albums and relive some fond memories. I put up the first two albums, which cover the period from the xmastime thru the end of the school year. Highlights include a trip upstate for the holidays, a trip the Caribbean, and Lizzy’s graduations from middle school. As always these galleries are for family and friends, so if you need a password drop me a line.