Author: zingblog

Beat The Heat Part I

Summer continues. The heat wave continues, with temperatures remaining in the mid to upper 90’s daily the last couple weeks. My friend Seth gave us an old air conditioner because he got central air put in his house. Normally in the summer we just have a cool zone in the bedrooms and we don’t even need that every day, but this year we were grateful to expand the cool zoon to the whole upstairs.

Seth’s dad Shelly passed away recently. Mark and Kelly came into town for a from the Adirondack for the funeral. A sad occasion but good to catch up. I’ll always remember Seth’s dad for a day I spent on his sailboat many years ago. I was a hot summer Saturday, when I was living in Queens, before I was married. Seth called me up and asked if wanted to go sailing. It told him I had planned on doing laundry. He convinced me to drop off my washing, something which had never occurred to me to do.

It was a great day sailing. We started up in Ossining sailed down the Hudson and under the Tappen Zee, almost to the George. Coming back we were sailing into the headwind and had to do quite a bit of tacking. Shelly had a pretty big boat (40 feet or so) and I’d only ever sailed little Sunfish before. I was really impressed at how he and Lynn could operate everything with ease, how coordinated they were. All the ropes were rigged that he could have run the boat himself, managed the sails and the rudder, from one spot if he needed to. It was a really great experience.

Origami Quartet

If you’re not an origami person you’ll probably look at this and think “what a bunch of geeks”. But I know these people and find it pretty amusing. Jason Ku, Andrew Hudson, Robert Lang and Daniel Myer perform at the 5OSME (5th International Conference for Origami Science, Mathematics and Education) banquet in Singapore earlier this month.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDy_y7wmacA

OUSA Convention 2010

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. First there was the origami convention and then we took a road trip upstate for the 4th to see family and friends. Now we’re back and catching up on things. We’re experiencing a major heat wave. It got up to 100 degrees today in New York City. Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and one.

It was a most excellent origami convention this year. I had six new models in my exhibit, including my Zeppelin, Turkey, Two-Color Stellated Octahedron, Great Dodecahedron, the Cairo Tessellation and its dual, which I’m calling the Cubocta Tessellation because its pattern of alternating squares and triangles reminds me of the Cuboctahedron. Classic models displayed included my Moose, Elephant, Lizard, Turtle, Rocketship and U.F.O. I’ll have pictures of mine and the other exhibits sometime soon.

I taught two classes: My U.F.O. and my Medieval Dragon. Both were well attended and went over well. The U.F.O. is a pretty advanced model and I warned them ahead of time. About a third of the class worked ahead, following my diagrams and had no problems. Most of the rest were right with me as I taught it, and there were a few who were in over their heads and couldn’t handle the precision necessary for the prefolding. The Dragon was sold out, which made it hard to teach cuz the room was big and I had to walk around a lot to show people steps close up. Again about half folded ahead and about half were with me, and I learned that a few steps in the diagrams were hard to follow. It turns out the Dragon is a great model for sculpting and I saw people do lots of cool creative interpretation with the details of the head, wings and tail.

Lizzy and Michelle were there two and folded a bunch of stuff and had a great time. They’re getting to be pretty good folders. They made friends with some other kids and stayed late Sunday for the giant folding competition. Michelle was really proud to have an Exhibitor ribbon on her badge, since she had a model in the Origami by Children exhibit.

I caught up with a bunch of my origami friends including John, Brian, Susan and Brian, and made some new friends too. John is selling iPhone and Android versions of his books now. Apparently it’s a lot of fun and at least moderately remunerative for him. He’s also coming out with four new print books this year, including new editions of the classics Dinosaur Origami and Origami Sea Life with Robert Lang, with updated diagrams and a bunch of new models. While he was in NYC John met with his publisher and they gave him back a box of models that they’d used for photos of the book cover. Some of them were Robert’s sea creatures, so John kept surreptitiously putting one or two of them on Robert’s exhibit over the course of the weekend.

Susan Thomas in addition to origami does this thing with making jewelry out of rings of chain mail and rubber o-rings. It’s a pretty cool idea and she has a book out on it, and it seems to be catching on. Jeannie made a bracelet, and Susan gave a bracelet to Lizzy and Michelle, and they’ve all been getting lots of compliments on them. I think it’d be pretty wild to make a sweater or something using that technique.

I met Roman Diaz from Uruguay, who is a very nice guy and brilliant origami artist. I want to get his new book, Origami Essence, but they were sold out of it at the convention. I gave him one of my models, a half Stellated Dodecahedron. I met Alexis from Quebec who is an excellent folder too. I met Alexis because he took my U.F.O class and suggested an improvement to a sequence of folds. We got to talking, and I invited him to be my partner for the giant folding competition.

The giant folding was a new thing last year and it turned out to be really popular, so this year there were a lot more participants. I folded my Lizard out of a nine foot square. I figured it was a good model because the paper is so big and heavy a lot of models turn out floppy, but the Lizard lies on it’s belly and has enough layers that it’d keep its shape. I taught Alexis the model the day before and he seemed to have basically memorized it, so we had no problem folding it in the allotted hour. And it turned out looking really cool, like an ice blue Komodo Dragon. And we even won the prize for coolest model. A lot of other teams made really nice models too. Some standouts were Roman’s frog and Aviv’s Kawasaki Rose. Lizzy folded a snake. We’re gonna burn ours when we go camping later this month.

The most interesting class I took on Monday was by Nathan Zeichner, who is a CS student developing his own origami software. It has an interesting spin in that it’s part of a project to create self-folding origami robots, if you can believe that. I talked to him a length after his lecture. He said he was inspired by my paper in 3OSME.

Since lots of people were asking about it, I have to say I feel good about how my book is shaping up. I have over 100 pages diagrammed now. I’ve organized into chapters and have a few more models to design and diagram to round things out. I’ve decided to jettison my polyhedra for a future book since I have enough material already and they will be really hard to diagram. So that suddenly puts me alot closer to completion. It also puts the center of gravity in the intermediate to complex range rather then the supercomplex, which I think will have a broader appeal.

Next up: road trippin’. Coming soon OUSA Convention pictures.

Origami Book Progress

It’s been a long time since I bogged about my ongoing origami book. Well I recently finished diagramming two more models. One is my Medieval Dragon, clocking an just about 100 steps. That’s twelve pages as I currently have it laid out. The other is my U.F.O., which is ten pages and a shade above 60 steps, but from step 40 or so onward it’s all fully three dimensional, so each step is a major work of drawing. These are by far two most involved models I’ve done so far. The only thing that comes close is my Adirondack Moose, which is also about 60 steps, but it’s only 3-d for the last few steps. Both the Moose and the Dragon are fairly traditional designs, using variations on classic bases and inspired by models in John Montroll’s first book. The U.F.O. however is completely modern and without an antecedent, and well over half the folding sequence is precreasing. So while it may not seem like a lot in terms of number of models, it’s a lot in terms of page count, and I knocked of two major models to boot. This brings me up to 16 models done, about 90 pages worth. I’m definitely more than halfway done with the book, so I think its time to start looking at the publishing process.

I signed up to teach both of these at the upcoming OUSA convention – only a week away. So I’m glad I got the diagrams finished but as usual I have lots of ideas for things I’d like to fold but haven’t had the time to fully develop. So I think this weekend will be a big folding jam.

I’m posting pics of the final step of each model as a way to motivate myself to continue by showing the result without giving away the whole diagram. I may go back and post pictures of the final steps of my other completed diagrams to create a sort of evolving table of contents. I need to update my origami site anyway. I have a number of models, going back more than a year, that I need to photograph and post. Well July will be a good time for that. I always get a big boots of energy and creativity from the convention, and that will fuel me into the summer to continue developing things.


Squirrels, Concerts, Cartwheels and Fireflies

When I was kid all squirrels were grey. Then one day we went up to visit my cousins in the suburbs outside of Toronto and we saw something new: a black squirrel. It turns it was a mutant strain, but a successful one, and over the years the black squirrels have spread out across the northeastern part of North America, to the point where now in the 21st century, they are common in Westchester County, NY. We have a champion elm tree in our front yard, and in it lives a family of squirrels. One Saturday morning a few weekends ago I was sitting on the couch sipping my morning coffee when the new family of young squirrels came out to play. I called the kids over and they were knocked out by overwhelming cuteness of all those squirrels frolicking in the trees, on the power lines and on the ground. I counted nine of them, some black and some grey. Then I saw something new I’d never seen before: a black squirrel with a red tail!

I was out rollerblading earlier this week and I saw another one. That’s two. I wonder if this a new variety of squirrels, and if it’s going to become common in a few years.

…

Last Friday was Lizzy’s spring band concert. I’m happy to say that the school band is getting a lot better and Lizzy in particular is sounding quite good. This is important to me as a parent and musician, because school band was a big part of my early musical training and experience. Two years ago (Lizzy’s first year in the band) the teacher quit at the end of the year, and about half the band graduated the school. So last year it was a new teacher and a ragtag group of beginners. So as you might imagine, they sounded pretty rough. But the teacher, Mr. Quinn, was quite dedicated and patient, and the kids have been steadily improving. This year was a dramatic both in terms of the material they could handle and the level at which they played it. This year they did a dress rehearsal at the school, which by all accounts was a big success and instrumental in recruiting new kids into the band.

Lizzy had a solo too, the Hunter’s Chorus by Weber, and I’m happy to say she nailed it. And at the end of the concert the band director told me he’s inviting Lizzy to join the honor band next spring. This is a band formed from the best players from a bunch of schools in the area. It’s made up kids in grades 6 – 8, and Lizzy is just going into 6th grade next fall, so that’s pretty cool.

…

This is the time of year when the evenings are really long. This kids are all excited about summer vacation and me, well, I have a couple long weekends coming up. Lizzy had the end of her gymnastics class last weekend, complete with a demo competition. It’s something she’s been working to master, so one night this week she was out on the lawn doing cartwheels back handsprings and asking me to spot her. Michelle was out too and as it started getting dark the fireflies came out. Firefly season is always special since it’s so short and only comes when the evenings are long. The kids caught a bunch of fireflies and but them in a jar, although I persuaded them to release our little glowing friends when it was time to go inside. It was a nice shiny moment of serenity.

Source Control as a Service

I’ve been doing software development for my friend Erik for a while now. It’s been going well, but I’m sort of bound by time constraints (I have a day job and kids, as well as commitments to developing my art in music and origami) and he’s been budget bound (small business owner). We worked out an arrangement to trade studio time for software development, but since my record is nearly done so is that deal. Erik had the idea to begin outsourcing the development, which would put me in the role of architect/designer/team lead and (potentially/hypothetically) triple our output as far as software dev productivity goes.

As a prerequisite to sharing the code, we needed to get the project under source control. I remember a few months back my friend Nick blogging about how to set up a GIT server. I thought this might be something I could do, but what a time suck and a hassle. As it turns out Erik is a big believer in the whole software-as-service thing. He’s using a service (odesk.com) to line up offshore developers, and he’s even trying to convince to use a service to help on my next album.

The thing is, he’s not really into my drum sounds, which is not too surprising, since they’re all redended MIDI parts, jammed using the four-finger method and/or step recorded by yours truly. They sound a heck of a lot better than say They Might Be Giants, who used a similar technique back in the day, but fall short of a really good real drummer. And the cymbals in particular are a bit thin samplewise. So Erik is like, “Man, somewhere out there is a drummer who’s just killer, who will nail your tracks and bring a whole new level of energy. You send him a file of your song, and he’ll send you back an amazing drum part.” And this really sounds not far from the truth. I’ve had good experiences collaborating over the net with my brother to create our last album, and on this album with my friend John, who’s just recently hung out a shingle to do mastering as a service over the internet.

As to the question of source control, Erik had a friend who turned us onto source-control-as-a-service at cvsdude.com, a.k.a Codesion. The cost is pretty low — on the level of your basic web hosting service, and they have an admin interface to let you set up source repositories, bug/feature tracking, and to add users and set access control. Totally worth it as far as the time it saved for me not having to do all that by hand. I was able to fairly quickly create a repository, upload the source, and set up version control in my IDE on another machine to confirm it works as advertised, then checkout the source, make some changes and commit the new version. So it’s all humming along quite nicely.

Of course the project up to now has just been living on my local machine, so there’s a whole cycle of organization, cleanup and documentation ahead before some third party developer can jump in. And the other thing is, before y’all get all drooling over the idea that the day of software-as-a-service has really arrived, Codesion is still just another scrappy startup trying to get by like the rest of us. At first I was taken in by their slick web interface and their more-human-than-human support/sales bot, but the illusion was soon shattered. I had signed up for a trial account to see if they were legit, and then Erik went ahead and creates a permanent account. The problem is, for some reason (like a flaw in their database design) they don’t’ allow the same email address on two different accounts, so every time I tried to log in I got an error and a nastygram from their server to my inbox. Their tech support cleared it up by nerfing my trial account, but this is disappointing because at some point I’d like to get the Foldinator under version control, but I don’t want to get a new email address just to appease these guys.

Tri-Square Origami Tessellation

My first origami tessellations was a grid of pentagons. Now I’ve made a tessellation of triangles and squares to go with it. And mean that in a very specific way. This mesh is the dual of the other. If you draw a dot in the center of each cell of the pentagon grid and connect them all, you’d get this pattern. Five cells converge at each vertex. In the other pattern all the cells were the same shape, but either three or four cells converged at a vertex. I’ve never seen anyone fold this pattern before and the two of them make a nice set.

Summer’s Here and the Time is Right

The season has progressed to full on summer. Finally made it to a long weekend, a much deserved and needed break after rather chaotic spell at work. Been trying to get our software release out the door, filling in for my boss who was on vacation, as well as running things since our project manager was gone too. Dealing with uncooperative directors of other projects, and that all-time favorite of software development, fixing other people’s bugs. Well all’s well that ends well I suppose and we met our deadline.

We went upstate to see Martin and Kathleen and Charlie over the weekend. Very nice hang. Went swimming, which was great for my back; the first time since the winter it really felt good. Unfortunately the car ride home undid that. We also watched the Queen open the British parliament on CSPAN. This was pretty random, but the girls are Anglophiliac these days because of Harry Potter, so we thought they like to see a real Queen in action commanding the Lords and Commons. The weirdest part was when the chief constable shouted “Hats off, strangers” before the Queen entered Parliament, predicted beforehand by a very blasé announcer.

I did some research into the wacky traditions of British government, and learned some interesting factoids. There is a movement afoot to replace the phrase “strangers” with “visitors” to be less anachronistic. The word strangers dates from the time of Cromwell. Smoking in parliament was banned in 1696, although snuff is available to all members at the public expense. Wearing of armor was banned in 1313. There’s a list of words banned from discourse that includes “blackguard”, “git”, and “traitor”.

Here’s some pictures from my yard and garden from 2 or 3 weeks back. The roses and fig tree are doing awesome, and we even have some ripe strawberries.

Workin’ Man’s Blues

I haven’t posted in a while. Last week I was feeling pretty burned out and dragged down by life and work in particular. In younger days this may have precipitated a semi-major existential crisis, but I’ve learned I usually just needed to unwind and catch up my rest, so I spent my evenings last week watching a movie or going to bed early rather than trying to get stuff done.

You may remember the management consultants skulking around my office a while back. Our corporate overlords want us to learn Agile since they don’t really understand software development or how to manage it. It should be said that we’ve been doing Agile for a few years now and we’re actually pretty good at it, and as far as it goes Agile is fine, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. The cultishness surrounding it is pretty silly and tiresome, and of course the problems in our organization have nothing to do with us not “doing Agile right”.

Nevertheless, the consultants were prized for their supposed Agile expertise. When they around to interview me I mentioned that I’ve seen a lot of management fads come and go. (Humans have been working together for more than 6000 years, so the idea that suddenly the One True Way of Project Management has been divined is kind of absurd.) We had several meetings in which developers raised legit issues about or process and the limitations of Agile, and the consultants gave us weak and unsatisfactory answers. Then they went off and wrote up a report and it’s been circulating our department. The consensus was that it was about 1/3 okay but that part was so generic they could have pasted it in from some web site, about 1/3 dead wrong, and 1/3 complete bullshit that couldn’t even be evaluated for correctness. Among the gems it contained was the bullet point “Developers think that Agile may be a management fad.” which is of course true, and if you reduce this to its essence, they have a problem with the fact that “developers think”.

My boss and the other tech directors, and basically everyone who read it had the same reaction, a combination of disgust and outrage. Even the VP’s of project management who commissioned the report were embarrassed to stand behind it. So they set up a meeting with the consultants and basically went over the report point by point tore them apart. I’d imagine that’s not the end of it, but it makes me feel better after having my professionalism slagged by some clueless wonks. One positive thing that was in the offing anyway is that we have a new VP to oversee our group and sibling projects. He made a good first impression on me and is well regarded by people who’ve worked with him. He’s now the new boss of the Bad Manager, so that will go a long way to solving that problem.

On top of this, we had to get a release of our product out the door last week. We just finished a major launch, and this was pretty much an unexpected follow-on to accomdate a new client. The Bad Manager wanted the release “immediately” so we had to call a meeting to explain to him what it all it would take to build, deploy and test the app. It’s a few days work, partly because we’re doing alot of the deploy stuff for the first time, and partly to allow for a full QA. At one point I’m enumerating the steps to the Bad Manager, and he says “Somebody ought to be writing this down.” So I handed him a pen and pad of paper. Yeesh.

Friday I stayed home from work because Michelle had to get a tooth pulled. I was totally burnt out, so it was just as well. She had a baby tooth that was fused to her jaw, so it was nontrivial surgery. I drove so Jeannie could hold Michelle’s hand in the backseat of the car. We’d known she’d need this for quite some time and Jeannie has been really dreading it. But it turned out not to be so bad. The tooth’s root had begun to dissolve and the x-ray didn’t look anywhere near as scary as the one from a year ago. The doctor and nurse were very nice and put Michelle at ease and the operation took only maybe a half hour. She was kind of woozy afterwards no major pain over the weekend.

So shaw’nuff life gets better. We had a fantastic weekend with beautiful weather. Took care of the yardwork, went skating, feeling rested again. The highlight was Jeannie and I went into the city last night to celebrate our friend Lisa’s birthday. (Lisa it’s your birthday, happy birthday Lisa.) We went to some crazy trendy Japanese restaurant in Chelsea. Fantastic food and drink and a really good time.