Author: zingblog

Blues Forever

Back in the day my brother Martin decided to teach himself how to play guitar. Once he got the basics together it seemed that almost out of nowhere he started writing a stream of songs, all of them quite good and some of them really powerful and beautiful, and some surprisingly dark. In short order he put together a band named Shade and started gigging out with the material. Sort of an distortion-guitar-driven post-prog pop vibe. I was an instant fan. We even played a few double bills with my band and his.

Shade broke up and Martin went on to commit these songs to tape using a four-track cassette recorder, very advanced technology for the day. He recently digitized the songs and put them online as The Shade Songbook. You can hear the tracks here. The songs hold quite up well and I’m really having a blast listening to them again. (I suppose they could use some modern EQ and tape hiss removal, but Martin made no attempt at such twenty-first century revisionism). Favorites include At The Show, Blues Forever, Just Another Heart Attack, Frozen Ocean, Making Miles … well there are alot of songs. You can get Martin’s take on the project here.

Megafauna Origami

As mentioned previously I made some megafauna origami models to donate to the American Museum of Natural History for their annual origami holiday tree. I did three models this year: a moose, an elephant and a bear. All three are made out of large paper and therefore quite big. The moose is made from a 32” square of brown parcel wrap, which was the biggest usable piece I could find. I tried making an elephant out of the same stuff, but I had the idea of wrinkling and then flattening the paper first to give it an elephant hide texture. The paper ended up with a slightly strethcy, almost clothlike consistency. The model is just one layer thick over the whole back, so it came out way to floppy. A very interesting failure. I’ll have to keep the technique in mind for the future. I made another elephant out of a 24” square of Canson, which is a thick art paper and very good for making elephants. Lastly I made the bear out of 15” Tant. I’m quite pleased with how all three came out and I hope the museum will use them well.

As an bonus I am including a pic of a funny little are project Lizzy and Michelle undertook not to long ago. They started making origami boats out of Masu boxes, and then put them together on top of corks.

Fall Down, Part II

Seems that this is the time of year for work in progress. Here’s an update on a bunch of project. You can skip it if you find it boring.

My job has entered a new planning cycle. I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a manager who’s making it difficult for me to accomplish what I need to do. I want to moving forward with a major new feature set of my product, and he’s not getting it together to provide me with usable requirements. I working on him to see that it’s in his best interest to let me take over some things, but he is reluctant to give up control even though he’s spread too thin.

In music, I’ve been finishing off my album Face The Heat. I updated the page, including links to the newest mixes. I’m in the final phase, really focused on the details of the mixes now. Probably one or two pass at each song remains, but I find after I do a mix I have to take a few days and listen to it.

But in the sense that I want to finish my record to make time for origami, so far it’s kinda backfired. I have a trip coming up to California next month for the Pacific Coast Origami Conference, and I’d like to have something new for that. I took the summer off from working on my book, but now I have to get back into it. Last winter I was in a groove of diagramming over a model a month, but that’s a pretty heavy pace. So far this fall I made some corrections to my Lizard and began diagramming my Medieval Dragon, which will be probably over 70 steps! I also have a bunch of models in development, including some insects: a new butterfly, a dragonfly, and maybe another crack at the ladybug. And then there’s the batch from June that need further refining: the Blimp, the Sphere and the Orb UFO. So I’ve been doing some origami, just not as much as I’d like. Ah well I still have a month.

I’ve also made progress on the Foldinator, my origami software. It is now generating the paper procedurally using the drawing API. Also I‘ve defined the various lines weights and colors the application needs. I have a bit further to go before I release the next demo, however. I want to draw the initial state of the paper based on what it says in the xml file for the model. This requires a bit of plumbing so that the paper is aware when the model is loaded. After that I will probably go on to the non-folding operations, namely flipping and rotating the paper.

I’ve realized that I am long overdue in updating my origami site with pictures of my 2009 models. The web site redesign is probably far enough along that I should shift gears and take care of this before carrying on with that. The photography and photoshop is a whole little project in itself. While I’m at it, I should update my general photo gallery with pictures from the summer before it gets too far behind.

New Recording: Touch The Ceiling Rough Mix

Here’s a rough mix of my new song Touch The Ceiling. As mentioned previously this was an original from the prog rock party band Infinigon, written by our drummer Mark Colicchia. My friend John Neumann, the original Infinigon bassist helped me with this song, contributing the bass and guitars, backing vocals and some synthesizer textures. It was a lot of fun collaborating with John. He had a bunch of new fresh ideas that expanded my idea of what the song could be.

The arrangement was true in spirit to the original version, but updated as well. The major difference is now we have all this machinery making modern music where back in the day we had to cover all the parts live. The spine of track is my Fender Rhodes part, on top of which I layered a lead synth that was fairly faithful to the original. On top of that we layered a few more synths. John broke down the guitar part into layers and built it up track by track, and in the end I had six tracks of guitars to integrate, a veritable guitar army!

Mark was one of the best drummers, if not the best drummer I ever worked with, and I tried to do justice to his style, energy, and chops in my drum track. I record my drums using the “four finger” method. I use a general midi drum kit layout and the left hand covers the kick drum and snare and the right hand does the hi-hat and cymbals. Then I go back and punch in and/or hand edit anything extra I need. I don’t typically use a lot of fills, but in the song it seemed like a good idea. There’s even an eight-bar drum break after the guitar solo that was a lot of fun to do.

My vocal on this song was delivered in a more hard rock style than usual. I was inspired by John’s suggestion to listen to David Lee Roth on some classic Van Halen. John later claimed he was joking, but I think the vocal is quite successful. I even added some spontaneous lyrics in the ending jam, as all chaos breaks loose among the synths and guitars. There’s going to be a fade out in the final version, but for now it just runs out to the end of the jam.

So this is it for the songs on my new record. Next I’ll be going over them one by one with an ear to fine tuning the levels and effects and cleaning up anything I might’ve missed, in preparation for the final mixdown and mastering.

Summer’s End

Labor day was unusually late this year, which meant we had an extra week of summer, which was great, but now we suddenly find ourselves in the second week of September.

We ended the summer with a long weekend at the beach in Ocean City, Maryland. This is the third year in a row and it’s becoming an annual family tradition, something we all look forward to. Swimming in the ocean, chilling and hanging out, going out to dinner, taking the kids to the boardwalk, the amusement pier and the water park, this may have been the best one yet. We did a few new things this time around.

On the day we arrived, it was too cold and windy to go swimming, so we decided to fly kites instead. We have a couple kites that have been hanging around for years, and it was the kid’s idea to bring them. It was great fun. The wind was strong and steady, and you can see why the Wright Brothers did their testing on a beach. One of our kites was cool pirate ship, the other is a maneuverable stunt kite with two strings that can be used for steering. I finally crashed this one into the sand in a big gust. One of the struts cracked but we were able to get it replaced at the very awesome kite shop on the boardwalk.

We went on an Assateague Adventure boat cruise. They take you on a tour of the harbor and then land on Assateague Island, home of the wild ponies, where you can spot wildlife on the island and in the water. On the ride home, the guide showed local marine critters such as crabs and starfish, some of which we caught that very cruise. The next day we went back to Assateague (by car) and did some of the nature hikes. We spotted crabs in the open spaces between the weeds in the saltmarshes, as well as all kinds of fish and birds. At the very end of the hike we spotted a fawn right up close; the kids were delighted.

Now we’re back and the nights are getting cool, and the kids are going back to school. Fist day is tomorrow and they’re all excited like it’s Christmas Eve. The time from now until January always passes in a blur.

Time to start lining up projects. Diagramming for my origami book has risen to the top of the rotation. I’m going to the Pacific Coast Origami Convention in November and hope to have a few new diagrams for that, as well as corrections on the batch I completed in June. Also maybe complete development on a few models I had in development in the spring.

Another thing I’m going to do this fall is finish my record album. I’m almost done tracking the last song, and then it’ll be time for mixing and mastering. I’m really looking forward to completing it. Beyond that I’ll probably spend some time writing before I dive into the next recording. Third is to continue work on the Foldinator, which is starting to get somewhere, and fourth is the ongoing development of my web site. Then there’s the usual slate of home improvements projects, mainly the painting we didn’t get around to last year. On top of that there’s kids activities, birthdays and holidays, not to mention my day job.

Car Trouble

I mentioned that our car was having trouble last week. The car started overheating on the way home from the beach, and this seemed to affect the power and acceleration and also the braking. It was so bad we drove straight to our local garage rather than going all the way home. The car is a ’99 Jeep Grand Cherokee coming up on 100,00 miles. Jeannie has been increasingly concerned about the car’s reliability, and since this was an unexpected repair it called the whole issue of whether to repair or replace the vehicle into question.

The car was in the shop for the better part of a week, and we spent a good chunk of that time researching potential replacements. We had a camping trip coming up, which is the max load for us, with the kids and all our camping stuff filling the car to the limit, so time was tight.

We mainly use this car for family road trips, and I haul stuff around in it from time to time, so it needs to be big enough for that. Nowadays on weekdays I mainly drive it to the train station and back, but I used to work in Connecticut and that was a long commute, so the car needs to be versatile and good in rough weather, snow and terrain. It needs to be big enough, but I don’t want anything too huge. There’s a whole category of large and extra large SUV’s out there I’m not even looking at.

The one special consideration is that I’m tall, and so many car out there – even large cars – do not have enough headroom for me, so this is a major issue.

I don’t want to get another Jeep, mainly because they are not that well made, but also I don’t like the new body and style. Bigger and heavier but less interior room.

We had looked at Toyotas at the time we bought the Jeep. They were either too small or too monster-truck like, and none were especially well designed. I sat in a Sequoia, and couldn’t sit up straight because the moonroof ate up so much headroom. The one car we liked was the Highlander, but they were brand new at the time and on backorder, and we couldn’t wait, so we got a 3 year old Jeep instead. We rented a newly redesigned Highlander on or recent trip to New Mexico, and I don’t like it, particularly the interior.

We went and looked at Subaru’s earlier this week. Our other car is a Subaru, and we love the Subaru boxer engines and AWD drivetrains, and their really great long term reliability. Subaru has supersized both the Forester and the Tribeca in them last year or two so we thought we’d check them out.

We were hopeful about the Forester. It is just a bit smaller than the Jeep, but is significantly lighter and gets significantly better gas mileage, and is very well designed overall, and reasonably priced. It is big enough in the front seat but has less cargo space. The biggest problem is that you can only get it with a roof rack if you also get the sunroof, and then it doesn’t have enough headroom. Disappointing.

Tribeca is even more frustrating. It’s their flagship car and is as long and heavy as our jeep and gets comparable mileage. It has a 6-cylinder version of the boxer engine, which you’d except would be awesome. But the roof is just too low, and the curvy back end cuts down a lot on the cargo space. And again with conjoined roof rack moonroof option. With the moonroof I can’t even sit up straight in the front seat. Yeesh.

Next to look at is Hondas. The Pilot is at the top our list right now. It’s just a shade bigger than the Jeep, gets a bit better mileage, and is available in 4 wheel drive. We’ve seen a bunch of 2 and 3 year old Pilots listed for $10 less than a new one, which is generally a good point value curve. (We seem to put about $1000 a year into maintenance and repair on both of our cars, and the Subaru is even older than the Jeep, but that’s still a much better deal than losing $5K a year to depreciation.) We’re also considering the CR-V, but we’re concerned it may be too small. They look to be comparable to the Forester.

While we were building our dossier of cars to check out we heard back from the garage. The overheating was caused by a hole in the exhaust pipe up near the engine. I had known about the whole before, and the garage had said it would cost well over $1000 to replace, as the pipe was part of integral unit that includes the catalytic converter. The hole itself was caused by corrosion where a clip had been welded onto the pipe (using a different metal) to hold on a pretty-much-useless piece of heat shielding. This is a perfect example of why I’m not getting another Jeep.

When I was first told about this, I decided to fix it myself using a muffler patch kit from an auto parts store. It worked well enough thru the winter, but I guess by spring it had worn thru and the hole was larger than ever, with the weather in the 90’s it became an issue. So this time I convinced my mechanic to patch the hole by welding on a plate, which costs only a couple hundred bucks.

The repair was complicated, however, by the last time the car was in the shop. This was in Washington, D. C., at a Firestone, not at our regular garage. I had needed a new set of tires, because one of the tires was wearing unevenly on the trip. The tires were old anyway, so that was not a big deal apart from the inconvenience, but it was the result a bad alignment or something, so that needed to be done again. The thing is, the garage over-tightened and cross-threaded a bunch of the lug nuts when they put the tires on, so now my mechanic spent the better part of a day getting them off and destroyed one of the wheels in the process, which of course needed to be replaced. Luckily he charged me only a fraction of the labor cost, and wrote me a letter I can use to try and pursue some kind of remuneration from the Firestone.

But now that car is fixed and feels better than ever, and is quite again to boot. We took it camping and home again and it performed great, so hopefully we’ll get another year or two out of it without any trouble. So for now we saved ourselves the hassle and cost of buying an new car. But we’ll continue our research, cuz next time something happens to the car, we’ll probably decide to replace it, which will be much easier to do if we know what kind of car we want.

The camping trip itself was great fun, even though we had some rain. We had planned on going up Friday afternoon, but delayed because there were flood and tornado warnings up near the campground. So we went up bright and early Saturday morning, which was good because the traffic was light, by time we got there the rain was ending. Apparently Friday night was clear by nightfall, but it rained again in the morning, so everyone pitched in to help everyone else set up as fast as possible in case the rain came back. The day was clear but the rain came back shortly after dark. Lizzy and her friends go flooded out of the girls’ tent in the middle of the night when a big storm rolled thru. There was also plenty of car-related drama on the trip too. One couple drove up in an 80’s Camero that died as they rolled in. Another friend had his keys locked in his car when he sent one the boys to get mustard from his cooler. Sunday was sunny again by midday, and all our gear dried out, and we got to enjoy the lake and play guitars and all the usual cooking out and hanging out. We stayed until Sunday evening to make up for our late arrival.

Meanwhile, the summer is almost gone, and getting the Jeep fixed sort of trumped the Mustang, so doing the restoration work is deferred yet again. Ah well, one of these days…

Deep Summer

Well it’s the second half of the summer now, and we’re getting our first real heat wave. It’s been in the 90’s since last week, with no rain for a change, and no end in sight. We’re getting peppers and tomatoes from our garden daily now. And even though we’ve been busy, we’ve had some time to enjoy summer activities. We took the kids to Playland last Friday evening and the kids enjoyed the rides and we saw fireworks. Michelle is exactly 4 feet tall, which was the cutoff for a lot of rides, and it some of the ride operators were being extra picky. They wouldn’t let her on the big rollercoaster (too short), and then later they almost wouldn’t let her on some the kiddie rides (too tall)! They wouldn’t let me on the bumper cars for being too tall. The park has a bunch of old, classic rides from the 1920’s. The carousel had a genuine calliope, sort of a player piano crossed with a pipe organ and robot percussion section, that was fascinating to watch and listen to.

We went to beach on Sunday, which was great, except for on the ride home the car started making trouble, one of the brakes was overheating and seizing up. It’s in the shop now, but the car has just about 100,000 miles on it, so we’re starting to think about how long we want to keep it and keep repairing it. There are a lot of things I like about the Jeep, and over all it’s in pretty good shape, so it’s tempting to just keep it running. On the other hand, that’s the strategy we’re following with Jeannie’s car, so we don’t want to be in the situation where we need to replace both cars at the same time. And of course to replace it would be a whole research project to figure out what kind of vehicle to replace it with, and it’s gonna take a whole lot of precious time to do it right. Since I’m so tall, most of the cars our there are not good for me to drive, and even a lot of larger SUV’s are not well designed for tall people. Right now is not a good time for it’s since we have a camping trip coming up this weekend, and another road trip a couple weeks after that. Still, I think we better start looking into it so we’re prepared.

I’ve been making progress on a bunch of side projects. Luckily we’ve had no major home repairs or other projects of necessity for a little while, and things are at an even keel for the time being with my job, so I’ve been doing fun stuff. I’ve basically taken the summer off from working on origami and my book, since I was jamming on it really hard back in May and June. But it’s getting close to the top of the list as other things get done. I dusted off the Foldinator and began development of version 2.0. I worked out a format for Origami XML, and posted a first build. The second build will be along in a few weeks. I stated redoing my web site in PHP to support dynamic pages, and have implemented the first set of scripts. Still on the todo list is take pictures of all my new 2009 origami models, which will happen sometime this fall.

I’ve been making great progress with music. I bought a guitar a few weeks ago, and have been playing it enough that I’m starting to get somewhere. I’m think of writing a guitar based song even, something in the approximate style of Greg Lake. That will be on a future project, as this one is nearing the end. My friend Erik has agreed and to help me mix and master my record, which is great news. And I finished a complete song in record time in July. Now I’m working on the ninth and final song for my record, with the help of my friend John. More on that in a future post.

Kickin’ the Guitar

Hey! Who’s that playing?
Hey! The guitar?

Last weekend we went camping with a bunch of friends and families. Cooking over fires, drinking beers, singing songs around the campfire. Ah good times. We were pretty lucky with the weather. It rained heavily Friday on the drive up, but stopped by the time we got there. Most of the trip was sunny but not too hot. It started raining again the last morning, just after we finished packing down the tent, and by the time we were on the drive home it was pouring again.

We went for a rocky and muddy hike up a mountainside. The kids did really well, Michelle in particular. Even as the more sedentary adults began whining, she was hopping from rock to rock, happy to keep going with great energy and enthusiasm. Lizzy lost a sandal in the lake, playing fetch with Seth’s dog Nula. We burned the giant U.F.O. I folded back in June for the oversize origami competition. My friend Nick has some powder to sprinkle into the fire to make it burn all kinds of crazy colors. We put it on the flying saucer and it was just the thing. Video coming soon.

But the main topic for today is about singing songs a playing guitar. This dude Joe brought his guitar and we had some jams. He also brought a stack of lead sheets he printed out from the Internet, which was a great help. I usually memorize the music I play, but everyone knows different songs. So it made it easy to follow along with a song you basically know but haven’t played before. And there are hundreds and hundreds of songs easy song like that. Next time I’m gonna bring some printouts of my own.

I got motivated to get back into practicing guitar. Actually, last year around this time I went thru a spell of playing guitar and trying to learn some tunes from my big Beatles book and a Neil Young book. I tried to practice two or three times a week for a half hour or so. I picked a couple tunes that were pretty challenging for me, such as “I Will”, and was making progress, but had to put it aside after a few months. I felt like I my progress was slowing, and I wanted to make time for other activities, and besides, my guitar playing would never rise to the level of my saxophone or piano playing.

Another factor is that even thought I have two guitars, neither one is very good. One an acoustic that I traded for a boom box many years ago. It has the dubious virtue of being made almost entirely not of wood. The body is plastic, a great big Ovation-style round back, and the neck is aluminum, wide and flat. It never is quite in tune and takes a lot strength to barre chord on it. At least it’s loud. And it’s great for camping cuz it’s well nigh indestructible and it doesn’t matter if it accidentally gets wet or dirty.

My other guitar is a bit nicer. It’s a Guild electric that I bought many years ago off my friend Mark (Yo Homeslice!). It actually has pretty good sound and action, and a nice two-pickup setup with a three-way switch and tone knobs. The main problem is the intonation. The joint between the neck and the body is not tight enough, so you end up doing Adrian Belew style tremolo effects every time you shift your balance.

Still, you can’t take a piano with you into the woods and you can’t sing while playing a sax, so I got motivated again. This time the focus is on easy rock and folk songs. I’ve just been googling lyrics and chords and finding pretty much every song I think of. It’s actually pretty funny how the same ascii tab charts that were floating around newsgroups in the 80’s are still out there circulating. One not-so-easy song I decided to tackle this time around was “Suitcase Blues”, a great ballad by Rik Emmet of Triumph.

And so, today I bought myself a new guitar. I knew I wanted an acoustic-electric (acoustic with a built-in pickup) so I could practice without and amp but could plug it in if I ever want to use it for recording or gigging out. After looking online, figured I could probably get a decent on in the $300 ballpark. I went to the music store on my lunch hour and it was nice and quiet, so I took some time and auditioned about 6 guitars. In the end I picked a Yamaha APX-500. It has really good sound and action, and a bunch of details that I like. The body has a nice shape and is thinner than other makes, so it’s more comfortable to hold, but still has a nice full sound. The neck is thinner and flatter than a lot of acoustics, but not as much as your typical electric. The jack is in a convenient place. It has a built-in tuner and 3-band equalizer and a slider labeled “AMF” that I’m not sure what it does. Its scale runs from 80 to 10K, so maybe it sweeps the resonant frequency for the middle band of the EQ. Finally, it has a really nice tobacco sunburst finish which is just gorgeous.

So now I’m totally psyched to learn a bunch of new songs. Too bad it’s too nice to take camping.

Here’s a picture of the guitar next to Michelle’s ukulele.

New Recording: Making Miles

Here’s a new recording of song called Making Miles, written by my brother Martin after coming home from a month of hiking on the Appalachian Trail. It’s not only one of the best songs he’s ever written, but it ranks as one of my favorite songs of all time. The lyrics are melancholy yet hopeful, and the music is sweet and full of subtle little turns that make it rewarding to play and listen to. I started playing it on piano when I got back from my trip upstate a couple weeks ago, after not thinking about it for years. Martin taught it to me way back in the day, and it just sort of came flowing out spontaneously.

I decided to record it for my album for a few reasons. One is that it’s such a great song. Another is that the arrangement is basically just piano and voice, and I was able to record and mix it very quickly. This is important because I’m trying to get my album completed this fall in order to make more time for origami. I have seven songs finished but need another two. I have more than enough songs that are half written, but I realized it’s a lot of work to go from having a basic concept for the lyrics and chords to working all the details of the structure and arrangement, and more and more I’ve been composing and arranging in the studio, with the results that it takes me a few months to do a single song. I had wanted a solo piano song for this record, and this one fit the bill nicely.

The parts went down fast and captured alot of the original spontaneity. The piano part is my own voicings, but an approximate adaptation of the way Martin plays it on guitar. I added a synth bass part following Martin’s suggestion (“Taurus pedals”). I multi-tracked the lead vocals to create a natural chorus effect, and in case I need to edit phrase here and there. I did a few takes of the vocals, and after each one listened back and tried again, getting more precise with each take. On the third attempt I was pretty happy with the result.

Foldinator 2 – First Build

Development of Foldinator2 is off to a good start. You can see the first prototype here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/foldinator2.html

Admittedly it doesn’t do much yet. So far it’s mostly framework and boilerplate MVC code. Not so glamorous, but important, like pouring the concrete for the foundation of the house. The data model class is defined and has a few important properties, including a reference to an object paper, which is currently just a square drawn to the screen, but will be the heart and soul of the application. The app presents a starting UI, and all the buttons are mapped thru events to commands. There may be more views and interface elements later, but this is enough to get going; anything new will fit into the established structure. Also I put a text output console, to make debugging easier going forward.

I have one more milestone to go before I get into actual folding in simulation. First implement the guts of Load button, read in an XML file and parse it, and assign the info and the steps to the (data) model. Next is to step thru the model using the shuttle controls. At first this will be text–only. The app will display the step number and the annotation for the current step. Once this is done, then it will be time to apply the fold specifications to the paper for each step.

Meanwhile, my brother Martin has begun work on an origami application of his own, and post a demo here:

http://www.victoryhearts.com/origamagiro/

His working title for it is “origamagiro”, a nice palindrome, but then he looked up the meaning of “giro” in Japanese here:

http://jisho.org/words?jap=giro&eng=&dict=edict

Well “giro” could mean battle, argument, controversy, guillotine…. or brothel. Martin sez: “Interesting contextual possibilities! Maybe we need to find a person actually fluent in Japanese to ask!”

Martin’s approach is in many ways complimentary to mine. He’s developing in Silverlight, so the possibility of us sharing code is slim to none, but that’s ok cuz we can share ideas at a conceptual level, which may ultimately be far more fruitful. Second, while I’m working my way in and building the groundwork, he’s diving right in and confronting the hard conceptual problems of graphics, modeling an animation head on. So while my first demo has a bunch of nice looking buttons, his has a virtual piece of paper that the user can manipulate.

Watch this space for future developments.