Author: zingblog

Hello Spring

Well, spring is here. In fact it’s April already. The nights are still cold but the days are getting mild. It’s been a few weeks since life has returned to normal WTR the work week, but I feel like I’m still catching up. Haven’t even had time to go shopping. Been trying to catch up on some random purchases. Been getting back into biking and rollerblading regularly again. We *did* manage to finish tiling and painting our bathroom (more on that in a previous post). Also last weekend we started getting the yard going for spring. Raked off the leaves and debris, and uncovered the fig tree, and started planning what we want to do this spring.

Been making progress on the new Mac. Every new thing is an adventure. After we discovered that Boot Camp won’t work if there are three partitions on the drive, we basically started over. We got a new external hard drive (which we were planning on anyway for backup) and put a 10.5 partition on it, and then put a 10.4 and a Win XP partition on the main boot drive. I went back and installed proTools on 10.4 and it worked, and so did the drivers for my MIDI interface, and so the whole MIDI rig. So far so good. Last week we installed VMWare, which involved calling up Microsoft to talk numbers with a phone robot. Tons of fun. My friend Blick, who is a Mac ProTools guru, came over to help me out last weekend with my music setup. Still after all that SampleTank still doesn’t appear in the list of plugins. So it looks like I’m gonna buy the new SampleTank upgrade for intel macs and see how that goes. At least I always have the option or running PT under windows now.

Been making progress on a new song. The song is gonna be it’s own post when it’s ready but for now I’ll say it’s a kinda prog-ish r&b number and I’m working out the horn arrangement. I realized as I was tracking it that I don’t really have funk chops on the bass, so I went for something I’ll call the funky rock approach that seems pretty good. Now I’m up to penciling the horn section.

And I did get a bit of a spring break, a few comp days. We took the kids up for a day of hanging out in the Catskills with my brother Martin and his fiancé Kathleen at this quaint Victorian era lodge. Sort of like camping but without sleeping out in the cold. The place had a Teddy Roosevelt kind of vibe; thematically consistent with the Museum of Natural History. It was built kinda like a castle into the side of cliff on a small lake. We went hiking and ice skating and swimming, and had a blast. Pictures to be posted sometime in the indeterminate future. The next day M & K came back to our place, and we hung out and played Wii and Settlers of Catan. Our friends Steve and Alice from Texas (yo!) also popped by for a visit.

I’ve also been making progress on diagramming my origami turtle (hope to be ready in another few days), but overall I feel like I need to devote some time to new origami designs, and haven’t yet had the opportunity. I have a bunch of ideas in my head I need to work out in paper.

Bathroom Tile Project — Victory!

Some time in the winter we managed to finish redoing our other bathroom, the one in the hall. We did the actual tiling in one marathon session back in February, and then grouting the following weekend, and then sealing and painting and installing new fixtures here and there after that. Along the way my old power drill died and I had to get a new one. Always something. We put the finishing touches on last Saturday, meeting our goal of completing the project by Easter. Or close enough anyway; we are declaring victory. All that remains is to get a new pair of handles on the cabinet door to go with the new towel bars.

You might think it looks just like the other bathroom, and indeed it’s meant to be stylistically consistent, but this one is blue and that on is green. Nice, huh? Well the photos don’t really do it justice, with the artificial lighting, but take my word for it, it’s nice. In any event, now that we’ve gotten good at tiling, it’s a job we may never have to do again.

Werk: MyNick NickPages

So what, you ask, is this fabulous project that has taken over the great part of my time and mind lo these long winter months? At last it can be revealed in all it’s great big grand fabulousness and fabulousity, as it went live a couple weeks ago and the kinks have pretty much been ironed out. It’s the new NickPages on MyNick. Kids can come and make their own customized, personalized home pages at nick.com and load them up with their favorite characters and widgets with things like buddies and favorite shows. At some point in the future I’ll write a post about the enormous learning curve that is the Flex API (a huge portion of the project was in developing frameworks, something the kids won’t ever see or grok), but for now suffice it to say we got there, and we’re gonna be adding a bunch more modules and features soon. A shout out to Moshe, Laura, Dhimiter, Dave, Alex and everyone else on the team. Here’s a sampling of same pages the first wave of kids have created. Check out some of these pages:

http://CHEETHALUV.nick.com
http://CEARA23.nick.com

And while you’re at it, why not go join the fun and make your own? http://www.nick.com/mynick/nickpages/

Ski

One of the few things I really love about winter is skiing, so I was really happy that we finally had a chance to go this year. Technically, we went skiing way back in December at a local hill near my parent’s house, but that barely counts cuz the main purpose of that trip was to introduce the girls to skiing, and mostly they took a lesson and I took a few slushy runs down a very short slope. I don’t think Jeannie ever even put her skis on. Still, it accomplished it’s primary goal, and Lizzy took to it, and Michelle liked the idea although did not do so well on the rope tow.

Then January and February flew by in a blur as I worked alot weekends and I had an injured foot anyway, so, like, whatever. Finally, with my project gone live and back to a normal schedule I was determined to have a real day skiing before winter’s end. Lizzy was thrilled, but Michelle decided she didn’t want to come, so we spilt the kids up, which turned out to be the perfect move. It’s something we rarely do, but they’re really at different levels, and Michelle had a great time with Nana and Poppy.

Of course the other wild card was the weather. The day before was pouring rain and stormy, to the point where my friend Nick had major flooding issues with his new basement, and my next door neighbor lost a chunk of his garage roof, and we had a rather heavy fallout of tree branches in our yard. But then it turned freezing overnight, so we went to bed hoping for the best. We got up way early, a problem made worse by the fact our government, in keeping with its recent trend of terrible policy making, decreed that this was the night we’d move our clocks ahead instead of a more sensible date in April. So off we went.

It turned out to be great day for skiing. The weather was in the upper 20’s and amazingly they had groomed large amounts of the mountain to decent conditions. The place we picked to go was Catamount, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts , about 100 miles from our house. They’re not a huge mountain, but big enough to be fun. Another nice thing about it is you can park close to the lodge. We started with Lizzy on the bunny hill, and discovered they had a conveyer belt instead of a tow rope. Michelle will be thrilled to hear about this. Lizzy took a lesson, and by the time she was done she’d been up the chair lift and down a real slope. Meanwhile Jeannie and I got in a bunch of good runs. One of the nice thing about Catamount is alot of the trails wind thru the trees, and my last run was very peaceful (and high-speed), as I was the only one on the trail. Perfect moment of ski Zen.

After lunch we spent our time with Lizzy and she was doing great zigzagging down the hill. She really wanted to make it the whole way down with out falling, and was well on her way, but toward the bottom she picked up some speed and the wind came up, and she almost lost her hat, and in saving her hat she lost her balance. I told her if that happened again just let the hat go; I was right behind and would grab it. Shaw’nuff next run the same happened, and she let her hat go, and made it to the bottom, quite triumphantly!

So that was it, now I’m ready for spring. As luck would have it, the weather is getting milder, and our government, going against its recent trend of deplorable policymaking, rolled back the clocks a month earlier than usual, so even though I’m getting up before it’s light out again, today I got to go out for a bike ride after work in the daylight.

Origami Sunday: Origami From Space

It’s that time of year again. Sunday I taught one of origami models at Special Folding Sessions at the American Museum of Natural History. The girls were all excited about it and spent a good part of Saturday making a bunch of origami as a warm up. I was crunched for prep time but was able to fold my chosen model from memory Friday night and print out some CP’s Saturday.

This year we did the whole thing pretty well as far as the timing goes. We were up late the night before grouting or newly tiled bathroom (more on that in another post) so we weren’t in a hurry to get to the Museum early. We did have time to hit some of the highlights, including the awesome dinosaur hall, the elephant hall, the whale room and the space center. The kids really dug it. Lizzy brought her camera and everything. Michelle says she wants to have her birthday there.

It occurred to me that the museum is also a meta-museum of sorts, a museum about the idea of what it is to be a museum. It was very state-of-the art 100 some odd years ago, with it’s halls of skeletons and taxidermy and broad marble staircases, all of an age preceding television and multimedia nature documentaries and elevators and even electricity. And an age of different values, too: it certainly would cause an outrage if someone were to go out and shoot all those animals nowadays. It remains the archetype for every other Science and Natural History museum I’ve ever been to (I still remember vividly my first trip to the Buffalo Museum of Science as a child), and yet the format, rather than being some quaint anachronism, is strangely enduring and compelling. I guess that’s what I means to be an institution.

It also occurs to me that as a home for the origami society is strangely fitting, in that exotic animals, modern and extinct are enduring subjects for origami, and in fact a great exercise would be to spend a day walking around the museum folding pretty much anything you see.

Which brings me to my class. The model I chose to teach was my UFO. This is part of my Origami From Space series, along with my Rocket Ship. The model is based on polar coordinates, and has a few tricks which have not seen anywhere else, including the method for creating the central dome. IMHO it is a very elegant model; the final form is just right to my eyes, and it is efficient in both it’s use of paper and the folding sequence. I consistently get compliments on it. However, it turns out to be very difficult to fold because so much of it is in 3-D and you have to be able to visualize it in 3-D even in the prefolding. This is the second time I’ve taught my UFO, and folders of a certain level seem to get it , and arriving at the finished model seems rewarding. So congratulations for seeing thru to the end, and nice work!

South Side of the Sky

Good news: my project for work is going live this week, which means no more working nights and weeks to meet the deadline. I worked basically continually from Thursday morning thru last night. At least it’s a good time of year to be sitting inside in front of the computer. I feel like I’ve made it through the worst of the winter, and the days are getting longer. On the other hand, I’ve been not devoting as much time to music and origami as would have liked this winter, not to mention playing Super Mario Galaxy, and need to make that up. Oh yeah and finishing tiling my 2nd bathroom.

At least I got out on my bike a few times when there was a break in the weather. I find I can tolerate 40 degrees or higher pretty comfortably. And I got my bike fixed up just recently. I originally bought my bike when I moved to California, and Jeannie and I were sharing a car, and my commute was shorter, so I did it on bike. I bought it at Palo Alto Bicycles, which at the time had a little neon sign that said “Google” in the window in the floor above the bike shop, the home of a tiny internet startup. Jeannie and I had a conversation something like this:

I though it was spelled Googol. I wonder what they do.”

“I think they do search or something like that.”

“Sounds interesting, I wonder if I should apply for a job there.”

“Nah, most startups tank. And Alta Vista already owns search.   I’m sure they’ll be gone in a year.   Stick with the job you’re at.”

It was a basic but well made mountain bike (a Trek if you’re curious), that has held up well over the years. No shock on the front, cuz in those days it was a pretty high-end feature. Palo Alto has lots of bike paths and I used to pass over a cute little bridge and by a kind-of farm with donkeys, so it was very pleasant.

So I switched to biking in the evenings after work when it got too dark to skate, and kept it up into November, and here and there in December, January and February. But then I got a flat tire, and not only my tubes but my tires were shot, so into the shop it went. This time it was Pelham Bicycles, with no internet startup on the floor above. They put on new tires, trued the wheels and replaced the brakes and cables. Now it rides as good as new. Of course as soon as I got it back from the shop, I rode it once and it was back to the cold and snow again that very evening. Ah well spring is getting closer. I’m looking forward to taking a few days off to catch up on things, and hopefully getting a day of skiing in before it’s too late, and get a bit of a spring break.

Special Guest Blogger: Lizzy

Today we have a guest contributor to this blog, my daughter Lizzy. She’s been getting into taking pictures and wrote about a few of them. Here you go:

“This is my play-dough heart. On Valentine’s Day Michelle brought pink play-dough from school. I made a heart out of it. Plus we got a lode of candy. Also I saved my brownie.”

“We didn’t have the week off but we had Monday off. But we had a snow day on Friday. On Friday we built a snowman, had a snowball fight and played with our friends on our block. And we also played ice princesses.”

Jammin’

Last Saturday night I had the opportunity to hang out and jam with my friend Erik. It was a good time. I miss playing with other musicians; it’s something I should do more often. I was always playing in one or more bands from 10th grade until Lizzy was born. Hopefully soon the kids will be old enough that I can think about putting together a group or regular jam session again. Meanwhile I practice regularly to keep up my skillz, and I have my recording project and the occasional jam like this to get by on.

Anyway, I mainly played piano and sax while Erik played guitar and piano, and even some drums, and we both sang. We jammed and jammed until we were too tired to play anymore, and then we watched Concert For George to top it off. Here’s a partial list of songs we covered:

Let It Rain (Clapton)
Fire On the Mountain (Grateful Dead)
(some Little Feet song)
Hey Nineteen (Steely and the Dans)
Black Cow (Steely and the Dans)
Home at Last Steely and the Dans)
Oh! Darling (Beatles)
For No One (Beatles)
The Long and Winding Road (Beatles)
Naima (John Coltrane)
Mr. P. C. (John Coltrane)
(drums and sax jam)
Because (Beatles)
You Never Give Me Your Money (Beatles)
I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
Whiter Shade of Pale (Procal Harem)

Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More (Allman Brothers Band)
What Is and Should Never Be (Led and the Zeppelins)
The Rain Song (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Of My Love (Led and the Zeppelins)
All Along the Watchtower (Dylan)
Too Many People (Paul McCartney)
Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
I’m Only Sleeping (Beatles)
Beast of Burden (Rolling Stones)
(some U2 song)
Can’t Find My Way Home (Blind Faith)
Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Traffic)
Lady Madonna (Beatles)
Waiting Room (Blick original)
Let It Shine (Blick original)

Sour Apple Blues

So around Christmastime I got a new computer, a shiny iMac. I think I’ve mentioned that I haven’t had a new Mac in over 10 years, since back in the says of System 7. But I was seduced by the image of hipsters on white backgrounds poking fun at hapless corporate types, and repulsed by the prospect of running Vista, so there you go. The plan was to make the Mac the new center of my home recording studio. I’ll bet you’re wondering how that’s been going, moving into the new machine and all. Well, let me tell you.

First of all, I’ve been really busy lately, working 60+ hour weeks for a product launch at work, plus a couple trips. So it’s been taking a while. I didn’t really have time to do much over the Holidays other than plug the computer in and tour some of the built-in apps. I don’t even have email on it yet! And then I was in the middle of a song (The Nine) which I wanted to finish before I switched my rig.

But a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to it. I successfully downloaded, authorized and installed PT 7.1 on the Mac. I use an MBox for audio I/O, and the ProTools upgrade was free, and worked just great, and the DigiDesign website was about as painless as you can expect that sort of thing to be. To give it a test drive, I recorded 2-track demo of She Came in Thru the Bathroom Window. Voice and piano, recorded live, which was kinda cool cuz I’d never tried singing and playing at once before; I usually overdub the vocal. I had the Rhodes in one input and the mic in the other, and it worked fine. With the wireless Mac keyboard I can start and stop the music sitting at the piano. Only problem is I have to turn around to see the screen, but for pressing play it’s great.

Now the current version of PT is 7.4, and I have no idea what’s new in last .3 revs. I’m told there’s a lot better MIDI support for things like time stretching. I wonder to what extent I can move files back and forth between my 2 machines now. Also, PT is officially not supported for OS 10.5, but it seems to work just fine.

Next I installed SampleTank, but PT couldn’t see it. I thought maybe it’s because I haven’t loaded any samples yet, or maybe I need to authorize it, I dunno. So then the project veered off to cruising IK Multimedia’s website and getting in touch with their tech support. After a couple weeks of back’n’forth, I learned that my version of SampleTank (LE 2.08) doesn’t work for Intel Macs, although it’s not clear what the issue is. IK want me to pay $300 to upgrade to a new version of SampleTank, and it’s not also clear how compatible it would be — how much work it’d be to import my old songs with the same patches and everything. So getting to the bottom of that and deciding if I want to do the upgrade is a whole research project.

I figured before I went too much further I’d see how the Mac likes my MIDI interface. It’s a MOTU MIDI Express XT, and MOTU’s web site says it’s plug and play for the Mac, and shawnuff I can see it in the list of USB devices. But when I bang on the keys of my synth, PT doesn’t get the events. So now the question is what software do I need to get ProTools to talk to my external MIDI interface? I’m pretty sure there’s no OMS anymore.

I found drivers for the XT for Mac OS on the MOTU web site, so that seem like a good place to start. Then I discovered the Audio and MIDI settings panel in the Mac OS. Unfortunately when I open the midi panel, it said it couldn’t load due to an error. It suggested I uninstall any recent drivers and try again. I did this but got the same error. Debugging this will be a whole nuther research project.

So in light of this I’m now thinking of installing Parallels or VMWare and running my whole music rig in XP, since I know everything works with that and I have all the software, drivers and everything. This kinda make the whole new Mac thing seem like a waste and failure, but I guess I can still cross over in time, once I get the MacOS issues worked out. Still it’s gotten to the point where it’s holding me back from working on new songs, so I just want to get back to making music. So for tonight I’m going back to my old laptop, and maybe I’ll be in XP via BootCamp on my Mac next weekend. At least I’ll be able to look at 24 tracks of faders on the widescreen display.