Author: Zingblog 2

Higher and Higher

The LEFT HOOK gig at Burke’s Saturday night was a pretty darn good time. It’s larger and nicer venue than we’ve been playing, and we had a good turnout, with a whole a bunch of people coming to help our drummer Gus celebrate his birthday, and a few of my friends, including Nick, who came all the way from Long Island and took a bunch of pictures of the band, which I’ll post sometime soon. Woo-hoo and thanks alot!

Gus is back to playing his regular drums, which helps the sound alot. Also, last week I finally got my Mark VII sax in for a final adjustment. It took Virgil only a few minutes of fiddling with the various bits of cork around the keys of the upper stack. Now it’s playing totally great. It literally has never sounded better! I have all the tone and growl that I really love, plus a great clarity in the low end, even playing very softly. So now I have two world-class tenor saxes in great working order, the beauty and the beast. I’ve been enjoying hanging out with Virgil, he’s got lots of stories and lots of knowledge on musical instruments. It almost makes me sad my horn is all fixed up now.

We added a bunch of new songs for this show, including The Letter by Joe Cocker, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, Beginnings by Chicago, and Cheap Sunglasses by ZZ Top. All went over really well. I think Beginnings in particular, which we used to end out first set, was a winner. We worked on that on for a while and made our own arrangement. I’m emulating a whole horn section on sax, and Mike and Gary are covering the vocal harmonies between them. We even have a percussion break toward the end.

The surprise hit was Cheap Sunglasses. This one was a bit of a late addition, after we’d tried out and discarded a bunch of other new songs for various reasons (vocals were to high, the groove too mellow, that kind of thing). We only rehearsed it twice. It’s a bit heavier than most of our material, but basically a boogie blues, and right in Gary’s zone on guitar. Ken and Gus and got a tight groove going on on the bass and drums. I sing lead on it, and it’s right in my zone vocally too, and I do an Abacab-like solo on the organ over the coda. Big crowd pleaser.

Since we’ve been working so much on new material, we only had a chance to run thru the whole set list once before the show. Overall it was still quite good, but there was the occasional tempo problem (mostly starting too fast) or missed or sloppy transition from one part to the next. Still, we know the songs well, and they’re great songs, and the energy and sound was always there. The vocals keep getting better and better too. I guess you can say the better we get the higher our standards get.

As usual, the second set was the tightest, had the best energy and the biggest crowd. There were a few time where Ken and Gus were really right together in the groove and it felt fantastic. One was Dance to the Music, which we really bombed in rehearsal. For the third set I used to joke that we should just do two or three long jam numbers like Dazed and Confused or Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. But now we finally have enough songs to have a full third set, and not just of the leftovers, but songs we know well. We even ended up doing a couple extra encores, including Foxy Lady, which someone shouted out as a request. Gary launched into it and Ken and Gus joined in, and sang. I think I remembered most of the lyrics. Good fun. And we even got paid more then we’ve been so far.

New Recording: Soul On Fire

We’re more than halfway thru January and winter has finally arrived in earnest. We got out first snowfall last night, and the start of a spell of sustained below-freezing temperatures. I’m weathering it alright. It helps that I’m working form home these days; don’t have to wait out on the train platform in the early morning. With the new Star Wars movie out Michelle asked that we watch episodes I – III, so we did over the weekend. I must say, they’re much better than I remember them, except episode I, which is even worse! I’d forgotten the bit where Jar Jar gets his tongue electrocuted and develops a speech impediment. Yeesh! Still, it’s frustrating because they could have been such really great movies if George had put a more effort into the characters and the dialogue and less into over-the-top CG action set pieces. Ah well it’s over now.

I’ve been able to get around to a few random tasks. I don’t have as much time for recording now since I’m mostly focusing on live bands, but I finally finished tracking the long-awaited Soul On Fire. I had laid down a sax part earlier but wasn’t quite satisfied with it. The new track is also the debut of my new Reference 54 tenor. It sounds quite good. I usually do a few takes and edit them together create the best total performance, but in this case I just used one take as-is with no alterations.

While I was at it I circled back and added a few synth parts to To Be a Rock. Martin had listened to my last mix and though it was missing something, and suggested I think in terms of David Gilmore. Well I didn’t add a guitar track, but I think I have something of that kind of feeling.

Mo’ Better Responsive

I’ve pretty much completed a first pass at making all the pages on my web site mobile-first responsive. Along the way I made a hit-list of items that were too much trouble for the first pass, so now I’m circling back to them. They mostly fall into one of a few categories. First is tweaking the existing styles and fleshing out new ones so the page layouts look good under all resizing and formats. Things like font size, padding and spacing. There’s also a few pages with unusual formats that still have to get converted. Some of this gets pretty subtle and I didn’t want to let it slow me down, but it’ll be worth it. Second is adding new content to the existing sections, and I’ve been doing this on an ongoing basis. It’s getting easier now, as the templates are all largely complete. You’ll notice an expanded roster in the music section, for example. Third will be some all-new presentation formats for the audio and visual elements of the site, but that’s still a little ways off. So for now, go click around and see what you can see.

Caroling Caroling Near and Far

It was a busy weekend. Friday nite we continued on our quest to watch all the Lord of the Rings movies, which we began around Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years, so they’re fresh again. Up to the middle of The Two Towers now. Jazz on Saturday had been moved to an earlier time slot, but is sounding better than ever after a few weeks off and a rusty start. We want to record our next practice to try and get some gigs. I’m gonna have to really learn how to play Giant Steps now. Yikes!

On Saturday nite we got our Xmas tree and all of the decorations up. This was complicated by the fact that our old tree stand was kaput, and after an hour of trying we had to face the fact it would not hold up the tree no matter what we did. So we had to run out and get another tree stand Saturday night, and even then it was hard to get the tree up straight. But we muddled through somehow. Sunday evening Jeannie and Michelle put up a lego train around it. Choo-choo!

Sunday morning I was in the city, teaching an origami session at the Museum of Natural History. It was more airplanes and spaceships, pretty much the same stuff I taught at MIT a few weeks ago. But in the meanwhile I diagrammed two more models: my Astronaut and my Space Probe. Both came in right around 25 steps.

This session was also webcast. It was my first time doing that and it went well. They provided a camera on a stand pointing down at the table, coupled to a computer running a group video chat so I could easily teach both the people in the room and the ones on the internet at the same time.

The level of folders, at least the local ones, was not at the MIT level. They were low intermediate at best, and some didn’t know alot of the basics. So a few of my models were actually pretty challenging for them. Still, we got thru four: the Astronaut, Rocketship III, UFO II and Space Pod, and all the students did well. It was a good learning experience as an author and teacher. I was wondering if these models might be too hard for a book targeted at non-expert folders. My conclusion is that some may be tough for a raw beginner, but with just a little experience most folders should not alot of fun and have much trouble.

Michelle came with me and took a class. She never misses a chance to do an origami event these days. She folded a really cool mouse, and then made about a dozen of them in rainbow colors. People are telling me now what a good folder she’s become.

This evening Lizzy and Michelle sang at a Lessons and Carols service at the church in Bronxville. It was a large group, anchored by the church choir Lizzy recently joined, and augmented by the children’s chorus from YAA, a really good organist on a great pipe organ, and a brass and timpani ensemble. Apparently today before the show was the only time all three sub-groups rehearsed together.

This is the first time I heard the choir, and I must say there are excellent, truly at a professional level. Lizzy is one of four first sopranos, and the youngest person in the choir. There are two other girls from her youth group but most are adults. They were doing very advanced and complex arrangements with all kinds of counterpoint and harmonies, lots of suspended and other non-triadic intervals, call-and-response things, interleaving voices, and they pulled it all off beautifully. Covered alot of emotional territory too, from haunting to joyous. I only know about three of the songs, but it was the best thing I’ve heard in a while. Also today I learn that unlike the Catholics, the Episcopalians still dress nicely to go to church.

The Devil You Know

Not too long ago I took a job with an ad agency as a consulting software developer. This was not the first time I worked in advertising. Many years ago, I co-founded Radical Media’s interactive division back in the 1990’s. (Technically they were a media production company, but alot of their clients were ad agencies, including the one I took a job with, and there’s alot of overlap) and I did all sorts of fun and exciting and groundbreaking stuff there. Since then I’ve done freelance ad jobs here and there. It’s actually surprising how little the ad business has changed in twenty years, the corporate culture and all. Stuff that was innovative back then is just business as usual now.

Being a temp position, so there’s no telling how long it’d last. In orientation they gave us alot of feel-good propaganda about how great advertising is, a lovely coffee table book and all, and really who would expect anything less. Good that they really cares about visual design, and to be able to use my design skills, and nice that they’re small enough so you can talk to people on your own floor if there’s some kind of tech problem. The place was totally chaotic however, in a sort of sleepy, hurry-up-and-wait kinda way. I spent three days waiting around for a computer, using various loaners. The computer they finally gave me was messed up, so I spent two more days trying to get it working before giving up and getting another one.

When I got on a project, they threw two other new hires onto the same piece of work. It was not deep but it was wide, and they really wanted to get it done fast as possible. Must’ve been money at stake with the client, so from their perspective this was a sensible way to do it.

The entirety of the work was tweaking CSS to make the site match the comps. Problem was the CSS, which was supposed to be hierarchical in an OO sense, was really a tangled mess. On top of that, there were hundreds and hundreds of auto-generated files that were not under .gitignore, so every time you checked in code there was a shitstorm of conflicts to wade thru. So with six people working in parallel, we all kept overwriting each other’s changes. I never lost any of my work, but most of the others weren’t as careful. Fixing any of this was out of the question cuz it would’ve blown the deadline.

On the third day our git repo exploded and work ground to a halt. The devops guys restored by the next morning. Fun fun fun.

So we worked thru the weekend. By this time we were completely off the script, so I literally spent a whole day with creative director, with him going “move that 10 pixels down” and me making the change in the code, and then him going “hmm, no, move it 5 pixels up.” He seemed a little put off by me questioning why their process wasn’t better. Like I said, the industry hasn’t learned anything in twenty years.

Then Monday the deadline came. I spent another day doing some minor fixes, and that was that. We spent a couple days chilling waiting on a new project. I spent my time reading up on git to see if I could avoid another gitpocolypse in the future, and on responsive frameworks for CSS.

Then we got a new project, a web site for some investment bank portfolio services. Again very CSS-heavy, with some animated charts’n’graphs and things. They gave us access to the git repo, but told us not to start work just yet, as the account people were still working things out with the client. A couple days after that they the deal fell thru and at was that. Of course they thanked us profusely and sincerely hope they can work with us again. And so it goes.

OrigaMIT and AMNH Holiday Tree, Part III

So the day after I got home from my trip I spent a day volunteering helping put up the annual Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, since I was dropping by to give them my models anyway. It was a great experience. I’ve been contributing models to the tree for years know and have gotten to know the people who run it. Last year Talo took over as director, and he likes my work.

This year he asked me to make a pod of Elephant Seals in a variety of poses to be featured in one of the hero displays at the base of the tree. I folded them a few weeks ago, going as far as I could before they became 3-D, and finished them after I got back from OrigaMIT. I figured they’d need to be wetfolded, but once I was done the sculpting they were just fine, and held their shape. The two largest ones were about two feet long, so it was it was a bit cumbersome packing them up for transport.

There’s no convenient way to get to the museum from Metro North, so I ended up getting off the train in Harlem and walking thru Central Park (one of my many recent walks to random places in the city; more on that later). This was longer than I expected, but it was a great day for a walk. Once there, I found a whole cache of models I’d folded in years past, which was a fun surprise. So were among my best stuff, while others show how far I’ve come as a folder. There was one old Elephant Seal in particular – I’d designed it just fro them – that I totally reworked to be more like the newer ones.

I also got to see more of the secret part of the museum than ever before. If you know where you can just open semi-hidden doors and go right in. The OUSA office is in basement, and I’ve been there plenty of times, but the underground, working part of the museum just goes on and on like a catacombs, all 19th-centrury stone a ironwork. They’d set up a photography studio in some crypt in a sub-basement. I’m glad I had a guide or I’d have never found my way back. There’s even a cafeteria for museum employees and volunteers, that serves the same food as the public cafeteria, but at 1/3 the price. They told me I could go there whenever I’m in the museum if I want.

Since they’re volunteers they don’t work that fast, and so I had some time in the afternoon to go up an take a tour of the hall of dinosaurs and some of the other exhibits. I came up the stairs instead of the elevator, and finally found out how to do the dinosaurs coming in at the beginning instead of the middle. The only disappointment is that the Whale Room was closed for some corporate event. Ah well I’ll be back there in December to teach.

It was a day of much walking and heavy lifting, so I took the train from the museum back to Grand Central. I was able to take a single train right from the museum to 42nd street and 6th avenue, which is pretty close.

It Keeps Changin’ Fast and It Don’t Last for Long

It’s been a extremely busy time for me the last few weeks, and today is literally the first time I’ve had a chance to rest in a month or so. So now there’s lots to catch up on.

First of all, earlier this month Lizzy celebrated her sweet sixteen. She’d been planning the party for months, making lists of everything. There was food and music with a sound system and custom playlists and dancing and fancy dresses and shoes and a cake and a ceremony lighting up the sixteen candles with Lizzy appreciating the people in her life. Very touching. My parents and brother came into town, and Jeannie’s family was there too, and lots of friends. Nick had to work late, and Martin had a long drive home and had to leave early. So they just missed each other. Even so, thanks everyone who came and shared a special night with us.

Now Lizzy’s gliding into the grownup world without skipping a beat. She’s getting her first bank account, her passport and her driving learner’s permit. She just got her first job, singing a choir at the church where she does her singing group. (My first job at sixteen was changing lightbulbs in a department store.) It’s not alot, but it’s not a heavy commitment either. She’s making at least as much singing as I am making playing bars with my rock band.

She also seems to be getting a bit more serious about learning the piano. But now hearing someone else playing it make me realize it needs a tune-up.

I’m putting together a photo gallery of the party, but may be a while before I can finish it. Meanwhile here’s one photo. And in completely other news, Michelle’s basketball team won their first game of the season today!

The Devil You Don’t Know

I recently had to turn down an offer for a bank job. It was tempting – it seemed like a very cool project, right in the sweet spot of my skillset, a combination of front-end and full-stack, of JavaScript, Java and API design, on the same scale as what I’d been doing in Platform Engineering, and a good opportunity to learn about the finance industry.

However, the pay wasn’t great, no better that I’m making now. But the real problem was it was thru a headhunter. All seemed okay until the bank decided they wanted me and the headhunter made me an offer. When it seemed like an offer was in the offing they actually asked “should I just accept whatever offer they make?” Seriously? Then he came to me with the offer and wanted me to say yes on the spot.

Naturally I had questions and concerns. It was a temp-to-hire position, so the main issues were around the move to the staff position. Jeannie was in a similar situation a year ago: they told her it’d be a six month contract-to-hire, but then they dragged it out for a year, and then when they offered her a staff position the salary was lower than what she’d been promised. I told all this to the headhunter (same agency btw), that what I really care about is the staff position, the temp position is just a speed bump, and I wanted to negotiate the terms of the staff position upfront. He’d mentioned a 3 to 6 month contract and a VP level staff position. Imagine that, me bank VP! And my kids’ friends all think I’m a hippie. But dude wouldn’t offer anything more solid than his “expectation”. When I pushed he wouldn’t budge, nor commit to anything firm. Dude insisted I give him answer by the next morning. The time came and went. Meanwhile I talked to the guys at the bank directly, and they were talking about up to 18 months as a contractor and an as-yet-undetermined staff title.

So I had to pass on that one. Headhunter dude was then like “well if you change your mind let me know.”

Plus the commute was kinda long anyway. Ah well.