Author: Zingblog 2

Casiotone Nation, Part 1

A few things before I get to the main point of this post, which is about shopping for a new synthesizer. First, thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic response to the publication of my first origami book, Zing Origami, on kindle, android and iOS formats.

Next, just to bring you up to date in the life-and-times department, I’ve been pretty focused on work the last month, and we just had a big demo/review session Friday. In some sense, however it’s a losing game. The better the code I write, the smaller and weirder the bugs that rise up to bother me on the one hand, and the larger and deeper the strategic problems I have to beat my head against on the other. Ah well I guess that’s what I’m there for, and I should be grateful things are on an even keel. Next week starts summer Fridays!

Thursday nite was a carnival at the kid’s new school where they’ll be going in September. It was really nice, with high class midway carnival rides (the kind that roll in on a tractor trailer), games, food, etc. It goes on for four days, and is apparently the major fundraiser for the school, and the local police and fire department get involoved and everything. The first night was largely for families of the school, so they sent out an invite to families of new students. The kids had a great time and we met a bunch of new patents and students. So it was a very positive scene. The kids are gonna be in for a shock come September when the find out they gotta do math homework just like any other school. Speaking of which, Lizzy placed out of her math final, which was the following day, on account of her having an “A” average.

Today was a street fair in our neighborhood that included a classic car show. Lots of 60’s and 70’s muscle cars, and a few souped-up 80’s cars, and a few from the 50’s and before. The was a ’71 Boss Mustang, a giant 60’s Lincoln Continental and a Model A Ford, but I think my favorite was a white 1960 Jaguar V-12.

Yesterday we spent the whole day on yardwork, the big trimming and weeding session. We seem to need to do this about 3x/summer and this was the first. It was also big trimming day for the neighbor’s landscaper, and he saved me a bunch of time and effort by doing all the hedges on the border of our property. This is a job he’s technically supposed to do, but usually skips if he thinks he can get away with it, but since I was out today and talked to him about it, he was very friendly and helpful.

Since my new book is out, I need to add a new page to my website to promote it. I went to go ahead and start making it, only to discover that the web server on my computer wasn’t working (macs these days run an Apache server). After some spelunking, Jeannie and I determined that there was a problem with Apache, namely that the directory for the log files didn’t exist. We figured this was a side effect of my recent hard drive upgrade. The next problem was that when we went to create the log directory in the Unix shell the command failed (silently). After some more spelunking, we determined that the problem was sudo didn’t work becuase my system password was blank. So once I changed my password to something with more than zero characters I was able to crate the directory and Apache started working again. Then we had to get my PHP going again, and next is my MySQL instance. Yeesh. Stupid computers.

Two New Songs: Rocket to the Moon and Sea of Tranquility

http://zingman.com/music/mp3/buzzyThird/RocketToTheMoon35.mp3
http://zingman.com/music/mp3/buzzyThird/SeaOfTranquility20.mp3

Here’s the rough mixes of two new songs: Rocket to the Moon and Sea of Tranquility. I’ll bet you thought I forgot all about Rocket to the Moon, after posting the lyrics a while back. Well what happened is it took me a while to finish it, and while I was deciding what to do I went ahead and made a second song. I find that it’s sometimes better to work on songs in pairs.

Rocket to the Moon is a straight-up, upbeat, uptempo, rockin’ number. The arrangement features electric guitars (a first for me) and now a horn section consisting of a bari sax and two tenors. The original concept was to go for something reminiscent of classic Chicago, but once I got into it the sound morphed into something like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones or They Might Be Giants. Anyway here it is and I think it sound really good.

Sea of Tranquility is sort of companion piece, a b-side if you will. (Do they even have those anymore?) And, apart from being just about the same length, a bit over three minutes, it’s a study in contrast. It’s an instrumental, soothing and hypnotic, based on a minimalist piano ostinato that begins in 5/4 time but dances around different meters throughout the piece. Meanwhile the orchestration builds slowly but insistently, as in a bolero. The first half is just piano and percussion, then the second time thru the instruments enter one by one to create a layered effect. In addition to piano, guitar, and some synthesizers, I used a saxophone quartet, with each voice double-tracked for a full ensemble sound. To top it off, Lizzy appears a guest artist playing the flute.

These songs are pretty much complete. All that remains is put some EQ and compression on the tracks and do the final mastering. I’m planning on releasing these songs on iTunes as singles for digital download, rather than wait for an album’s worth of songs to be completed. This means I have to figure out what software or technology I want to use for mastering. I think for a first pass I may just run my stereo mixes back into protocols and see what I can do with them in there.

Spring Break

Another mainly rainy week. We’ve been on spring break, such as it is. Took a few days off of work because the kids were off school. Manly catching up on our rest and doing odd jobs. Last Wednesday I worked at home and the kids did art all day. Thursday the rain stopped and I got a bunch of yardwork done. Turned over the garden, laid down cedar mulch under the hedges. Pretty much done with the spring cycle.

We finally retired El Jeppo last week and replaced it with a shiny Pilot in a very attractive shade of blue. Yes, our quest is at an end and good riddance to the whole ordeal. On the way back from negotiating the deal I was say to Jeannie it would have been nice to get a better trade-in price. But then back windshield wiper stopped working and I remembered why I needed to get rid of the old bucket o’ blots, and considered it was probably a fair deal. We named the new car Hoban after the famous starship pilot Hoban Washburne.

Last Friday I took the kids into the city for a visit to the Guggenheim museum. It’s been years since I’d been there, before I moved to California. Lizzy has been getting into abstract and impressionistic art. This was the perfect exhibit for her. It was all about the birth of Modernism, 1910-1918, plus a side exhibit on the Bauhaus. Lots a Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky and others all in one place. Modern art’s greatest hits. It’s been a while since I checked in with this stuff and it struck me how deeply the language of modernism has come to permeate every day pop culture, media and industrial design, to the point where it’s almost invisible. It’s always interesting to image a time an place where ideas we now just accept were new and radical and challenging. Plus the gallery itself is a most excellent space, with it’s snail-shell spiral main hall.

Jeannie has been making Lego robots to solve a Rubik’s cube. More on that later.

Origami Site Update

I updated my origami site with some of the pictures I took for my book. Also update the blurbs for a bunch of models.

http://zingman.com/origami/
http://zingman.com/origami/adk_ori.php
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#loon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_animals.php#octopi
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#balloon
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#canoe
http://zingman.com/origami/ori_things.php#adk_chair

Origami Book Pictures

Another thing I did over the weekend was to take some pictures for my forthcoming origami ebook. I folded new versions of three 3 models. The Canoe and Adirondack Chair are of 8″ squares on Wyndstone still had leftover from other projects. The Octopus is from an 8.5″ square of elephant poo paper (really!) that I got at an auction a few OUSA conventions ago. It’s really soft and textural and great for that model.

I also did a layout for the cover, at various resolutions and levels of cropping. This image really pushes the limits of my camera, which is just a digital point-n-shoot with a macro mode, but has no interchangeable lenses or control over the f-stop and all that. With a better camera I could probably get a sharper picture, but this will do since it only has to display the size of an iPad screen.

Change O’ Season

We went on a great little ski trip over the weekend, up to Catamount Mountain in the Berkshires with our friend Seth. We had so much rain last week I almost didn’t go, but Seth talked me into it. It turned out the weather was just fine for some great spring skiing. After our last few trips, with big crowds, bitter cold, and long runs down big mountains, this was just the opposite. The temperature got up into the 40’s but there was still plenty of snow, and it wasn’t slushy or (obviously) icy, really good conditions for this time of year. Catamount is a great little mountain, with lots of intermediate level runs, and a few steep ones, and a snow park with a half pipe and contoured terrain. Great way to cap off the season.

The next day we went hiking at nearby Bash-Bish falls, officially starting hiking season. The falls was just roaring with runoff from the recent rains and melting snow. So in one weekend we go from skiing season to hiking season. Really looking forward to spring now.

New Song: Rocket To The Moon

My new song, Rocket to the Moon, is coming along. It’s a short (under 3 minutes) and fast, sort of fake-punk song and it’s the first song I wrote on guitar. At one point I had hoped to submit it to NASA’s space shuttle song contest, but It’s been a long time coming, between being busy with other projects and getting up to speed with my new studio setup.

The song has a really cool bass part, much too active and melodic to be real punk. At first I was playing just straight 16th notes on the root, but that got kinda boring, So I asked myself, what would John Paul Jones do? I ended up using a combination of thumb, fingers and two-hand tap just to get the lines out. Sounds killer but hard to play a such a fast tempo.

I laid down the lead vocal and an electric guitar part on my last session. Need to figure out what kind of effects to put on the vocals, and if I want any backing tracks.

For the electric guitar I had been using a little stomp box amp simulator that my brother gave me, but the thing bit the ghost and now I have no FX. I tracked the gtr using a combo of direct inject and miking the amp, which provided a bit of reverb and overdrive and fullness, and layers nicely with the acoustic gtr and is not too bad as-is. Martin has offered to lend me some more of his unused FX to experiment with, which is both kind and cool, but I don’t want to go back and retrack this gtr part if I don’t have to, so meanwhile I think I’ll explore the gtr fx in proTools.

So the song is on it’s way, but I still need to figure out how to fill out the arrangement. There’s some question as to the structure. There’s a middle eight that’s not doing much that needs some kind of solo or something. Maybe a bass solo? And then there’s a jam out on the ending, that also needs something. Martin suggested a kind of Tom Jones-esque horn section, while Neumann proposed a Morphine style sax riff. Both seem to agree it’s something over in saxophoneland, so I think I’ll give that a go. John also mentioned a half-time section. This is intriguing, but I like the short, fast, high-energy thing the song has going, and wonder if this might take it into a whole nuther direction. This is the kind of thing that’s almost easy if you have real band. You can just try out a few ideas in rehearsal. But in the studio it can be rather painstaking to lay down the tracks, listen back, decide and iterate. I had originally hoped this would be a quick song to record, but there’s alot of experimentation.

…

Rocket To The Moon
By John Szinger

Some days – I feel so far away
I move – so fast
To be with you at last

Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon

Tonight – I’ll make it home alright
To be – with you
You know what we can do

Yeah we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you soon

Some days – I feel so far away
Tonight – I’ll make it home alright

And we’ll rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you soon
Rocket to the moon
I’m coming for you, for you, for you soon

Like a Lion Fighting an Angry Ram in a Wet Cardboard Box

Feeling the first hints of early spring. The weather has been more mild lately. Traded snow any bitter cold for rain and heavy winds. Cold comfort for change.

Work has been busy; big deadline looming at the end of March. Jeannie has been having dental work the last few weeks and has a few weeks more to go. We’ve begun researching cars. Lizzy got accepted into honor band for middle school, which starts this week.

We’ve been painting again. This time it’s the baseboards, door frames and trim. We’ve done two sessions two weekends in a row. The downstairs is done, and the stairway (huge amount of work) and the kitchen and living room. Still to go are the hall, bedrooms and bathrooms, plus some window frames and doors. Most of time is laying down tape. Hope to be done all this by the end of March so we can concentrate on outdoor stuff when spring come in April.

Snow Crash

Last weekend we went on a family ski trip up to Vermont with Nick and some friends of his. It was mostly great. The skiing itself was awesome. The snow and the mountain were perfect and we all had a great time with the skiing. Michelle is really coming along, and Lizzy is doing good too. We stayed in a condo right on the mountain with Nick and his family, and that was a good time. Watched The Empire Strikes Back, Jeannie’s favorite movie of all time. On the other hand it was really cold the whole time, especially sitting on the lift as it approached the summit.

The big downer is we got into a bit of a road accident on the trip up. We got caught in a pileup on an off ramp. Luckily no one was hurt, but once we were done feeling relieved over that, the hassle factor set in. We had to wait an hour and half for the police to show up and get everyone’s statements. So we got up there pretty late on Friday. And we’ve been dealing with insurance and paperwork ever since. At first I thought the Jeep had only minimal damage; I just lost my license plate and maybe the fan was a bit noisy. The car in the middle, a Mini, seemed to fare the worst, with both bumpers (the flimsy plastic kind) cracked. The car in front, the cause of al of it, was another SUV and looked to be totally intact.

Close inspection later revealed a piece of framing behind my bumper was bowed. It did its job and bore the brunt of the impact. There’s other assorted minor damage, probably mostly not worth fixing on account of the car being so old. It’s safe and drives okay. I’ll take it to my local mechanic and get his opinion on the minimum necessary repairs, put the license plate back on myself and be done with it.

I guess I’ll start looking to replace the car this spring. I had hoped to keep it another year or so, since we just got a new car for Jeannie. It’s certainly good enough to get to the train station and back for a while, but longer term it’s transitioning to the beater category. Luckily time is on my side and I can research cars and wait for sales. Too bad cash for clunkers in no longer in effect!

Did I mention that the skiing part of the trip was really great? An since we’ve been back in town, it’s gotten really warm, like spring and almost half the snow from January has melted. On the way home from Vermont we saw another car crash at the exact same spot. I’m sure the police keep statistics as to how many accidents occur at the ramp. It’s be interesting to know.