Author: Zingblog 2

Again With the Turkeys

Let’s see … a few things. Yesterday was our big deadline at work, the release of v2.2 of out software. We almost made it, but our QA guy was hung up by our server going down all the time the last few days. Meanwhile the last bunch o’ weeks of working extra hours while trying to keep everything else going have caught up to me and I was kinda under the weather yesterday. I’ve been watching some Galactica to unwind a few nights over the last few weeks, TV as a sedative. Everyone says BSG is awesome, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, it’s very dark, gloomy and humorless. Not very entertaining in the sense of providing entertainment. Second, EJO is great as Adama, but the only character with any personality in the whole show is Starbuck. Everyone else is just in the situation, and pretty dark and gloomy and humorless about it. Third the pacing is very slow, like a soap opera. A lot of inconsequential stuff happens every episode, and some of it moves the Big Plot forward a degree or two. Lastly, the genius scientist and his imaginary Cylon girlfriend are just too much! Still the thing is strangely compelling, and I expect I’ll be making my way thru the series just to see what happens.

The big thing we accomplished around the house last week was to paint the ceilings downstairs. They kinda did a crappy job when they built the house and it always bothered me, but it sometimes takes a while to get around to things. It’s a big room that includes my studio and our family room and Jeannie’s office (the size of all 3 bedrooms plus the hall and bathrooms and part of the kitchen), and it was a big job. We started Friday night and did most of the rest Saturday night, and finished Sunday afternoon. It’s the only way to fit in a big job like that. And of course that’s probably part of the reason I’m so burnt out right now. Still, we’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and it’s much better than it was before. Cross another item off our hydra-headed todo list.

But you came here to read about turkeys, and by that I mean origami turkeys. In between everything else, I taught my Turkey at the Origami USA Special Sessions Saturday at the museum. I get a lot of great feedback on this model. I taught it last spring, but decided to it again this fall because of the tie-in with Thanksgiving. And I’m happy to say it went over quite well. It was a good group and they all did great at the model. Including one kid about Lizzy’s age. Wow.

I hadn’t folded the model in about a year couldn’t really remember how it went. It’s a pretty complex model (probably over 100 steps once I diagram it). As luck would have it, Friday at work our servers crapped out so I had some downtime and was able to fold a few attempts and get as far as the base. When I taught the class they were all advanced folders and got the idea of free-form sculpting the details from the base, so that wasn’t a problem. Still it’s good to work it out and take it to the next level. Absolutely necessary for diagramming for a book. Along the way I got some of the previously improvised parts a bit more formalized too, particularly in the tail, so I feel a lot better about this model then I did before. The only thing left to work out now is the head. Now if I can only find the right paper I can make an exhibit quality version.

I had some time a the end of my session so I taught my Walrus. (I usually bring whatever new models I have to these things to see what people think of them, and there were some requests to teach this one.) This is the kind of model I really like. It’s only 20 or 30 steps, but communicates so much, and not being so hard, a much wider range of people respond to it. This one will definitely get into my book. The slate is already pretty full for my first book and most of the diagrams are drawn, but I guess there’s the potential for a follow up. I only wish diagramming didn’t take so long. Recently people have been sending me email asking to make youtube videos teaching my models. I guess I should be grateful they ask, but I have to tell them no. Boy, why doesn’t some one volunteer to help diagram for my book? I guess that’s why we need diagramming software. And so the circle of futility is complete.

Here’s a crease pattern for the Turkey Base. Probably not enough detail to figure out how to fold the final model, but enough for the basic layout. Hint: it’s a modified bird base.

Music Update Part 1: Da Bass

You might wonder what I’ve been doing musically in the time between records. Rest assured, I’ve already started planning my next album, but there a few things I need to care of first. More on that soon.

Meanwhile, one thing I’ve been doing is woodshedding the bass. I want to improve the bass parts on my songs, which too often play a set pattern that follows the left hand of the piano rather than jam out and groove. I went thru a Geddy Lee phase a while ago, and learned the bass parts to a few Rush songs, including Xanadu. I even toyed with the idea of getting a Stienberger or Rickenbacker to get that punchy, toppy prog sound. (Although last tour I saw Rush, Geddy was playing a Fender Jazz.) But while I love writing in out meters and all that, I haven’t really been able to make his style of playing work with my songs, and have been looking for a less chopsy, more soulful direction.

My bass is a Fender P, and I’ve been reinvestigating my roots in the p-bass pantheon. I recently got a couple of books to study. One is R&B Bass masters, that has chapters on guys like James Jamerson, Chuck Rainey and Donald “Duck” Dunn, with a bio and a lesson. The lessons include drum parts that they suggest you lay into a sequencer, which have really specific annotations like “54% swing”. The other books is transcriptions to the bass parts from the first two Led Zeppelin albums. It all started one day a few weeks back when I picked out the bass part to Moby Dick, and thought it might be good to learn The Lemon Song. But I figured it’d be a lot easier just to read the parts than work them out by ear, so looked for the book and shaw’nuff someone had written it.

I remember as kid being captivated by John Paul Jones’s bass playing, and even with so much awesomeness going on in the rest of the music just listening to the bass over and over. Some of the he-man-woman-hater-club lyrics seem a little trite to me after all these years. The Lemon Song reminds me for all the world of the Chuck Jones Grinch Grinch cartoon. “You ain’t nothing but a no good two bit jive – with arsenic sauce!”

In any event, perhaps unique among hard rock and metal players, JPJ has a solid grounding in soul and R&B, and his riffs show it. (After 1970 or so it seemed all the English groups forgot how to use 7th chords. Maybe this was around the time Jimmy Page sold his soul to Lord Voldemort, who took back the 7th chord like the Ursula took Ariel’s voice, I dunno.) And it turns out the parts are not that hard. The electric bass is in fact just about the easiest instrument to play, provided you have big strong hands. It’s all about the groove and the musicality. There’s tons of great chromatic passing tone ideas and syncopation, almost straight out of bebop. Then laying into the heavy fourthsy stuff. Looking forward to getting it together to the point where I can cop some riffs.

Catching Up

I haven’t really had a chance to give a general update since the start of the school year back in early September. My deadline at work come and gone. The new rev of my product is in QA with the release slated for 11/15. It seems like I’m always in the middle of things.

It’s November now, halfway to winter break. Although the weather is starting to turn cold at night, it’s been really warm until a couple days ago. One day last week I walked up thru Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History to drop off my origami models for the holiday tree, and the temperature was in the 70’s. Now it’s in the 30’s in the mornings. Time to break out the hats and warm socks.

Jeannie and I got back to our house painting project. In the fall of 2008 into the winter we painted all three bedrooms, including the ceilings, plus touch-up in the living room, halls, kitchen and downstairs room. Last winter we didn’t do anything cuz I hurt my back. So this fall and winter we’re gonna finish the house. We did the ceilings in the upstairs hall, kitchen stairs and half the living room a couple weekends ago, and then the high part of the living room last weekend. It looks great and was not an overwhelming amount for work. We started Friday night with the taping up and edging. Saturday we did the roller work, and were done by mid-afternoon. The hardest part was the stairs because we needed the big ladder, which is hard to move around. We did the high part of the ceiling in one night. The only difficulty was that the extension handle to the roller broke midway thru, so I did a lot of trips up and down the ladder. The plan now is sometime before Christmas do the ceiling in the downstairs. Then it’s down to touching up the trim, which we’ll start after the new year.

We’ve had some time for fun in there too. Way back in September, we went to the Maker Faire when it visited NYC. Had fun playing with robots and electric hula hoops. Plus the event was at the New York Hall of Science, which I’d never been to before. Jeannie and the girls had been and love the place, and they’re right – it’s very cool. In particular there’s a really great discovery playground. It was also the first outing as a family with the new Prius. Tons of Prii in the parking lot. Don’t know if it’s just the effect of noticing when you get a new car, or maybe the Maker Faire is the kind of event that tends to attract the same kind of people that drive a Prius anyway.

We took a day trip up to a farm near New Paltz in October. Met up with Martin and family, and picked apples and pumpkins. Came home with three giant pumpkins, which have been carved into jack-o-lanterns and placed on the front stoop, where they are now serving as squirrel food. When we were done at the farm we went into town for lunch, and ended up walking around the historical district, where houses dating back to 1705 and older are still standing as a sort of park or museum. Pretty neat. The motivating excuse for the outing was to give Prius a good run on the highway. The car did not disappoint. It got 46 mpg.

Inspired by Maker Faire Jeannie finally got around to getting herself a Lego robot kit from her gambling winnings way back from our trip to Tahoe. While she was at it, she picked up a minifig of Jedi Master Yoda to hang from the rearview mirror of her car. “It’s a toy Yoda for my Toyota, see?”.

A friend lent us season one of the new Battle Star Galactica. The idea is to make it our main video entertainment for the coming winter. So far we’ve only had a chance to watch the pilot, which was excellent. I’d forgotten what a compelling actor Edward James Olmos is. I hope does some origami in this show.

Somewhere in there Jeannie and I celebrated our anniversary, Halloween (Lizzy was an aqua witch and Michelle a devil), and put on a birthday party for Lizzy. Now it’s time to make plans for camping and ski trips. Hopefully the end of the year will be a little less hectic. I know I have some vacation time that I have to use soon.

Buzzy Tonic on iTunes

Face The Heat, the new album from Buzzy Tonic is now on sale on iTunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/face-the-heat/id398782886

My friend John already wrote an excellent review, which includes song-by-song commentary. I’ve never heard Jeannie described as “non-Yoko” before. Ha! Just for the record, on the Who Can Fool Me, the opening riff is stolen from Thelonious Monk and the main groove is inspired by Duke Ellington’s East St. Loius Toodle-oo, but in 7/8 and with a flat 9 in there.

So go over there and buy yourself a copy, and a few to give to your friends. Write some more reviews and help build the buzz. While your at it, go ahead and pick up a copy of Buzzy Tonic’s first disc, The Brothers Zing.

Eric Joisel

International origami master Eric Joisel passed away over the weekend. I was a big admirer of his work, truly some of the most detailed and expressive origami ever created. Eric came to paperfolding from a background as a sculptor in clay and wood, had a highly developed style both thematically and aesthetically, and was particularly adept at human figures, faces and characters. You can see some of the best of his work at: ericjoisel.com.

Buzzy Tonic on CD Baby

Face The Heat, the new CD from Buzzy Tonic is now on sale at CD Baby at (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/buzzytonic) So go over there and buy yourself a copy, and a few to give to your friends. If you already have a copy, do me a favor and review the album and help me get some word of mouth going. While your at it, go ahead and pick up a copy of Buzzy Tonic’s first disc, The Brothers Zing (http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/brotherszing).

I also update my music pages to link to teaser versions of the songs, just the first minute or too, to give all y’all further incentive to go and buy the CD.

Colored Lights Can Hypnotize

My friend Leo Villareal is an artist who works in the medium of flashing LED’s. I’ve known him since grad school when he was just getting started with this stuff, and I did some programming on one of his light shows a while back. Yesterday CNET ran an article about him and his work, including an new exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. Leo’s a brilliant and kind guy, and it’s good to see him getting to this level of success and recognition.

California Pics

Okay, here you go. Five galleries of pics of our trip to California, plus a few upfront to whet you appetite. As always the family and friends fotoz are password protected, so contact me if you need the password. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/fotooz/2010-01/index.html
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2010-02/index.html
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2010-03/index.html
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2010-04/index.html
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2010-05/index.html

Patent Troll From Beyond the Grave

On the heels of my trip to California my former employer is making news, back from the dead after ten years as an undead patent troll, a Patent Lich, if you will.

Way back in the 90’s I worked at the secretive, futuristic think tank Interval Research, owned by the reclusive “accidental billionaire” Paul Allen. It was a very cool place to work, brimming with cutting edge technology and great, creative people and their ideas. Their self-declared mission was to become the next Xerox PARC and the place was loaded with the best and brightest from the aforementioned PARC as well as the MIT Media Lab, the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, and of course Stanford and lots of other places. Douglas Coupland described it in Microserfs as “the coolest place in Silicon Valley.” To me it was kind of like getting a PhD, but earning a real salary instead of accumulating academic accolades. Lots of real good interdisciplinary collaboration with lots of interesting, smart people.

However, the lab has a fatal flaw: hubris. Not satisfied with merely doing cutting edge R&D, their goal was to create startups and change the world and profit wildly, to spawn the next Apple or whatever. I was invited to join the research staff partially on the strength of the work I had done at NYU/ITP, using a programming language called Body Electric to build virtual worlds. This software morphed into a thing called Bounce under the guidance of my friend and mentor Levitt, and made its way to Interval, where it collided with a project from MIT called MediaCalc to create something new and really pretty amazing, particularly for the time, when digital video on a computer barely worked at all, even for the most specialized, high-end rig you could build. Both Bounce and MediaCalc used the idea of a graphical dataflow programming interface to create multimedia applications. Bounce was focused on realtime control and simulation environments that included animation and music. MediaCalc was more focused on generating data streams of metadata from audio and video input and recombining them for new, novel outputs.

At one point I was asked by the Biz Dev group what I thought the commercial applications of our work might be. The Biz Dev people were somewhat removed from the R&D group and the cultural divide was one of the lab’s big flaws. To me the answer was obvious: create a commercial tool for new media artists. Bear in mind that at this time Director and Premiere were still pretty new, as well as their now-defunct competitor MTropoils. Flash hadn’t been invented yet. Pixar was known only to a handful of geeks for being the company that made Renderman, an app that let you farm out our your rendering to a network of SGI’s if you were lucky enough to have that kind of thing. A lot of people there were academics, and were not interested in running a startup anyway. I’d worked at a few small companies before and to me the idea that you start with one core strength and build from there seemed natural. However, I was told that making authoring tools “isn’t a Paul Allen sized idea.” Apparently they wanted to go straight from zero to Toy Story which, needless to say, turned out to be unrealistic.

Meanwhile the world wide web happened, and as the dotcom bubble came to its busting point the lab seemed a little out of sorts. While we were making big investments in deep technology that would come to fruition in the future, the world changed around us. For example, one project got killed when Apple and Sony adopted FireWire rather than our data bus. By 1999 it seemed like anyone with a half-baked business plan could cruise up Sand Hill Road and get a zillion dollars for their startup without any particular technology or protectable IP. Remember pets.com? Interval continued to pursue R&D and indeed filed many patent applications, but never succeeded in launching a killer startup. My guess is that the top twenty coolest things from the lab will never see the light of day and will remain known only to a handful of insiders. One example: there was a guy there named Tom Etters who was working on a complex-plane Boolean logic for quantum computers called Link Theory, based the premise of the square root of not.

By early 2000 Microsoft was on trial for criminal practices with regard to numerous antitrust laws (basically they illegally strangled and killed Netscape), and the day the verdict came down (guilty, but just a slap on the wrist) Paul lost over a billion dollars (on paper anyway) due to the tumble in the price of Microsoft stock. This, in my mind, was the trigger that started the whole dotcom collapse and shawnuff in the next few months everything fell apart. Paul, always wanting to be ahead of the curve, wasted no time and immediately shut down Interval and about a half a dozen other companies of his. The ghost of Interval was subsequently reanimated to “maintain and exploit” its patent portfolio.

Last Friday Interval announced it was suing Google, Apple, and basically all of Silicon Valley for patent infringement. I haven’t read the patents yet, but it sounds from the press release that some of it may be based on my work. How funny. I understand the law of the land may well be on their side, and it’s unlikely that they’d have launched the suit if they didn’t have the patents to back it up, but I still think it’s kind of a dick move. Interval had a more then a decade to develop technologies and businesses based on their prototypes, but they didn’t, so now, years later, they’re crying someone stole their ideas.

Interval joins Viacom on the list of companies I work or have worked for that are suing Google. Unlike Interval, I feel the Viacom’s case is much more in the right philosophically, even if Viacom is the most ironic of champions to the cause. For some reason, Google has gotten away with legitimizing piracy of music, video, etc., where others have been smacked down. The project I was working on my last year at Interval relied heavily on media content sharing and was effectively killed by the Napster decision. Now Viacom is clearly an 800 pound monopolistic media conglomerate here, but at stake really is the ability of anyone working as an artist to get paid for their work in the future world of mainstream media. So the world is changing again. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Bear Flag Republic Part III: Tahoe

We got into Tahoe Wednesday night (felt like a Sunday to us). The next morning we took it easy and hung around the house. Wanda’s family has a cabin up there which we’ve been to many times. Tahoe is our favorite place to go skiing (our next trip out to California will surely be in the winter), but there’s lots to do there in the summer too. We rented a power boat for one afternoon and cruised around the lake. We went into Emerald Bay and Wanda, the kids and I hopped off the boat and swam to an uninhabited rocky islet with the relic of a castle at the top. The water was cold and the air was thin, and Michelle, even thought she was wearing a life vest, was nervous and clingy, which made it hard for me to swim. Wanda coaxed Michelle to swim toward her, and once Michelle let go of me she realized she could float and swim no problem, which made things a good deal easier for me. We climbed up to the castle on the top of the island, which was pretty cool. We spent the rest of the afternoon tubing – one person riding in an inner tube towed behind the boat. It was a fabulous time. Once everyone had had their fill we went back to the marina and hit the bar. It seemed the trip was complete and things couldn’t get any better.

That night we went out dinner and afterward Jeannie and Wanda went to the casinos on the Nevada side. I’ve never been a big gambler myself, except for a stint when I first moved out to Silicon Valley and had a friend from M.I.T. who had been part of their famous card counting club and was starting a local chapter in Palo Alto. I learned the system and did well enough when we were practicing in his house, but when I got to a real casino the dealers were trained to never leave cards face up a moment longer than necessary, so simply getting a look at all the cards was the hardest part. It soon came to feel like hard work and not any fun, and so I gave up blackjack. I still had some fun at roulette, but my pattern is to bet only on single numbers so I either win big or run out of money in a hurry. Jeannie on the other hand, likes to play the slots and is good at losing slowly, making $20 or whatever last a whole evening. This night she got lucky and won a few hundred dollars, a great surprise to be sure!

The last day there we went out to breakfast, hiked around the waterfront and played a few more games of Dominion. Drove back over the pass into the central valley and back to SF. Shortly after we left, Wanda spotted a bear walking thru their yard! We got back to SF in time to go up to Coit Tower, although the cold and fog were still in effect. Had one last dinner on Pier 39 at Jeannie’s favorite seafood restaurant and replenished our pilfered chocolate.

Our final morning we had time for one more sightseeing jaunt. We took a walk down to San Andreas lake, along a trail in Burlingame, near the airport. Jeannie and I had happened upon this place our vary first visit out to California shortly after we got married, so the place has a special memory for us, and closed the trip with a nice symmetry. I’ll have to compare or recent pix to the ones we took all those years ago.

We got to the airport in good time, although the lines were plenty long. For some reason (traveling with children maybe) they let us to the front of the line for security. We had time to get lunch at the airport – chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. Then when we got to the gate they upgraded us to business class, which meant extra-big seat, and another lunch, and some really good wine.

Next up: pictures
…

Back in the world it’s much too real. Things at my job have gone from completely chaotic to somewhat more organized but under high pressure to make up for lost time. I recently updated my resume but decided to wait until September to start looking for a new job, mainly because I’m taking most of my time off in the summer and so it’s a bad time for it. Now the end of this long slog may be in sight, so I’m somewhat hopeful things could get back to normal soon. The day after tomorrow we’re doing a release candidate build. We’ll see how things play out.