Author: Zingblog 2

Spring Break

I took a few days off for spring break. Unlike last year, when we went on an epic journey to distant lands, this year we pretty much hung around the house, rested, got caught up on some chores and did a few fun things locally. The weather has been absolutely fantastic, more like June than April. We’ve been barbecuing almost every day. I haven’t seen a lot of the neighborhood kids since last fall, and its surprising how everyone’s grown.

All our flowers have come in beautifully, including the new flower bed by our neighbor’s garage that we planted last fall. We got rid of our little kiddie play structure slide and sandbox now that the kids have outgrown them. We covered in the low spot with dirt and blue stuff. The end of an era. Some other random tasks put us about half done with the spring yard work cycle. Still to go is getting the mulch under the hedges and turning over the garden. Plus getting the roof fixed. At least we got a few estimates and it looks reasonable. Oh yeah, and Lizzy’s gonna need a new bike this year.

We washed, waxed and vacuumed the cars for spring. I like to do that once a year. I also started up the Mustang, and it’s good to know it turned right over. No problems with the batteries or anything major like last year. When you step on the gas, however, there’s a temporary drop in power before it surges back. I noticed this towards the end of last summer, and I suspect it’s the carburetor. So I’ll taking it into the shop as soon as I get the chance.

On Easter Sunday Mary’s came over. It was a really nice visit and another great day. We had everyone sit at the dining room table rather than have a separate kiddie table in the kitchen. The end of another era. Everyone growing up fast.

Yesterday Jeannie and I took the girls on an outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for a walk thru Central Park. It was a fantastic time. The Met has been on my list for about a year now. I haven’t been there in many years and had forgotten that it’s much more than just art. One of the big old classic New York museums, up there with the American Museum of Natural History, which I know pretty well by now, having visited a few times a year for origami the last few years.

In addition to paintings and sculpture, the Met has all kinds of artifacts: medieval armor, musical instruments, furniture, all kinds of metal, wood and glass vases, vessels, instruments and implements, plus ancient ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Inca wings. All of it fascinating stuff. (Well maybe the furniture got to be a bit much after a while…) The armor and musical instrument galleries were probably my favorite. There are two huge wings of paintings, Modern and Classical, but I feel like we didn’t really do them justice. For one thing, the whole place is laid our like a maze rather than designed for flow-thru, and the painting galleries in particular are not well organized. They could do with some signage to tell you about what county and century you’re looking at and what is the story from hall to hall. Also looking at that many paintings is a lot information, so one tends to glaze over after a while. Still the kids seemed to get a lot out of it and so did I.

They really wanted to visit Strawberry Fields in Central Park, but it was on the opposite side. On a related note, Michelle learned how to play the intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the piano.

Today I crossed off another longstanding todo item: I went and got a New York City library card. I have a card for my local library but I hardly ever go cuz I’m mostly at work when they’re open. Still, I have a long list of books I’d like to read and for most books it seems such a waste to buy it and read it once and get rid of it. The main NYC library -– the famous one with the lions on the steps -– is just a few blocks from my office. So the plan is to go there on my lunch break every week or two from now on. I’d never been inside before. It’s a pretty impressive marble edifice with giant halls and stairways, like it was carved by dwarves out a massive mountain of solid stone. There was an exhibit on old maps, which is pretty cool. Only on the third floor will you find books or librarians. Apparently most of the books are in and underground vault or in the branch library across the street. They have some kind of system for checking out books by computer. I plan on going back soon to get some books, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Change in the Weather

Rewinding a bit, St. Patty’s day was sort of an unusual day. We’d had a lot of stormy weather, and it was really cold that morning, and I had to get up early for physical therapy. The road there was still closed from the big storm, so I had to take a different route. By the time I was on my back home, it was already warming up outside and turning into the first really nice warm spring day. I’d been waiting for a while for my back to start feeling better, and that turned out to be the day. Such a relief.

My train was late, and when the door opened it smelled like booze. Partiers headed into the city to enjoy the parade. I was probably the only one in the car going to work. Some guy on the train noticed me folding a color-change stellated octahedron that I’ve been working on. “Dude, is that origami? Cool! Did you get that from youTube?” The parade goes right thru my neighborhood, and it’s like that the whole day, drinking and partying, like it’s Mardi Gras or Halloween or 1999. At least I was able to cross 5th Ave. without any altercations with the police this time.

At work it was all about deploying the first release candidate of our project to the Q server. This is a major milestone on what has been a really long strange trip. I was mired in config files all day, or as I’ve come to call it, configgy pudding. Our company has a mandate to try and do more thru configuration and less thru code. But it’s already becoming hard to manage, and we haven’t even deployed to live. So I need to write a config management tool so we can have instant congfiggy pudding. Anyway, we got it working, and deployed to QA, where we’re already finding bugs.

After work was a corporate happy hour function at a hotel bar which was smack in between two Irish pubs. I made friends with a management consultant who was part of a team engaged by our overlords to hang around and analyze out office’s dysfunction and presumably figure out who to fire. She seemed pretty smart and interesting/weird with a possible MIT vibe. She told me, “You don’t look old enough to have been writing software in the 90’s.” Hell, I was writing software in the 70’s. Hopefully this means I won’t be the one who gets sacked.

The mild weather continued and by the weekend we were able to get started on the spring yardwork and enjoy the season’s first barbecue. I was really tempted to get on my rollerblades or see if I could start up my Mustang after a winter of sitting in the garage, but neither one seemed like a wise idea given the condition of my back. After the weekend the weather reverted to a more typical state of dreary cold and rain, which is pretty much how it’s been for the past week. I’ve gotten a bunch of new exercises from my therapist, and have developed a new workout routine to incorporate those along with most of the stuff from my old workout. I’ve been able to bring back most of the exercises now, and am back up to 70 percent of the weight, and some of them still have limited mobility. I did go ice skating that past Saturday with my kids, and did fine, as my back continues to improve.

The kids are going thru a Beatles phase right now, which is fun because they’re one of my all-time favorite bands. It started back in January when we were watching Anthology. Then Jeannie found the DVD’s for A Hard Day’s Night, and Magical Mystery Tour on sale. (Yes MMT is as bad as everyone says. Three or four excellent music videos and an hour of filler showing people riding a bus.) At first the kids were into all the early boy-band pop stuff like “She Loves You” and “Please Please Me”. Now they progressed to the weird John songs like “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” and “I Am the Walrus”. Michelle learned how to play “All Together Now” on the ukulele.

Promises of Spring

The weather has been really nice the last few days, with sunshine and temperatures getting up into the 50’s. Despite this there are still snow piles stubbornly clinging to existence. We had so much snow they haven’t completely melted yet. My back injury continues to improve slowly but steadily. I’m no longer doing my regular workout, just the exercises my physical therapist prescribed, plus plenty of walking. I’m hoping to reintroducing some parts from my regular workout this week. With luck I’ll be pretty much back to normal by the time the weather is good enough to start doing things outside.

Meanwhile I finished updating my Friends and Family photo galleries thru the fall and the holidays. This year I may have a few videos worth sharing, so look for that update soon. And as always, contact me if you need the password.

http://zingman.com/fotooz/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2009-08/index.html
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2009-09/index.html

More Complaining About Winter

I went shopping for a snow blower today. I haven’t gotten one up until now because we only get enough snow to make it worthwhile a few times a year, and some years not at all. But now we have snow and I really shouldn’t be shoveling it by hand, and it’s a lot for Jeannie to do solo. So there it is. A few weeks ago we went to Sears to look at dishwashers and refrigerators and they had a whole field of different kinds of snow blowers. I went back today and it’s all lawnmowers and barbecue grills. What the heck?!? It’s still February and there’s over a foot of snow on the ground. Also looked for a new winter coat, but as usual they have nothing in my size. I hate shopping.

I started working out again yesterday. I made some adjustments to the routine. Doing more stretching and far less weights. I’m going to reintroduce the weight and reps gradually. By the time I get back to full weight it will be spring, but I think next winter I’m going to make it a policy to seasonally adjust my workout balance with less strength training and more yoga and stretching stuff.

Getting Back Into Shapes

It’s been a rough week. I had a bit of a pain in my leg which turned out be caused by a swollen or pinched nerve. I tend to have a few aches in my legs this time of year due to the cold, but this got bad enough I needed to go see a doctor. Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, since I’ve been feeling down about my work situation lately and I had a few days off, a break from that unpleasantness and drama and from commuting in the cold, and I took a few days to rest and reset. Now that I’m on the mend physically, I’m much less burned out mentally too.

I got a chance to work on some more origami ideas this week. I have a handful of polyhedra I’ve been trying to perfect for a while now. One of them is the Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedron, and I had a half-fold one I started ages ago and I thought I’d finish it off. But as I got into, I realized the layout was kind of weird and I could do better. So here is the new improved layout. As you can see, the layout is nice and symmetrical, and that makes the precreasing relatively straightforward. The forty-right triangles that make up the faces are based on the geometry of the silver ratio. There is a border that runs the whole way ‘round the paper to provide flaps at the corners to tuck in and finish the model. As luck would have it, I picked a good size for the flap to provide a reference to set up the silver ratio without having to find any other landmarks. I’ve folded a couple of these now, working out a clean way to close the model. Look for completed model in the near future.

Snow Daze

Well I’m surviving the winter. I feel better about the season now that there’s snow on the ground. Last week we got a big snowfall, enough to pretty much close the entire New York City for a day. The kids had the day off from school and I helped them build a snow man amid interminable shoveling. But that was nothing compared to my friend John in D.C., who’s endured a few big snow falls, a power outage and a week of from school (He’s a teacher).

I was scheduled to another mixing session with Erik, but that got postponed. We ended up doing it a couple days later and now I have two songs done and sounding totally awesome. One of them, an R&B number with a horn section, almost sounds too clean. Once I get one more in the can I’ll post some audio files for you to hear.

The kids had off from school yesterday and we took them skiing. Another round of fresh snowfall made for a slow drive, but the best conditions I’ve skied on on the East coast in years, maybe ever. As an added bonus, we met our friend Seth on the mountain and it was his birthday. It was snowing so hard we had to stop and buy the girls goggles. It was Michelle’s first real day off the bunny hill and up to the top of the mountain. She was a little nervous abut it, but she did just great, and soon felt confident enough to try some blue trails. At one point there a was a steep spot and I skied a bit ahead, stopped and turned back to see if she could handle it. She just blew right past me going “Wheeeeeee!!!”. Now we can all ski together as a family, which is great, cuz it means we can plan a ski vacation out west in a few years.

Things have been contentious at work recently. My project is behind schedule, mainly due to the Bad Manager, not giving us requirements to work against in a timely fashion. This in turn stems from the fact that he does not have a technical background and is out of his depth trying to manage this project. Last Friday we had a meeting to work our requirements for a particular feature set and yet again he wasn’t prepared, didn’t take notes or understand what he needed to meeting, questioning obvious points but unable to contribute to the actual issues that need to be worked out. So my boss kind of lost her temper and the two of them got into a rather heated argument. Today was yet another meeting, and my boss’s boss and the Bad Manager’s boss showed up, and everyone was on their best behavior and in the end we hammered out the design of the panel resolved. Yeesh.

We’ve been watching some Olympics and been enjoying it pretty well. I like the winter sports, but I must say I haven’t watched regular TV in a long time and I find the pacing and constant interruptions and 50-50 ratio of ads to sports makes it kind of a drag, and my enthusiasm starting to wane. Most people don’t seem to mind or notice this, but TV ads have been out of my system and it’s kind of a shock.

Producer’s Toolbox Music Playa Version 3

I recently completed new version if the music player for my friend Erik and his music production studio GE Music. You can see it live here:

http://producerstoolbox.com/ProducersToolbox_Music/geMusicPlayer44.html

This version has numerous improvements over the previous one. It is much more flexible in how it handles music libraries, allowing for multiple library files of several formats and multiple mp3 directories at arbitrary server paths, all driven by config scripts for easy library updates and management. There was also a major behind-the-scenes refactoring of the code base and a slew of minor bug, so overall the app is much more robust. Also, it now displays album cover art for each Playlist, dynamically loading the album images.

I’m happy because the app has needed some attention for a while, and also because this was my end of the software-development-for-studio-time arrangement I worked out with Erik.

Over the weekend I began converting my ProTools projects from PT7 under Windows to PT8 on the Mac in preparation for brining the songs over to his studio. This meant rendering out all the MIDI instruments (mostly the drums) one track at a time as audio and flying them back into the project. Kind of tedious but not too bad. The one snag I hit was that I double-tracked the snare drum, using two different samples from two different kits. The bouncedown must not be sample-accurate because the resulting audio of the two snares phased against each other and produced a flanging noise. So I had to re-render the snare with the two samples playing at once, and that sounded fine, although I loose the option to mix between the two sounds going forward.

I’m scheduled to go into the studio later this week. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Recording Project: Seven of Nine

I’ve reached a milestone with my recording project. I have seven out of nine of my songs ready for final mixdown and mastering. The are: Who Can Fool Me, Fine Red Wine, The Nine, Touch The Ceiling, Heat Wave, Angel Or Alien, and Earthbound. I’ve been cleaning up all my mixes, doing things like soloing the drums and bass and editing out little clams or bits of noise, blending the layers of keyboards and synthesizers, adding fader moves and refining the effects.

I’ve been focusing in particular on the vocals, drilling down, singing one phrase at a time until it sounds as good as I can make it, really concentrating on phrasing and intonation. My method is to lay down whole vocals track up to 5 times, and then cut together the best performances to make the track, and used the spares for thickening. Tedious but effective. I ended up completely overdubbing three songs: Fine Red Wine, Angel or Alien (which I think I am going to rename “U.F.O.”, and Earthbound. Earthbound in particular has a lot of lyrics and backing vocals, so it was a fair amount of effort.

It makes me feel better to know alot of the pros (Sting, Paul McCartney, etc.) worked this way. The problem now is, the better the takes get, the better my ear gets, and so now I’m thinking about going back to make punch ins on some tunes that I had previously thought were good enough. For the few weeks I’ve been listening to alot of Beatles music, mainly Sgt. Pepper’s and the White Album in heavy rotation. The White Album is now my workout music, which is kind of weird cuz I usually use something strongly uptempo throughout, but it’s a record I know really well and it’s musically interesting so it works. But now I’m hearing little flaws in John and Ringo’s singing on some tracks (never Paul’s) and I’m thinking to myself maybe I’ve gone far enough.

I burned a CD to listen to in my good stereo upstairs over the holidays, shuffled in with other albums. I do most of my listening back over the ipod on the train, and between the mp3 compression (really mangles cymbals and flange effects in particular), the cheap headphones and the environmental noise, there’s alot of fidelity I’m missing, although it’s great for hearing if the mix is good enough to withstand all that and still come thru.

The two remaining songs still need work in the arranging department. One of them is Making Miles, and I’ve decided to follow Martin’s arrangement more closely and give it an instrumental section and a reprise of the chorus, bringing up to near 5 minutes from the current 4. It’s gonna build throughout the song so it comes in like a full band midway thru and gets really huge just before the end, where it will scale back for the outro. I’m looking at adding bass and more drums, more keyboards, and maybe even guitars, as well as redoing the vocals. I’m also gonna cop the harmony vocal line on the chorus from the Shade tape.

The other song is Green Glove, which I sort of arranged in the studio, adding layers experimentally with no clear plan. It sort of sounds like a mess now, and it needs a tear down and rebuild. I might scrap it altogether, although I’d like to give it one last chance. It was a cute idea and the piano solo is pretty smokin’, and the groove could be really hot. So I have to think of a way to salvage the song, rethinking the horns, vocals and rhythm section. I’ll need to retrack the vocals anyway. I think I’ll start by just muting the horn section.

If I do scrap it I’m gonna replace it with a new song “Rocket To The Moon”. This is the first song I wrote on guitar and I’m fond of it, plus it fits with the rest of the songs thematically while offering some new musical ideas. I figured my fist guitar song would be something like a Greg Lake style ballad something like Lucky Man, but this is pretty different. It’s a sort of uptempo fake-punk thing that I came up with when I was learning Message in a Bottle. It’s short, probably less than three minutes. It’ll be interesting to see if the rhythm guitar part will carry the tune, also to see how it goes recording the acoustic and adding effects in ProTools.

So now I’m hoping the record will be done by the end of the winter. You can hear the latest tracks on my music page. Let me know how they sound to you.

Tree

Last week Lizzy took a class trip to the American Museum of Natural History and while she was there had a chance to check out the origami holiday tree. I had hoped to cruise up there to meet them for lunch and tell the kids a bit about the tree and Origami USA, but alas it was not in the cards. I was stuck in an all day project planning meeting. It got pretty contentious and by the end my boss was openly calling for the bad product manager (you may recall him from a post a few months back) to be sacked. Today was had part two of the meeting, in which some differences were resolved and workable project plans were agreed upon. At one point I had to call out the bad manager and asked him to articulate the difference between his new plan and my existing plan, and he admitted he hadn’t read my plan therefore couldn’t say. So my plan prevailed, much to the amusement of some of my colleagues. Frankly I’d rather avoid all this unpleasantness and stupidity, and I’m beginning to loose my sense of bemused detachment. Although I must say all the developers on my team are really excellent, so I don’t see any deep worries, just management B.S.

In any event, Lizzy and her classmates enjoyed the tree, and she had been the museum before for special folding sessions as well as to see the museum itself. She was able to tell the other kids something about the tree, and even spotted some of my models and took some pictures. In addition to the models I donated this year I was happily surprised to see a turtle which I’d donated a previous year.