Author: Zingblog 2

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.

Foldinator 2 Build 3

Development of Foldinator2 continues. You can see the third prototype here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/foldinator2.html

Earlier prototypes is archived here:

http://zingman.com/foldinator2/old_versions/foldinator2_build02/
foldinator2.html
http://zingman.com/foldinator2/old_versions/foldinator2_build01/
foldinator2.html

The main feature for this time around is that I am now generating the paper procedurally using the drawing API. This is core to the whole application, and everything going forward will be built on more sophisticated instructions to the drawing algorithm. The paper is initialized only after the user loads a model. The paper gets its initial state (white or colored side up) from the OrigamiXML for the model. I’ve defined a set of constants for the various lines weights and colors that the rendering will need. For the next build I am going to set the paper’s initial rotation as well.

I’ve also begun putting in controls to toggle the enabled states of the various buttons and to allow the user to switch between View and Edit modes. This will be more fully fleshed out in the next build.

Since it is still fairly early in the development cycle, even simple features require a fair amount of new behind-the-scenes structure to be built. For this build I extended the event framework to handle callback events. I use this in the app initialization sequence when loading the list of OrigamiXML files, and when a file is loaded to trigger the Paper initialization. I also created a class to hold application constants outside of the drawing API styles. These include definitions for steps, actions, folds and their properties and parameters. This will come into play as the folding code develops.

Everybody Knows a Turkey

Birds are the new bugs in origami in that making sculptural, realistic birds is trendy these days. Robert Lang has done quite a few, and Seth Friedman’s Blue Bar Pigeon is a recent standout, and other folders as well. So here’s my contribution: a turkey.

I tackled the subject because I’ve not seen an origami turkey out there that I like. I’ve make several prototypes and I’m pretty happy with the outcome. Mine features a detailed head complete with wattle, a nice round plump body, a fan tail, realistic four-toed feet (better to make it stand), and some nice color change effects. The base is unique and interesting. The feet are developed using a method similar to Robert Lang’s Songbird I in Origami Design Secrets, with little bird bases embedded in two corners. The main base is something like a semi-sunken stretched bird base, except that it use 15 degree symmetry instead of the more typical 22.5. The proportion between the feet and the rest of the body is also based on a 15 degree ratio, which provides some nice symmetries.

Unfortunately the design folds beautifully from foil but getting it to look good from regular paper is a bit more difficult. My recent folding style has been trending towards thicker papers, but for this model that kind of thing is completely inappropriate. Too many layers in the legs for one thing. So I’m on the hunt for some good paper to use. I have a couple sheets of origamido paper, but neither is two-colored, and I don’t want to risk wasting it on an experimental design. The way the tail comes out of the body seems to turn out a bit different every time. Plus I’d have to wet fold it, and so I’d have to work that out too. So I ordered some foil-backed washi from Nicholas Terry’s website. It’s 35cm square and brown on one side and gold on the other, so with luck that will be perfect for this model. Check back in a few weeks to see how it turns out.

And while we’re at it, here are a couple pictures of my Eve, to go with Brian Chan’s Wall-E.

Californigami

I just got back from a great trip to San Francisco for the Pacific Coast Origami Conference. It was Jeannie’s idea for me to go, and I must say I was kind of ambivalent about the whole thing until I actually started the journey. But it was great and she deserves a big thanks. The conference went from Friday to Sunday and was a ton of fun. I lived in the Bay Area from the mid-90’s to the early 2000’s, but haven’t been back for a few years, so I also spent an extra day visiting old haunts and catching up with friends.

I must be getting older. Old people are famous for getting up early. It didn’t really bother me to have to get up at 4:30 to get to the airport in time. It felt like getting up for a normal day of work. A few random skipped meals didn’t bother me either, nor did the time zone change or lack of sleep. I cashed out the last of my frequent flier miles from the 90’s when I flew 100,000 miles a year and got an upgrade to business class. It was awesome! The seat was like a living room recliner chair. Since I’m well over 6 feet tall it made a big difference for me being able to nap on the plane.

I was flying alone and wanted everything to fit in my carry on including the models for my exhibit. For my exhibit I made a new batch of models from the designs I know well; sort of a greatest hits collection. These included my Elephant, Moose, Lizard, Turtle, Balloon, UFO, Luv Bug and Loon.

The Pacific Coast Origami Conference (PCOC) is smaller than the New York convention, but a bunch of friends showed up, including some NYC people like Jan and Tony, and the M.I.T. crowd including Brian, Jason, Aviv, Andrea and Tian, who are smart and geeky enough to be fun to hang out with, and others like Eric G, Jared, and Nathan. Brian makes lots of puns and Jason quotes Monty Python enthusiastically and inaccurately and sings contagiously. Andrea has moved to San Mateo and is working for Oracle and Aviv was out there for an interview. Nathan is done college and living in SF working as a school teacher. And so it goes.

I stayed at the hotel where the conference was, which made it pretty convenient. We had some really good Thai food in Japan Town after wandering around in an indecisive group looking for a place Robert Lang recommended, but knew neither the name or location. I bought some really nice origami paper and won a sheet of handmade origamido paper for participating in a folding challenge.

While I was there I folded (among other things) a new original model: an Eve robot to go with Brian’s Wall-E. I taught a class which was a hit. I’m working on a book and brought a whole stack of diagrams, hoping people would fold them and give me feedback. Everyone wanted to fold my Turtle since it was in the model menu, and so I taught that from memory while a few people folded from diagrams on the side.

I’d forgotten what a beautiful city SF is. So mellow and picturesque, especially compared to New York. Saturday morning I took an epic walk. I went from the hotel across town, down the crookedest block of Lombard Street, up to Coit Tower, and then down and around to the waterfront, Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf. I had planned on riding the cable car back to the hotel, but when I got there the line was way too long and there was a bad guitarist playing guitar and singing badly to try and get tips from the people in queue. So I walked back up to the hotel.

Monday I rented a car and drove down 280 to Silicon Valley. I had lunch with my friend Wanda in Palo Alto. It was great to see her and catch up. It was a beautiful day and fun to see my old neighborhood. I went for a hike at a place called Windy Hill, which is just up at the top of the hills from there. The ride up is a crazy switchback road thru redwood forests. From the top you can look down and see Stanford, Moffett Field and the whole bay, and even San Francisco off in the distance. Turn around and you see the Pacific Ocean out over the hills to the west.

Ah, my heart is torn in two. I loved living there and love the land and the climate and the culture and people and everything about the place and would love to go back.

In other news, Lizzy got her cast off the day I left. She was born in California and fantasizes about going to college at Stanford as her destiny. I tell her get good grades. She’s with me in pining to move back. I suppose if the right opportunity comes up. But then there’s reality of there here and now.

The last thing the happened at work before I left was that I packed up my office. My whole project moved to a new floor. I flew the red eye overnight Monday and worked at home yesterday, so today I got in to see my new space. It’s much nicer than my old one. It’s a corner office with windows on three walls and a view of Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square. The movers didn’t take my chair (which was a nice one that I brought with me from Nick when I joined the platform group), and my colleagues told me the chairs all were gone and lost. But I went up there and another guy had appropriated it, and gave it back without me having to get too insistent. Another thing, my company just announced extra days off for everyone for the holidays, so it looks like I can take a good long xmas vacation this year.

Coming soon: pictures!

Origami Polyhedra Design

My friend John Montroll has a new book out, called Origami Polyhedra Design. It’s been in the works for quite a while and is a real tour de force. Congratulations John! This is his third book on origami polyhedra, and his first for the publisher A. K. Peters. (They publish a bunch of origami books including Robert’s ODS, and the Proceedings from the 3OSME Conference, which contains a paper by yours truly.) Unlike most origami polyhedra, which are modular, John’s are always from a single square sheet. This a challenging and rigorous style to fold in.

In a change from John’s usual style, this book is much thicker, almost 300 pages, and divided into three major sections. The first is a wealth of theory including general principles, design techniques and consideration, and methods for dividing into nths, for finding angles, folding various polygons, and other related topics. This is really good stuff. The second section of the book is devoted to a variety of models related to the Platonic Solids, including color-change and sunken variations. Totally awesome. The third section is Dipyramid models. This a particular specialty of John’s and there is a great variety of dipyramids with different proportions and number of facets, and a chapter of really cool dimpled (semi-sunken) dipyramids.

All in all the book is really quite amazing, and really takes origami polyhedra design to the next level. And while it is a real Magnum Opus, John has enough unpublished polyhedra to form the basis of anther book, so I hope this one does well and a sequel materializes.

John asked me to fold a few of the models pictured on the cover. I must say it’s very nice looking cover, with the model well arranged and photographed. John’s site is not yet updated to list the new book, and if you go to order it on Amazon there is no cover image yet. So I was taking some pictures of my models for the upcoming PCOC origami convention in San Francisco, and thought I’d share a shot of John’s book while I’m at it. (I know the lizard there doesn’t strictly fit with the theme, but it reminded me of an Escher print and I thought it looked cool.)

Origami Site Update

I’ve made a number of updates to my Origami Site. I’ve added new photos for my Moose, Elephant, Baluchitherium and Bears. I’ve also added a few new models including my War Elephant, Castle, and accompanying explorations, and added a new section for Origami Architecture. This is a substantial step forward for my origami site. I have a few models still for which I want to fold and photograph an exhibit-quality model, and beyond that breaking the list of models down to be browsable by category and year.

Enjoy!