Category: General

Winter Update

Well it looks like we’re having a classic winter this year, which is unusual for NYC.    It’s been cold and snowy since late December.  I’ve been out shoveling almost every day the last week.  I can’t remember the last time there’s been snow on the ground for a month or more.  There’s even ice floes on the Hudson.

It got down to 5 degrees one night last week.  This prompted a project of putting new weatherproofing in our garage and lower hallway at the door between the garage and the hall, and in the wizard room, a.k.a. the unheated closet under the stairs.

For some reason, though, the cold seems alot more tolerable when accompanied by snow.  So all in all I’m doing pretty good this winter.  We even took the kids ice skating this weekend.

The other thing we did this weekend was get back into the ongoing house painting project.  We painted our main room downstairs, which our family room, guest room, office and studio.  It was mainly cover damaged and dirty parts of the walls, and since it was the same color as before, we literally cut some corners by not doing any trim or edging, and not moving most of the furniture, but just going over the areas the needed it with a roller.  Still it took a half a day and we used a whole gallon of paint.  The long term plan is to remodel this space, since this is now the only part of the house left that has the original paint left from when we moved in.  So this will definitely hold us over until that day comes, and we’ll be touching up the upstairs hall and stairway at some point later this winter.

Winter Break

Well the holidays have come and gone and the tree is sitting by the curb, and it’s back to the ol’ grind in the new year.  Getting up before dark and standing out in the cold waiting for the train is what I love best about January.  But I don’t want to sound to grumpy.  I had a really nice winter break.  Got to see some friends and family and do a bunch of travelling and other things, and just as importantly, take some much needed time to rest.  Of course the vacation was too short and there were people I wanted to see but didn’t get the chance to.  Sorry John, John and Larry.

Here are a few assorted highlights:

Way back over two weeks ago, the Friday before Christmas was supposed to be the night of the kids’ big xmas concert at school, but nature had other plans.  A big snowstorm meant school was cancelled so the concert was postponed until the following day prompting all kinds of frenzied reordering of plans.  In the end the concert was a success.   Lizzy had a Flute solo (the only solo in the band) and did very well.

It was a big xmas for legos.  The kids had a lego advent calendar and they both some lego sets as presents, Jeannie set up her lego train from a few years ago around the tree, carrying presents and all.  To I got a lego Avatar Air Temple set as a gift from the office.  So we put ’em all together under the tree in a big ol’ explosion-at-the-genre-factory kind of legopalooza extravaganza.

We played a good amount of Nintendo after playing virtually none at all since last winter break.  Up to 59 stars in Super Mario Galaxy, plus played a bunch of other games at various people’s houses.

I had some good Origami time.  I finally got a chance to get back to working on my book.  I finished diagramming and laying out my Elephant II, which weighs in at 33 steps, well down from my previous pachyderm with its 57 steps.  Also closed in on my Moose, which will be about 70 steps — just the antlers to go — and am more than halfway done with my Adirondack chair.  So I now have models diagrammed, and 2 more in striking distance.  Not too far off the pace of one a month, which isn’t bad considering I did no origami at all the last month or so.  Winter has always been my big origami time, being dark and cold outside and all, so I’m optimistic that I can continue in this groove.  (Last year was a bit of an anomaly, as it was right a year ago I started a three-month marathon of working 7 day, 60+ hour weeks.  Luckily I don’t have that sort of thing on the horizon now.) 

Also my friend John Montroll asked me to fold some of his polyhedra for the cover photo of his forth coming book.  I recently bought some Canson, which as an art paper normally used for pastels, thicker than regular kami. I thought it’d be perfect for these models. So far I’ve made 4 out of 5 of them in 12″ squares, and they’ve come out quite well.  Nice look, good and very strong.

I also spent some more time on the continuing saga of fixing and upgrading my computer and music recording system.  I will talk about that in a separate post, since I’m sure you’ll want all the tedious geeky details.

Lastly we took the girls for a day trip skiing.  After staying up and sleeping late every day for more than a week, it was hard going getting up and out the door, and the mountain was the most packed I’ve ever seen it, but the snow was good and we all had a good time.  Lizzy is doing quite well.  She picked up right were she left off last year and got here groove after a run or two, and even went down a blue trail in the afternoon.  Michelle is not a big or strong, and needed some coaxing.  I spent a good deal of time with Michelle on the bunny hill, getting her used to basic sliding, turning, stopping, shifting and holding weight and skis.  I think she progressed pretty well.  I’m hoping she’ll be ready to get on a lift by the end of the season.

Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a really wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. First of all, we’ve been working really hard on home improvements, software development and whatnot, so it was good to have a few days off to rest and enjoy family and feasting. I really feel blessed this year just to have an opportunity to have some good family time and appreciate my loved ones.

My Mum and Dad came down from upstate NY for a few day’s visit. They brought with them a dining room table and chairs, which came from my uncle, who inherited my grandmother’s dining room set. For years we’ve been using a folding card table in our dining room so this is a great improvement. The style is very much to our taste — minimalist mid-century Scandinavian hardwood — and goes with the rest of our furniture. So we really appreciate it. You can see us breaking it in enjoying our Thanksgiving dinner (the kids sat in the kitchen). Also it looks really nice in everyday mode (we put random stuff on it).

In addition to the furniture my Mum brought some traditional Hungarian folk motif pillows and some crystal and a few other random items that had been in my grandmother’s house so we have a few nice things to remember her by.

In the karma department, I recently got a new bed frame and dresser for Michelle, so I’m passing my old dresser on to Kathleen and Martin. My Dad has been very helpful to both of us hauling furniture all across the state.

Thanksgiving dinner was really nice. Jeannie did a great job cooking a huge variety of foods, including the turkey, most excellent stuffing, potatoes and gravy, home made cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and two pies. In addition to my folks, her folks came over, as well as Mary and Lou and KVAP. Everyone had a really nice time.

Friday we took it easy and I caught up on some random tasks such as covering the fig tree for the winter, fixing the screen door (broken by an enthusiastic kid at Lizzy’s birthday party), putting away all the supplies from the recent painting project and throwing out the packaging from Michelle’s new furniture. That evening Lizzy, my Dad and I played few games of chess. It’s been a long time since I played an opponent at his level, and with Lizzy I always start with a handicap of missing knights and bishops. So I’ve gotten used to opening aggressively with the Queen, which turned out to be a mistake every game. The best game between my Dad and me lasted over an hour and a half, a long slow war of attrition with lots of maneuvering punctuated by the occasional capture of a piece, always in an even trade. Eventually it was down to a king, a bishop and two pawns on each side, and I finally managed to get one of my pawns promoted to a queen, and that was the end of that.

Saturday my folks, Jeannie, the girls and myself all headed up to the Albany area for Martin and Kathleen’s baby shower at K’s parents’ house. They live out in the countryside to the south of our state’s capitol, not too far from Ski Wyndham and Hunter Mountain. The house is on a huge plot of woodland, so while the wimmen were in showering Kathleen, Martin, my Dad, K’s dad Charlie and I went of a hiking tour of the property, spotting deer tracks and birds and 200-year-old stone walls and millions-of-years-old fossilized seashells. Charlie is a really nice guy and it was a good day. Unfortunately on the way home we got stuck in some serious heavy traffic before the Tappan Zee bridge, so it was a two hour trip up and a four-hour trip home. Note to self: remember to take the bridge at Bear Mountain!!!

Sunday we played lots of Nintendo. Up to 38 stars in Super Mario Galaxy.

An Answer

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

— Barack Obama, 11/4/2008

Scouting Outing

Last weekend the girls and Jeannie went to a region Girl Scouts event and had blast meeting other kids and doing crafts and other activities. Tonight guest bloggers Lizzy and Michelle tell the story.

Hello I’m ….. Elizabeth or you can call me Lizzy. Liz works too. I also like eLizzy.

Hello this is Michelle. You can also call me Shelly.

This is hamster trio. You can call us cute. Or cuties.

Umm, this is Elizabeth talking. Laugh laugh laugh. Oh yeah. Let me tell you about the best time of my life. It’s called ….. Girl Scouts Heart of the Hudson. Explosion baby! Pow zip bang bing burp! There were lots of kids there. We taught origami boxes and cootie catchers. My mom made about 600 papers and we used about 400 of them. We learned how to do a new lanyard. My best friend Isabella was there but I didn’t see because it was so big. It was fun. Goodbye!

Weekend in D.C.

Over the weekend we went to Washington to visit my friend John, who is an accomplished origami artist. It was a really fun trip.

But first the part about danger and adventure. About a month ago, after all our summer travels were over, I took my car into the shop for an oil change, tire rotation and new front brakes. Since that time, I’ve only driven to the train station and back, and have not taken the car about 30 mph (48 km/h). The kids had a half day of school on Friday, so we lit out for DC about 2 in the afternoon. The trip was great, the traffic smooth and light, and the weather turned from cool and cloudy to mild and sunny. But I after I got on the highway I started to notice a vibration in the front end, and as the trip went on it got worse. By the time we got off the Beltway it was pretty bad, and soon the front brakes were smoking! Luckily we made it to John’s house and there was a garage just a couple blocks away.

It turned out one of the tires was seriously worn along the outside edge, to the point where it was ready to blow out! I think the garage last month must have screwed up with the tire rotation, cuz this was not normal wear. On top of that the rear brakes were shot. So I got new back breaks and ended up getting four new tires, cuz one other tire was pretty badly worn and all of them were more than five years old in any event. Ah well, it was an expensive hassle, but I would have had to get this work done at some point, and all in all we were pretty lucky.

And it didn’t even slow us down very much. There are a lot of good restaurants in John’s neighborhood and Friday night we got Mongolian food. Saturday I got up early to deal with the car, and then we all took the train into downtown D.C. We went down the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial. I haven’t been there since high school, so it was interesting to see how the place had changed. For on thing they put up a slightly incongruous World War Two memorial right near the Washington Monument.

It’s also interesting how some thing haven’t changed. It’s a long walk (4 miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and back), and you’d think they’d have trams or bicycles or something for the tourists in this day and age of fat America. It would also come in handy for people with kids or a bad ankle, or people who don’t want to walk the whole length of the Mall twice. Also the food selection is pretty meager, just a single concession stand with bad pizza and hot dogs and soda. You’d think there’d be row of places to get lunch.

The highlight of the day was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. This is a fantastic place and I’ve been to it every time I’ve been to Washington. It’s full of spaceships, including such legendary craft as the Apollo 11 Command Module, and of a more recent vintage Spaceship One, and storied airplanes including the original 1903 Wright Flyer plus hundreds of later models from every era of experimental, military and commercial aviation. There used to be a Space Shuttle but that’s now gone. I understand they moved it to a new museum hall out near the airport.

The kids really loved it (as Jeannie I both did at that age), and I don’t think they ever really thought to spaceships as something real before, only an idea out of movies. I grew up in the 70’s and I remember the waning days of the Apollo program, Skylab, Viking and Voyager, and the development and debut of the Space Shuttle. All that stuff was really cutting edge back then; now it seems almost nostalgic. I mean, my 41-year old classic muscle car is built of the same technology that took humanity to the moon! I read in the paper today that the US will not have manned space light capability for the next five years and will have to pay Russia to send up our astronauts like dotcom zillionares do. Sigh, yet another failure of our government.

In any event the museum was a blast and it was a great day. When we got back to John’s neighborhood the garage was still open and I picked up the car. We get Peruvian food for dinner and played Settlers of Catan after. (It seems John always wins.)

John has a grand piano. It’s been a few years since I’ve played a grand. I used to play one a lot when I lived in California and hung out at my friend David’s house. My own piano is an upright, and it’s good for what it is, but a grand has a faster, better action and much more definition in the sound, especially in the bass registers and the very high end. So it was very enjoyable to play on that.

And of course we spent a lot of time talking origami. I folded some models out of his forthcoming book, a magnum opus of polyhedra and geometric origami. He has a chapter on polygons, including a regular pentagon and a golden rectangle. His pentagon is (folded from a square) is a very accurate approximation, but the golden rectangle is mathematically exact, which is very interesting because it’s only a few steps; the golden rectangle is latent in the square. I have been searching for year for a method to fold a regular pentagon (or a 36 degree angle), and his is the best I’ve seen. But it doesn’t beat the method I’ve come to prefer, which is basically to eyeball it, because I’ve gotten good at it with practice. In any event, since the golden ratio is expressed everywhere in pentagonal symmetry, I feel intuitively that there must be a way to develop a mathematically perfect pentagon from a golden rectangle. I plan on investigating this.

We spent some time considering the Archimedean Solids and their duals. I developed and folded a Truncated Octahedron from a square sheet of paper. This a really interesting shape, composed of eight hexagons and six squares and has the property of being able to tile space. To my surprise and delight, my design mainly worked, right up until I got closing the model and locking the last face in place with it’s neighbors. This ending stuff can be tricky but is essential to a nice model. My current design wants to spring apart, but it looks like I can get make it with stiffer paper and a slight adjustment of the layout of the faces on the paper.

Back in the office today I got a demo to Flash 10 from an Adobe evangelist. It has a lot of cool new API for doing 3D. My friend Veronique turned to me and said this would be cool for my origami software. She’s totally right, but this had the effect of making me sad because I’d love to have the time to work on that project again. I started it back in the dotcom bust when I was out of work and got a lot of design work done and start on a demo, but it would take months of full time work to get to the next level with it. Ah well, with the economy going the way it is maybe I’ll get my chance. Heh!

Happy Autumn, Part I

Today was the Equinox, and I’m into the fall groove over here. Getting caught up on some little things and starting in on a bunch of projects. Getting around to everything in the inevitable rotation of activities.

The weather has been really nice this September. Soon we should have a whole lot of ripe figs. Meanwhile I’ve been enjoying skating as always, and going for bike rides on our local trails in the Nature Study Woods. Mountain biking is fun, and in another month or so I’ll have to switch from skating to biking after work cuz it’ll be dark out, so I’ve started biking once a week after doing almost no biking the whole summer. The NSW is a nice place, with woods and lakes and horses and swans all kinds of birds and critters. The only real problem with the place is the trails are kind of eroded and need some work. Some of the hills are too hard to go up, not because they are steep but because they are so rocky.

I’ve also been taking my old Mustang out for a ride now and again. It started making a noise a little while ago in the engine, like the lifters were clacking. I remember from when I lived in California and used to drive that car every day, that when that happened I just needed to top of the oil. So I checked the oil but the dipstick said full. So I didn’t quite know what to, and just sort of worried and figured I’d get it checked out in the spring. I’ll probably only drive it once or twice more this fall. Yesterday before I drove it I topped off the oil anyway, and shawnuff the noise mostly went away after a few minutes. Damn dipstick, I guess it must be reading off. Well what do you expect for an old car. I’m still gonna get it checked out in the spring, but still I’m relieved about that.

A couple weeks ago I finally decided to do something about my downstairs stereo, so I could listen to tunes while I work out. My old CD player died a couple years ago, and I had been using an old discman as a replacement, but it had problems with the jack or the cables and one side never sounded right and would drop out from time to time. I didn’t know if the problem was in the CD player, the receiver, the speakers or the cabling somewhere. So as an experiment I repatched the system to use my DVD deck as the CD player, using its extra audio out. Works like a charm and sounds great. I’ve been listening to Steely Dan’s Alive in America for 2 or three weeks now every time I work out.

Now on to what are the works in progress.

Our major home improvement project this fall is to paint all the bedrooms. A much easier job than tiling, for sure, and also this year I don’t have to do all kinds of concrete work, so I’m grateful for that. In any event, it’s September and we figured we’d better get started. Got colors picked out for the girls rooms and everything. We decided to do Michelle’s room first. We were all set to paint the walls, but when I was doing the prep work I noticed some spots that needed spackling, which necessitated painting the ceiling too. So got that done over the weekend, and the wall are coming next.