Category: General

Tea With Warriors – Quiet Revolution

Hello world, I’m back from Thanksgiving break. Four and a half days of getting caught up on rest, enjoying the company of family and friends and getting some work done around the house. Sleeping in, going to bed early. Lovely to just sit around in the morning and listen to the birds.

…

when you wake up feeling
in your empty space
are you in a rush to fill it
and let the outside take its place?
sit back and feel the rush of the machines
as they fill the spaces in between

lead a quiet revolution
beating wings
are part of your solution

Over the weekend I received a copy of the CD Quiet Revolution by Tea With Warriors from my friend John Neumann. Congratulations John! It sounds great. If you’ve checked out the rough mixes last time I blogged about it, John has added some guitar parts, polished the vocals, and taken the to level and EQ everything quite nicely. The album is now for sale on CD Baby, so check it out.

And while you’re there, pick up a copy of The Brothers Zing – Buzzy Tonic!

…

Today it’s back to work getting up early and waiting in the cold rain for the train, and then running the gauntlet of relentless New Yorkers, trying to avoid getting poked in the eye with an umbrella. Coming down with a cold. My project has to ship by Christmas. Fun fun fun.

Flex Development and Weekend on Long Island

Work has been — well, programming can be a challenge, especially when learning a new language while trying to write a software application on a deadline. I’ve been deep in the steep part of the Flex learning curve, with its monumental edifice of pre-built components, loaded with design and usage assumptions. I’m trying to forge our designer’s interactive, animated, curvy concept into Flex’s prefab boxes. I’m particularly having difficulty with the HList Component, which does not give the developer the power and flexibility one would want or expect. Seriously, for example you can’t turn off rollover highlighting of a list item without also suppressing the event that the rollover action generates. Oy! Over and over with stuff like that. I feel like I’m trying recreate a wood carving out of Legos, and am running into the same limits as you face in real Legos: either it looks blocky or you have an over-reliance on specialized, one-off pieces.

A couple weeks ago I went to a wedding on Long Island for Jeannie’s cousin. It was on Friday afternoon, so I left work early and we were able to get out of the house on time with the kids. On the trip out it started to rain, and then turned into a severe thunderstorm, and naturally traffic was massively backed up to the point that by the time the wedding was over we were only halfway there. Well, I thought to myself as the wipers swished back and forth energetically but futilely, this is easier than writing code.

We dropped the kids off in Wantagh and proceeded to Babylon. Thanks to Nick & Lisa for watching the kids! They had a great time. Lizzy is now a fan of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. By the time we got there the rain had pretty much stopped. Got to the hall. Pointless valet parking. The parking lot was right there, but everyone had to wait in line, and the parking guy spilled my CD’s and maps all over the front seat. I can’t understand the format of the Long Island wedding. The meal is stretched out over the whole night, constantly interrupted by dancing, but only a few songs, not a real set. On top of that the music was EQ’d badly, with the mid-bass too loud drowning out conversation. There must be some “club” effect they use. It was a I good time anyway. Got to see lot of Jeannie’s family. Denis and Sarah were in town. Jeannie and I did take a nice walk around the harbor, spotting cabin cruisers. And we did stay ’til the end and danced, which is something we don’t get to do very often. Stayed on long island overnight and spent the next day at Jeannie’s sister’s house, with the whole clan. Like I said easier then writing code.

Been Busy

Since the kids went back to school, it feels like we’ve been continually busy every day every waking moment for the last nine weeks. Working all week and every weekend something going on. It’s gotten to be the time of year already when it’s still nighttime when I get up in the morning, which is never much fun. I feel like I’m several weeks behind in writing about what’s been going on, so here’s a general update, to be followed by some more specific posts.

Work has been busy for me, building a major new application while learning a new language. More on that later. Lizzy has been busy too. Third grade is a big year. She’s building skills and discipline. She needs to memorize her multiplication tables, so we made up some flash cards and I’ve been drilling her every night. It’s been paying off, but requires persistence. She also started flute lessons, so we have to make sure she practices, which requires supervision too. She’s been at it a few weeks, and about a week ago had her first big breakthru, where she was able to consistently get a good tone where the pitch is not overpowered by the should of breathiness. She was very proud, as well she should be.

It’s been an unseasonably warm fall until this week, but now fall is finally here. I’ve been both raking the leaves and then mowing the lawn cuz the grass is still growing. Wearing shorts and no jacket. Now we’re getting into the heavy part of leaf season, so hopefully we’re done mowing for the year.

I’ve also been trying to keep my outdoor workout going as long as possible into the fall, even though we’re now into the dark half of the year. I had been going out rollerblading 2 days a week after work, more and more into the twilight as the weeks went on. Then I decided to switch to biking, since that’d be safer and easier in the dark. (I don’t jog cuz of an ankle injury from years ago.) I found the old clip-on headlight for my bike, and was happy to discover it still works. I find it hard to exercise enough in the winter, so hopefully I can keep this going a while longer.

Fotoz 2007 Summer I

It’s that time again. I just put up two new photo galleries from this summer, June and July. I probably have about 3 more galleries to post to get thru to the end of the summer.

http://www.zingman.com/fotooz/2007-02
http://www.zingman.com/fotooz/2007-03

These galleries are meant for friends and family, and are password protected. If you think you are friends and/or family, and need a password, please send me an email.

Also, I created an index page for the public galleries, since I now have more than one. You can expect that to grow in the time ahead, albeit in a more random fashion.

http://www.zingman.com/fotooz_public/index.html

Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of the pix.

Figs and Roses

Happy October, everybody. Or should I say Rocktober! We’ve been so busy of late I missed mentioning some important markers of the change of season. So, happy fall equinox. Happy harvest moon. Happy birthday Martin!

This may be the mildest September I can remember since leaving California. We haven’t turned our heat on yet; we haven’t even taken our air conditioner out of the window yet. But now there’s more darkness than daylight. Pretty soon I’ll have to stop going rollerblading after work. I guess the good news I tend to do much more origami in the winter.

Almost at end for the yard and garden too, apart from the copious raking in the weeks ahead. The first leaves are just starting to fall. Our new grass has come in nicely. Our fig tree’s best year yet.

Life’s a Beach

Today is the first day of school again for the kids, but we ended the summer on a high note. We spent the better part of last week in Ocean City, MD. It was a great trip: fun and relaxing and action-packed and low-key all at once. The town of OC is very nice, and family friendly. Not so crazy and built-up as say Virginia Beach or Daytona, but nicer than places I’ve been to on the Jersey Shore. We went swimming in the ocean every day right outside our front door, visited the wild horses on Assateague Island, spent a whole day at a great water park, checked out the amusement pier, went out to some breakfasts and nice seafood dinners, ate funnel cake and lemonade on the board walk, and even had a shot of having a shot of Tequila with Jeannie to celebrate our twennyversary. I’ll be putting up a full photo album sometime, but for now here are some of the pics:

Summer Camping, Part II

We just got back from another weekend of camping, this time in the opposite end of the Catskills, with our friend Seth and his daughter Erin, and our friends the Blickers, and bunch of friends of theirs. We’ve been doing this a few years now, and it seems to get larger every year, so we’ve dubbed it Blickapalooza. More hiking, canoeing, hanging around the campsite making fires, cooking food, singing songs and drinking beers. How can you complain? Well this trip was too cold for swimming, and hikes we took were kinda short, but we had lakeside campsites and I got to do a lot of canoeing with Michelle and Lizzy. And it rained Friday night, but at least the fire kept going and then the stars came out and our new tent stayed dry, so now we know it rocks!

Also, after years of never practicing guitar and having only a basic knowledge of simple chords and a repertoire consisting mainly of Neil Young songs, I’ve decided for what I do it actually sounds pretty good, and it might be worth it to learn some more chords and some new songs, so I’m thinking of getting a new acoustic guitar to replace the one I got for trading an old boom box years ago. That guitar is amazing in that it has almost no wood at all in it, but it still has a great bright tone. Unfortunately neither the action nor the intonation is very good, so it’s a bit hard to play.

We took tons of pictures. I think Lizzy took about 20 just of Erin’s feet. Here are a few to start with; a more complete gallery will follow on sometime later. Most of the feet pictures will be removed as part of the curating function.