Category: General

Caroling Caroling Near and Far

It was a busy weekend. Friday nite we continued on our quest to watch all the Lord of the Rings movies, which we began around Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years, so they’re fresh again. Up to the middle of The Two Towers now. Jazz on Saturday had been moved to an earlier time slot, but is sounding better than ever after a few weeks off and a rusty start. We want to record our next practice to try and get some gigs. I’m gonna have to really learn how to play Giant Steps now. Yikes!

On Saturday nite we got our Xmas tree and all of the decorations up. This was complicated by the fact that our old tree stand was kaput, and after an hour of trying we had to face the fact it would not hold up the tree no matter what we did. So we had to run out and get another tree stand Saturday night, and even then it was hard to get the tree up straight. But we muddled through somehow. Sunday evening Jeannie and Michelle put up a lego train around it. Choo-choo!

Sunday morning I was in the city, teaching an origami session at the Museum of Natural History. It was more airplanes and spaceships, pretty much the same stuff I taught at MIT a few weeks ago. But in the meanwhile I diagrammed two more models: my Astronaut and my Space Probe. Both came in right around 25 steps.

This session was also webcast. It was my first time doing that and it went well. They provided a camera on a stand pointing down at the table, coupled to a computer running a group video chat so I could easily teach both the people in the room and the ones on the internet at the same time.

The level of folders, at least the local ones, was not at the MIT level. They were low intermediate at best, and some didn’t know alot of the basics. So a few of my models were actually pretty challenging for them. Still, we got thru four: the Astronaut, Rocketship III, UFO II and Space Pod, and all the students did well. It was a good learning experience as an author and teacher. I was wondering if these models might be too hard for a book targeted at non-expert folders. My conclusion is that some may be tough for a raw beginner, but with just a little experience most folders should not alot of fun and have much trouble.

Michelle came with me and took a class. She never misses a chance to do an origami event these days. She folded a really cool mouse, and then made about a dozen of them in rainbow colors. People are telling me now what a good folder she’s become.

This evening Lizzy and Michelle sang at a Lessons and Carols service at the church in Bronxville. It was a large group, anchored by the church choir Lizzy recently joined, and augmented by the children’s chorus from YAA, a really good organist on a great pipe organ, and a brass and timpani ensemble. Apparently today before the show was the only time all three sub-groups rehearsed together.

This is the first time I heard the choir, and I must say there are excellent, truly at a professional level. Lizzy is one of four first sopranos, and the youngest person in the choir. There are two other girls from her youth group but most are adults. They were doing very advanced and complex arrangements with all kinds of counterpoint and harmonies, lots of suspended and other non-triadic intervals, call-and-response things, interleaving voices, and they pulled it all off beautifully. Covered alot of emotional territory too, from haunting to joyous. I only know about three of the songs, but it was the best thing I’ve heard in a while. Also today I learn that unlike the Catholics, the Episcopalians still dress nicely to go to church.

Pumpkin Time Again

Things have gotten really busy lately, so before it recedes too far into the past, here’s a picture of this year’s Halloween pumpkins. As you can see, we were really lazy this year and just drew on them with magic marker rather than actually carving them. Like I said, really busy. Still they came out pretty cool. One is by Michelle, the other by me.

This year, inspired by her trip to the National Air Force Museum in Ohio, Michelle went trick-or-treating as a WWII era pilot, complete with bomber jacket and shades. Bonus: I found a 7-foot-tall blow-up Godzilla costume from the internet. Oh no, there goes Tokyo, go go! Also makes a good lawn ornament. Scary stuff.

The Devil You Don’t Know

I recently had to turn down an offer for a bank job. It was tempting – it seemed like a very cool project, right in the sweet spot of my skillset, a combination of front-end and full-stack, of JavaScript, Java and API design, on the same scale as what I’d been doing in Platform Engineering, and a good opportunity to learn about the finance industry.

However, the pay wasn’t great, no better that I’m making now. But the real problem was it was thru a headhunter. All seemed okay until the bank decided they wanted me and the headhunter made me an offer. When it seemed like an offer was in the offing they actually asked “should I just accept whatever offer they make?” Seriously? Then he came to me with the offer and wanted me to say yes on the spot.

Naturally I had questions and concerns. It was a temp-to-hire position, so the main issues were around the move to the staff position. Jeannie was in a similar situation a year ago: they told her it’d be a six month contract-to-hire, but then they dragged it out for a year, and then when they offered her a staff position the salary was lower than what she’d been promised. I told all this to the headhunter (same agency btw), that what I really care about is the staff position, the temp position is just a speed bump, and I wanted to negotiate the terms of the staff position upfront. He’d mentioned a 3 to 6 month contract and a VP level staff position. Imagine that, me bank VP! And my kids’ friends all think I’m a hippie. But dude wouldn’t offer anything more solid than his “expectation”. When I pushed he wouldn’t budge, nor commit to anything firm. Dude insisted I give him answer by the next morning. The time came and went. Meanwhile I talked to the guys at the bank directly, and they were talking about up to 18 months as a contractor and an as-yet-undetermined staff title.

So I had to pass on that one. Headhunter dude was then like “well if you change your mind let me know.”

Plus the commute was kinda long anyway. Ah well.

One More Time

And so the endless summer slacking comes to a close. We ended with a nice trip to the Maryland beaches. Nature hikes, water parks, swimming in the ocean, a couple fancy dinners, very nice. Jeannie and I are discovering we all have more fun if we let the kids go off on their own. The traffic was terrible both ways, but we had some good tunes. Jeannie bought some old CDs by the Canadian power trio Triumph, which I hadn’t heard in years, but still stand up quite well.

The kids are finally back to school tomorrow. Google wants to set up another phone meeting, presumably to either tell my goodbye or bring me in for round three. If it goes well I’d like to get back into doing R&D. My hope dark-horse hope is to become their in-house expert on computational origami. Trying to figure out how to pitch that they need one of those.

Endless Summer Slacking

I just got back from a fun and relaxing camping trip. Perfect weather, lots of jamming on guitars, canoeing, swimming in the lake, cooking of fire, just great. Back home again now, doing all kinds of stuff. Since Labor Day is late this year it feels like we get an extra week of summer. Still one more week until the kids go back to school.

Some happy news! Gus back playing the drums again and the Left Hook is back in full swing. We’ve had a couple rehearsals at my house now, with him on his electronic kit. Good to have the group jamming once more. Going back to the studio and real drums next week. In our hiatus the rest of band spent our time working on arrangements and vocal harmonies, so the level of playing is increasing. We also added five or six new songs to the set. We’re actively working on bookings gigs now. We have a bunch of irons in the fire, and one confirmed date – our triumphant return to the Fisherman’s Net in October. More on that as the time grows near.

I’ve integrated the bench press into my workout. This enabled me to drop some other exercises so the total length of the workout remains the same. I’ve been going up in weight rather conservatively, but I’m up to 200 pounds now, in two sets of eight reps each. I can feel it more in my elbows and my ribs than anywhere else. I’m also up to 8 pullups.

Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago I got a call from Google, trying to recruit me as a software engineer. I passed level one with the recruiter, and it was onto level two, a tech interview over the phone. They sent me a packet with stuff to prepare. Man that company has alot of attitude, alot of hubris, but not very, um, mature. Seem to take it for granted you’ll be absolutely gobsmacked knocked out that they want to talk to you. Selling points include “we have an ice cream truck on the 8th floor of our office!” Then on the topic of how to dress they say “dress however you feel comfortable, but remember hygiene is important.”

They had some advice on what you’d need to know, so I spent a week studying up on all kinds of stuff I haven’t really used much since college: directed and undirected graphs, binary search trees, heaps and stacks and hashes, matrix math, sorting algorithms, big-O notation, and a bunch of more general stuff on Java language and systems architecture. Google must be hiring alot right now because twice that week I came across someone’s post for a Google tech interview cheat sheet. I made my own notes, but they’re so dense it wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. In the process I came across a good approach for representing the state of a piece of folded paper if ever get back to working on Foldinator.

The day before the camping trip the interview came, and they didn’t ask me about any of that stuff. Instead the topic was serialization/deserialization. The format is they ask you to write a program off the top of your head, and as you go they put in more requirements. I did well, solved the problem and had a good discussion and all. But was I knock-your-socks-off awesome enough for Google? I guess we’ll see; they’re supposed to let me know in a week or so if I advance to round three. It sounds like that’s more of the same, but on site and with five back-to-back sessions in a row.

More Summer

Travelling is mainly done for now, and we’re into the long back stretch of summertime. The fun continues with a new adventure every week. Last weekend my parents were in town for a visit, which was really great, barbeque and storytelling. Then this weekend Jeannie and I went up to Connecticut to visit a friend and splash in his pool and ride in his motorboat and go tubin’ on the Connecticut River. Wicked fun.

In between I took the girls out to the beach, Jones Beach on Long Island – on a Monday. Last few years I was only ever able to go on the weekend, but this time there was no one there, totally awesome.

I also bought a new weight set. About a year ago I added some tricep and lat exercises to my workout, as well as pullups, and my arms and shoulders have never felt better. But only I have dumbbells for weights and I’ve gone as far as I can go without a bench press. I looked online and went to several sporting goods stores but couldn’t find a good bench press rack. It was important to get a rack with a safety bar cuz I don’t have a spotter. Then I went craigslist to look for weights, figuring used weights are just as good but alot cheaper, and found this guy in Queens who deals in new and used gym equipment. Went to get a stack of weights and got a rack and bar while I was at it. Bada-bing bada-boom!

Left Hook Videos, Part II

I created a bunch of videos for the Dudley’s gig, including some new medleys and some whole songs: Domino, Hold On I’m Coming/Soul Man, Knock on Wood/Get Ready, In the Midnight Hour/Mustang Sally, and Them Changes/I Got You. Looks like a heavy concentration on the soul side of the set. Have to balance it out with more rockers next time. Meanwhile here’s the link:

http://zingman.com/music/lefthook/vids/dudleys1505/

There’s a pretty good amount of overlap between these and the FN set, so the next step is decide which ones we want to link on the web site. Coming soon. Also I’ve started making a CD from the show so we can use it as a tool to book more gigs. Onwards and upwards!

Summer Kick-Off

Hi, I’m back. Been busy traveling and other stuff, getting an early start on my summer. I went upstate to visit my brother Martin and then on to the Adirondacks to see my good friend Mark for a few days. Nice just to disconnect from everything and spend a few days on my own. Martin and family are doing well. Abbie is now past two. Out of baby phase and into little kid phase. She’s trying hard to keep up with her big brother, who is trying hard to keep up with *his* big brother. Meanwhile out in the yard they have chickens and ducks and guinea fowl running around and squonking all the time. Great fun.

I haven’t been up to the mountains in a while and it was good to reconnect with nature and to see Mark too. The weather was beautiful and bugs not too bad, so we did a bunch of hiking and canoeing. Very peaceful, just awesome. Mark is doing well too, busy running his own business building web sites for everyone (it seems) in the region. On my last night there I sat in with Mark’s band Crackin’ Foxy. They do old-timey gypsy jazz, and are quite good. Two female singers for an Andrews-sisters-ish sound, two guitarists and a standup bass, with Mark on banjo and ukulele. I played soprano sax and had a great time.

On the drive home coming out of the mountains I wrote a new song.

Lizzy had a concert at her school for her a cappella group and the school band (obviously not performing together). They were really excellent, even surprisingly so. In fact the a cappella group got invited to sing the national anthem at a Yankee game next weekend!

On Memorial Day weekend we had a big ol’ barbecue and had a bunch of friends over. Everyone is so busy all the time so it’s good to see people and hang out. Also went rollerblading for the first time this season, and took the Mustang out for a nice long ride. In between lots of yardwork (today it finally got actually *hot*), working on music, my web site and of course origami for my new book. I now have 16 models designed, including a brand-new Quadrocoptor, and two new models diagrammed and the diagrams for two more well begun. Only a month until convention and lots to do!

Double Play

Last Saturday nite Left Hook played our second gig, at Dudley’s Bar and Marina. It was an excellent time. Some friends came out to see us (Hi Joyce and Lisa!), and at some very enthusiastic drunks at the bar. We played pretty much the same show as the first gig, with a few substitutions here and there. As with the first gig we only played about half our third set, but this time we decided to extend the second set rather then break and come back. Overall the band was both tighter and looser. More precise, more relaxed, more musical. According to our singer my sax playing was particularly smoking that night.

Audio and video coming soon. Meanwhile here’s some pictures from the show.

We don’t have any gigs lined up for the rest of the month, so now we’re gonna learn a bunch of new tunes, and get together some audio and video clips, put together a press kit and systematically pursue a higher level of gigs. The goal is to become a kick-ass bar band, and I think we have what it takes to do it.