It’s been a busy few weeks. The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there. Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit. That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.
I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November. Also got a new computer and been moving into that. One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros. It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.
And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills. Ping me if you fit the bill.
Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions. More on that as it, uh, unfolds.
Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.
Lastly, been working on music. I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place. Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape. The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix. EQ helps but not enough. When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range. I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs. Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone. Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.
It’s been cold and rainy the past few days. I got in quite a few good bike rides in September, but now summer is definitely over. Been busy with work, new origami, the Jukebox, setting up new computers, and the recording project. One plus side, I saw two excellent concerts last week.
The first was The Levin Brothers at the Jazz Arts Forum, a cool little jazz club in Tarrytown. The Levin Brothers are Mark on piano and Tony on bass, along with a drummer and, for this tour flute player Ali Ryerson fronting the group. We were seated right up front, so close to the bandstand that I had to move Tony’s music stand and some cords on the floor so I had room to sit down. They played a combination of originals and jazz interpretations of pop and rock songs, including Steely Dan’s Aja and the traditional Scarborough Fair. The tone was mostly laid back and tasty, occasionally reaching out into more abstract and experimental territory. The flute was unusual choice for lead instrument, and fit perfectly. She was an excellent player, great tone, phrasing and soloing, and gave the group a unique sound and brought it all up to another level.
Tony Levin is of course a world famous bass player, and equally famous for pioneering the use of the Chapman Stick. For this gig, however, there was no stick. He stuck to an electric upright bass, some kind of Steinberger I think, and and old Gibson bass guitar with a star-spangled paintjob that might well date from 1976. His tone and playing were much more restrained than with some other groups, but sounded great and tasteful.
After the show the band was hanging out at the bar and we got to meet them. Jeannie had a picture on her phone from when we saw King Crimson last summer. Tony liked that and said it’s good we were there, cuz that’s probably the last time Crimson will play North America. I mentioned the first time I saw Tony was with Peter Gabriel back in the 1980s’. He said Gabriel is gonna be doing a major tour next year, very exciting. I said to ask Pete if he’d do Carpet Crawlers.
The other show was Sungazer at Gramercy Theater in the city. The venue was pretty cool, smallish but not that small, maybe a former vaudeville or movie theater with an open floor in the front half and raised seating in the back, and a bar on each side in the middle. There was an opening act that I’d never heard of, but who were really good, called Childish Jibes, fronted by an attractive, dark-haired singer with a great voice and a sort of Amy Winehouse or Adele vibe, complete with a beehive hairdo and boots so high she could barely dance. The band were sort of a blend soul funk and rock and pop with a unique sound. Excellent players, great songs and arrangements, really polished. I hope they make it big.
Sungazer is sort of a jazz-adjacent jam band like Lettuce or Galactic, but less funky and way more proggy, with elements of metal, techno and jazz fusion. They favor dense, complex arrangements with out meters and multilayered polyrhythms and subdivisions of time. The drummer and leader of the group is a virtuoso of this kind of playing, and his solo was just mind blowing. The synth player had his own devil’s mellotron with samples from videogames and cartoons and things. The bassist and guitarist were prone to unison shredding, and the bassist augmented the low end with a sub-bass synth reminiscent of old Genesis. The sax playing resembled something like Morphine or King Crimson more than what you’d typically recognize as jazz.
All in all totally my kind of weird. It’s funny, Jeannie and I were very likely the oldest people in the crowd. I wonder how a band like that finds an audience in this day and age.
We ended the summer on a chill note for the long weekend. We’ve been doing alot of traveling the last few weeks, including our recent tour of Cape Cod and Boston, followed by a trip up to Buffalo a week ago to take Michelle to school.
This was our third trip up to Buffalo this summer (Jeannie’s fourth). We got a car for Michelle this semester, so she and Jeannie drove her car and I followed in mine. The move-in went smoothly and Michelle’s new dorm is quite nice. She’s in a suite with three friends from last year. Very much echoing the pattern of Lizzy four years ago.
Lizzy met us on campus and gave us all a ride in her new car, and took us thru the Delta Sonic car wash. I’d forgotten how much of a thing Delta Sonic is up there. It’s a fun ride but maybe could use an animatronic Johnny Depp in a pirate outfit at the end. Afterwards we went out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant that used to be a Denny’s where I worked as a dishwasher for a couple weeks as a teenager.
I also spent a bunch of time talking with parents, which is nice. One day I went for a walk around the lake with my dad, and he told me a bunch of stories about how his first few years living in Canada, how he decided to go to college at age 25, and what it took to apply and what happened when he got in. It turned out him and a German fellow named Siegfried got the two highest scores in English on the entrance exam, despite both of them being non-native speakers (English is actually my dad’s third language). When the professor asked him how could this be, my dad said, “Well, I studied.” Also something about the French being salty about the Concorde many years later.
Back home, we caught a show at the Blue Note last week, with Jeff Tain Watts on the drums and Daryl Jones on bass with members of the Rolling Stones touring band doing a tribute to Charlie Watts, mainly jazz and blues interpretations of Stones songs. Many were more enjoyable than the actual Rolling Stones versions to me. The great Randy Brecker was the special guest on trumpet. I haven’t seen him play in many years, probably since the Return of the Brecker Brothers in the 1990’s. He’s looking old and rotund and when he came up on stage maybe even not sure what he was doing there. But when he put the horn to his lips, he’s one of those guys who just lifted the whole band to another level. It’s like have Kate Blanchett in your movie playing and elf queen.
So after all that running around we decided to mainly stay at home over Labor Day and catch up on random tasks. We went on one day trip, out to Fire Island, condensing a whole beach weekend into a single day. It was cool in the morning, so we parked near the beach and went on a nature trail swamp walk up to an historic light house and climbed up to the top, which gave us an excellent view of Long Island and the ocean. The next leg of the walk took us to a quaint little town called Kismet, which feels like a real-life Hobbiton. It’s full of little beach cottages but has no roads, only sidewalks, because it’s only accessible by foot, bicycle or ferry. We had an excellent lunch of seafood and frozen drinks and lingered a while. When we got back the beach the weather had warmed up so we hung out and went for a swim in the ocean. The threat of sharks was gone, but there were some dead jellyfish floating around. I got stung by one, just a little on my arm. After that it was time to go.
For some reason I’ve been listening recently to alot early 90’s alternative metal and ska bands like Fishbone, No Doubt, Mr. Bungle, De La Soul, Soul Coughing, Cibbo Matto, and Soundgarden. Not all the same genre I know, but there does seem to be some kind of center of gravity there.
Among my recent musical projects has to be remix and remaster my 2018 album Elixr. I was listening to it back in the spring, and although it was a big step forward for me in terms of musical production at the time, my mixing chops have improved substantially over the last few years and I decided I could do it better. In the end I decided to get a small batch of CD’s made, and so it took some time to do the artwork and get it printed and all that. Now the new version of the record is on all the major streaming services, so go ahead and check it out!
I wrote a country song! Well sort of at least. The second in my guitar singer-songwriter experiments, My Ol’ Brokedown Truck is pretty much a traditional country song, although with different lyrics and chord voicings it might be something like a jazz standard from the great American songbook. I wrote it around Christmastime when I was visiting my parents and my Mum asked me to explain to her Nashville notation. I did so by way of demonstration, starting by writing down the title and eight bars of chord changes, and then a bridge, and suddenly I had the beginnings of a song. The lyrics also came quite quickly and naturally, and I liked it well enough to to finish it.
I recorded a basic track with guitar, bass drums and vocal. The guitar sound may take liberties with the conventions of the genre, bringing in some energy of bands like Cake or the The Black Keys. The vocal has a low and high harmony part, and I decided it’d sound better with a female voice doing the high harmony. I asked my sister-in-law Mary, who has been in a number of singing groups over the years, if she’d like to do the part. She came in and nailed it, and lifted the song to a whole ‘nuther level.
The hardest thing was to get the right sound for the solo on the intro and middle eight. A sax was definitely not appropriate, and I don’t play pedal steel guitar or fiddle, or banjo or mandolin, and the chords modulate so a harmonica won’t work. I experimented with various synthesizer sounds, trying to harken back to a rare moment in pop music where pedal steel guitars played side by side with analog synths, as exemplified by songs Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Billy Joel’s The Great Suburban Showdown, or Jackson Browne’s The Load-Out. But the right tone eluded me. I ended up using a melodica (a funny little keyboard instrument that you blow into) run thru a boxy amp simulator, spring reverb and tremolo effect.
Enjoy!
…
My Ol’ Brokedown Truck
My brokedown truck and my rotten luck
Have left me here stuck by the side of the road
With my bleeding heart I will make a new start
But first I must get my body home
We’ve made many miles together
Sure in sunny and stormy weather
Well I could trade ‘er in for some shiny new tin
But you’ll never find peace while you roam
(solo)
We’ve rode many roads together
Fast through foul and fair weather
And I might go far in a brand new sports car
But then how can I carry the load?
So I’ll wait here stuck with my rotten luck
And my ol’ brokedown truck
– John Szinger, 2022
Slope began life as a jazz song with my pre-pandemic group Haven Street, written by our bass player Jay, and appeared on our record. I wrote a lyric for it, but we didn’t do vocals in that group, and I’ve never been much of a fan of vocalese anyway, unless it’s Ella Fitzgerald. So for this record I changed it from a jazz style into an old-timey blues, with a drop-tuned guitar now carrying the main riff rather than a standup bass.
The arrangement is fairly sparse, with just a single vocal, guitar, bass and drum. To finish it off I added a bit of Fender Rhodes, and of course a smokey bluesy sax. I also added real drums doing brushes on the snare, since I have no way to create that using midi and samples.
Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope
Just when you think that life’s looking up
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Scamblin’ up that slope
Tumblin’ down that slope
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope
We finally had a weekend at home after all that travel. The weather is hot and sunny. Back to yardwork, backyard barbecues and making fires in the fire pit. Running the sprinkler most every day. Last Sunday Jeannie and I did a long bike ride on the South County Trailway, from Yonkers up to Ardsley and back. Very nice, wooded, flat and smooth.
Around this time last year I created a playlist of 80 Favorite Songs from the 80’s to enjoy while hanging out in the yard. Last weekend two of my neighbors were playing competing classic rock playlists, which inspired me to create a playlist of 77 Favorite Songs from the 70’s. It turned out the be pretty interesting. It’s organized more or less chronologically, which helps to see how trends come and go, and some juxtapositions of different things around the same time. I limited it to one song per artist, and since it was the era of long songs, I excluded full-album-side multi-song suites, or parts thereof.
The early part is dominated by album rock, including early prog, with lots to 7- or even 10-minutes songs. The middle part is thinner, and a bit of a transitional period, with a pretty deep foray into jazz fusion. Toward the end there’s a lot going on again, as funk and disco emerge, as well as new wave and a variety of other styles. Even though this playlist has fewer songs than my 80’s one, its about an hour and a half longer. Anyway, here it is. Enjoy!
1. Woodstock – Crosby Stills Nash and Young (1970) 2. Wah-Wah – George Harrison 3. American Pie – Don McClean 4. War Pigs – Black Sabbath 5. Child In Time – Deep Purple 6. Take a Pebble – Emerson Lake and Palmer 7. Miles Runs the Voodoo Down – Mile Davis 8. Fire and Rain – Blood Sweat and Tears 9. Box of Rain – The Grateful Dead 10. I’m Your Captain / Closer to Home – Grand Funk Railroad 11. Layla – Derek and the Dominos
12. Superstar – The Carpenters (1971) 13. L.A. Woman – The Doors 14. The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys – Traffic 15. Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? – The Rolling Stones 16. When the Levee Breaks – Led Zeppelin 17. Heart of the Sunrise – Yes 18. Wind-Up – Jethro Tull
19. Watcher of the Skies – Genesis (1972) 20. A Hit by Varèse – Chicago 21. School’s Out – Alice Cooper 22. Summer Breeze – Seals and Croft 23. Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
24. Undun – The Guess Who (1973) 25. Jessica – The Allman Brothers Band 26. Rosalita – Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band 27. The Great Gig in the Sky – Pink Floyd 28. The Real Me – The Who 29. What is Hip? – Tower of Power 30. Watermelon Man – The Head Hunters 31. Spain – Return to Forever 32. Birds of Fire – Mahavishnu Orchestra 33. Frankenstein – Edgar Winter 34. Right Place Wrong Time – Dr. John
35. Back Home Again – John Denver (1974) 36. Crime of the Century – Supertramp 37. Apostrophe (‘) – Frank Zappa 38. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Pt 1. – King Crimson 39. Whatever Gets You Through the Night – John Lennon
40. Band on the Run – Paul McCartney (1975) 41. I’m In Love With My Car – Queen 42. Never Been Any Reason – Head East 43. By-Tor and the Snow Dog – Rush 44. Some Skunk Funk – The Brecker Bros.
45. Give Up the Funk – Parliament (1976) 46. The Boys are Back in Town – Thin Lizzy 47. (Don’t Fear) The Reaper – Blue Öyster Cult 48. Peace of Mind – Boston 49. Carry On Wayward Son – Kansas 50. Song Within a Song – Camel 51. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – Gordon Lightfoot 52. Miami 2017 – Billy Joel 53. Magic Man – Heart 54. Dancing Queen – ABBA
55. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap – AC/DC (1977) 56. Threshold / Jet Airliner – Steve Miller Band 57. Aja – Steely Dan 58. Contusion – Stevie Wonder 59. Solsbury Hill – Peter Gabriel 60. Slip Slidin’ Away – Paul Simon 61. Watching the Detectives – Elvis Costello 62. Three Little Birds – Bob Marley 63. Paradise by the Dashboard Light – Meat Loaf 64. You Make Loving Fun – Fleetwood Mac 65. Feels So Good – Chuck Mangione
66. Boogie Oogie Oogie – A Taste of Honey (1978) 67. Shadow Dancing – Andy Gibb 68. Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? – Rod Stewart 69. Mister Blue Sky – Electric Light Orchestra 70. Life’s Been Good – Joe Walsh 71. In the Dead of Night – U.K. 72. Runnin’ with the Devil – Van Halen 73. Walking on the Moon – The Police
74. Can You Picture That? – Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem (1979) 75. The Devil Went Down to Georgia – Charlie Daniels Band 76. Funkytown – Lipps, Inc. 77. Rapper’s Delight – Sugar Hill Gang
More summer, more busy these days. The weather has been beautiful. One night last weekend we built a fire in our fire pit and hung out on the patio and considered what song we might use to break Vecna’s curse. Last summer I made a playlist of 80 favorite 80’s songs, and now I’m thinking of making a new playlist of 77 favorite 70’s songs for this summer.
I edited up some highlight form the the Spacecats gig. I’m going to update my web site soon to feature of few of the best ones, but for now, you can see the whole set here:
I got out for a bike ride five days last week. I mostly go around our neighborhood, which is kinda hilly and some streets have alot of cars. Sometimes to a local place called Nature Study Woods, which is mountain biking trails, and not particularly well maintained. The steep parts tend to be washed out and stony, and the low spots muddy. Also I tend to go on fairly short rides – a half hour to an hour, and usually go as fast as possible.
All in all Jeannie doesn’t enjoy this style of riding, but we wanted to start doing some biking together.
So on Sunday Jeannie took our bikes out to Jones Beach and biked along the scenic Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway. It’s a great bike path, smooth and flat, that runs the length of the island, out from the main beach, through as series of smaller beaches, saltwater wildlife refuges, and the occasional marina, restaurant or bar. We went out a little over seven miles then turned around, for a total of fifteen miles or so. On the way back there was a pretty consistent headwind, but it was a very doable and fun ride. We had a lunch of ice cream and clam strips, then went out to the beach, but it was too cold for swimming. The water was unusually calm and there were lots of seashells. Also tons of giant container ships out at see, queued up to get into New York harbor, like I’ve never seen before. There’s usually maybe two or three, but this time there was over a dozen.
I also got the mustang on the road over the weekend, and continued with the yardwork. This time is was doing the edging on the driveway and front walk. Still to go is the walk around the back of the house, and the patio. It seems everything has grown in quite alot this spring, and needs an extra level of cutting back. Also I’ve never seen so many bunny rabbits and chipmunks in our neighborhood, nor heard so many songbirds.
Lastly, I’m continuing with doing origami and preparing for the convention, which starts this Friday. My two dodecahedron star balls are nearly complete, but it’s taking some work to finish them. They’re single-sheet polyhedra, a very advance form of origami, and closing off and locking the bottom where the edges come together is a nontrivial design challenge. I’ve also been experimenting with a new design called the Space Cat, a variation on my Sophie the Cat, with a midcentury modern look and proportions. Hopefully will get there and have a few new pieces for my exhibit.
Meanwhile, I’m teaching a couple classes, and agreed to pre-record them for people who are attending the convention remotely. This process grew out of last year’s online-only convention, in which all classes were taught live as Zoom calls. This year we’re recording Zoom sessions, with a camera pointing down at the work as it’s being folded. I kind of view this a run-thru, a rehearsal for the real class, and good opportunity to make sure I know the model and can teach it. My first class, Sophie the Cat, went off without a hitch, totally great. For my second class my Five-Banded Armadillo, I somehow skipped a stepped and messed of the proportions of the bands, which are created by pleating. I realized my mistake after I did the collapse and it was too late to undo, so I had to just roll with it and adjust the proportions as I finished the model. All in all it still turned out in the end, and I’m sure to get it right in the actual class.
Well, Spacecats had our first gig Saturday night, at the Alternative Medicine Brewing Company in Mount Vernon. It went really well. The band sounded great. The crowd dug us, and the owner wants to have us back, and is talking about putting together a regular jazz night.
The room itself is pretty big, although half of it, behind the band, is where they brew the beer, and the other half, out in front is the bar. So the acoustics were good, with a large, boomy reverb. The bar provided a PA, which was very nice and saved us alot of trouble hauling and setting up our own.
We did a combination of jazz and funk, standards, originals, and interpretations of rock and pop songs. I was definitely happy with my playing, and the sound of the group, and everything musically. We really came together as a band, focused and leveled up the last few weeks.
We played two sets of just about an hour each. Here’s the set list.
Buzzy Blue (Szinger)
All the Things You Are
Mister Magic
Heavy Skies (Szinger)
I Hear a Rhapsody
Walking on the Moon
Pour Me a Fifth (Duetchman)
Some Skunk Funk
Peg
Dr. Pluto (Szinger)
Sunny
Minority
Atonement Blues (Szinger)
Havona
Dolphin Dance
Lift Off (Szinger)
Cape Verdean Blues
You Can’t Get What You Want (‘Till You Know What You Want)
Some of these originals I played in previous bands, altough the arrangement and sound have been updated. Dr. Pluto is all-new, a funk jam written for this group based around a bluesy bass line, which Ken plays with a wah-wah effect. Pour Me a Fifth is also new, a jazz waltz by our piano player Josh.
Watch this space for audio and video clips from the show, coming soon.
…
In other news, I finally finished trimming the hedges over the weekend. All in all it took five sessions over three weekends. This last one was all up on the ladder, including getting low-hanging boughs from the neighbor’s willow tree. Now we’re done for a while, but next it’s on to weeding and edging.
And, it’s origami crunch time. I’m trying to finish a few original models before the convention. This week it’s dodecahedron star balls. Watch this space for pics, coming soon.
So let’s see. I guess project dirt was completed a while ago and the new grass is well on its way to being grown in at this point. I’ve been mowing the lawn for several weeks now. We even did the first round of weeding, planting in the garden, and putting down mulch under the hedges. Next job will be trimming.
A couple weeks back I got up on a ladder to unclog the downspout of my gutter in one corner of my job. I used to have to get up there and clean out my gutters every year or so, when there were hundred-foot-tall trees all around my house. But one by one the trees got cut down and I didn’t have to do it for several years. This time instead of leaves and sticks, it was beads of whatever our roof shingles are made of. We got a new roof put on a couple years back, same time we installed our solar panels, and some of the material has worn off with the weather. Of all the jobs I do, this is the one I dislike the most, because of the potential danger of falling off the ladder twenty feet up. So far I’ve been careful and never met with any harm but you never know. Next time I’ll probably hire someone.
Now that the yardwork situation is under control, I’ve been trying to move forward with project furniture. I want to get a good armchair for the living room to replace the awful recliner we have, and a new coffee table and end tables, plus a new sectional sofa for the family room, and maybe and entertainment center too. By the end of the year, if possible. We started thinking about this at the beginning of the pandemic, but it turns out to be a kinda complicated research project, and there’s always something else to do, and every time we find something we think we like, it turns our to backordered for months. Nevertheless, it’s getting to the point where our kids have nicer furniture than us. So it’s time to get moving.
As the weather has been getting nicer, Jeannie and I have been spending more time outdoors. We’ve gone for a couple hikes, mostly at local places like Saxon Woods. I’ve also been getting on my bike alot more, averaging about three times a week this spring, and my strength, speed and endurance are increasing. My typical ride is pretty short, less than an hour, but the neighborhood is kinda hilly. My main ride these days is a loop into downtown Bronxville, then thru Chester Heights and back home. Also went to the Nature Study Woods once, but mostly it’s been too muddy cuz of the rain.
I’ve gotten the Mustang out on the road a few times. Even had to put a tankful of gas in it yesterday. So far it’s been running great. I want to get new tires put on it this spring. The tires I have are the ones from when I bought the car in 1997!
In the software realm, I’ve been working on several thing. One of which is the Origami USA convention scheduling tool. If you recall, I’m on the OUSA convention and web committees, as the person who creates the schedule of classes and events, and the one who writes the software to make that task easier. The last few years we haven’t had any in-person conventions. Last year we had a zoom convention, and I did the schedule for that. Along the way, I discarded the existing scheduling tool, basically a bunch of macros for MS Access, and wrote a web application in Drupal/PHP that integrates with the main web site and other tools. This year I enhanced the functionality in a few ways. First, I created a workflow to reschedule a class without having to first unschedule it then schedule it again. Second I added the capacity to sort the classes by name, to make it easier to find them. On the roadmap is the ability to sort and filter by a number of parameters including the class name, the teacher name, the class type, level of complexity, number of periods, etc. But Drupal and PHP are a serious pain to work with, so I’ll save these enhancements for a future convention.
Meanwhile I have a little over a month to get some new models completed, get and exhibit together and decide what to teach. I have a big pile of half-finished models and an even bigger backlog of ideas. But for the zoom conventions don’t really inspire me and I haven’t been doing that much folding lately. Luckily, this year’s convention is live and in person, at the Sheraton Hotel in NYC, the third weekend in June (I think). Should be alot of fun to reconnect with my origami friends, and hopefully I’ll have a bunch of cool new models.
Been working hard at my new consulting gig at Consumer Reports R&D Lab. Hard to believe I’ve been there three months already. They’ve just extended my contract to the end of the year, which is good news. My group is involved in this thing called the Digital Rights Protocol, which is designed to make it easier for consumers to exercise their rights to opt out of online data collection, tracking, etc., and easier for companies to comply with requests around these rights. We lead a consortium of startups involved in the internet privacy business, and last week we had the first end-to-end test of the Protocol with partners in various roles. Meanwhile Consumer reports is involved in several business-oriented capacities as well, so I am building a reference implementation of the DRP to live in our application ecosystem and provide a touchstone to our partners. Anyway, the end-to-end test was a big success, and now we’re planning out the next phase of development.
Meanwhile at my other big client, The Global Jukebox, we’re getting ready to roll out a new release to Live. This one has a new backend and a cutover to a new server, to get rid of a bunch of old headaches. Everything is all tested and ready to roll. All that remains now is to switch over the DNS server.
Lastly, my music projects proceed apace. Mary came over and laid down the vocal track for My Ol’ Breakdown Truck a week or so ago, and it came out great. Afterwards we went out for Mexican food. Now I have three songs mostly done, with the vocals, bass and guitar tracked and mixed. All that remains is the fine-tune the drum parts, and add a little keyboards and sax to fill things out. Also, Elixr – 2022 Remaster is vary much almost done; all that remains is one final listening back.
Now that my Thursday band has a name and a gig, the music has been rising to the occasion and getting more intense. Today we had a rehearsal where we really drilled down on some of the finer points of some of our songs, to really master the arrangements and make them our own.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed my Selmer Reference ’54 tenor sax, which I was so in love with, seems to have developed a leak somewhere, so the notes below low D don’t sound clearly and require alot of force to sound at all. Plus one of the mounting posts on the low C keyguard has come loose. So I need to find a new sax repair guy. The guy I’d been using for year – Virgil Scott – was up on Yonkers, only 10 minutes from my house. Sadly, he died of covid during the pandemic. My new guy is great, he’s out in Connecticut up new Massachusetts, almost two hour from here. So I need to find someone local.
For the time being I’ve switched back to playing my Selmer Mark VII, which I had worked on last summer. The low notes are clear and effortless, but best of all, I had the action set up, which it turns out makes a huge difference on tunes like Some Skunk Funk. I’d been struggling with playing that fast and cleanly on my other horn, and now the notes just roll right off. On the downside, I have to get used to this horn’s intonation again. And even worse, I’d been busting my ass to get good on the altissimo range on the tenor, and could get all the way up to the second high D, and play riffs up there. I was developing some real chops. On this horn, the embouchure required is completely different, so I’m back to square one.
