Category: People

David Levitt Running for US Senate

From time to time I give a shout out to my friends’ (usually art or software) projects, but here is something much more important. My friend, colleague and former professor David Levitt is running for US Senate as a progressive candidate in the state of California. David is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, forward-thinking, outspoken, principled, charismatic and warm-hearted. He’s a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and among his accomplishments are contributions to the development of virtual reality, interactive music and social media. He’s also activist, founding director of OccupyGovernment.org and founding member of BeYourGovernment.org. We need more people like him in government. Go David, good for you!

I no longer live in California, so I can’t vote for him, but if you do, you can! And no matter where you live, you can contribute to his campaign or to OccupyGovernment.org.

News article on David Levitt’s candidacy:
http://current.com/groups/news-blog/93679257_citizen-candidate-to-challenge-dianne-feinstein-in-senate-race.htm

Interview with David:
http://bcove.me/53w95j2b

Links to orgs:
http://occupygovernment.org
http://beyourgovernment.org

And of course his campaign home page:
http://www.levitt2012.org

Cold Snap

Last weekend was a little ski trip up to the Berkshires with our friends Seth and Cathy and their daughter Erin. The trip coincided with a cold snap – zero degrees when we woke up Sunday morning! It got up to maybe 10. There’s been no snowfall this year but they’ve been making snow on the mountain. Conditions were pretty good, mainly cuz it was so cold. We had a great day skiing but we didn’t stay out too long. For once, though, the cold didn’t seem to bother me, and I stayed out on the mountain longer than anyone in my fur-lined tuque. I got in a good 10 runs.

Apart from the weekend this has been a mild winter and so far I’ve been feeling really good. Hope it lasts ‘til spring. The days are already starting to get longer.

The trip was a really good time and we stayed up late playing games with the kids. As an added bonus Michelle went with Erin to her horseback riding lesson Monday and got to help groom the horse and ride him too! She was absolutely thrilled.

The next day it was back to work, and the kids are already deep into school again. Tuesday night was Lizzy’s school band concert. The band sounded really good. Lizzy and the girl sitting next to her sound particularly good as the 1st flute section. It’s the same band director as the old school, which is nice cuz he’s a cool guy and a good teacher. It’s much larger ensemble now, forty kids compared to maybe a dozen. And that’s just the experienced band. The beginner group, including Michelle, will play in the spring concert and double the size!

‘Tis The Season

Been doing lots of holiday stuff the last couple weeks. A trip to the museum, two family holiday parties, three kid’s performing arts shows, and four work-related parties, town halls and similar functions. Whew.

I took the kids to the AMNH a couple weeks ago, and we had a great time. Spent a long time with the dinosaurs and the frogs, and in the hall of minerals. The Origami Tree is in the south hall this year, since they’re doing renovations in the lower hall on the Central Park side. My elephants were featured in the “folding the museum” display at the base of the tree, and they saved a number of my models from years past, which are in the tree.

I also folded some models – a dragon and a moose – as ornaments for the tree at the kids’ school.

Yesterday was the big family xmas party for Jeannie’s dad’s side of the family. A good time and great to catch up with all for Long Island cousins. Today was a party for her mom’s side. Had to skip that one to get some things done.

Our kids a in this after school theatre program, in which they do singing and dancing and acting. They had two different shows last week, one for the younger kids and one for the bigger ones, and it’s pretty impressive the level of the performance. Later this week there’s some kind of holiday play. Lizzy is an angel and gets to say some lines.

There’s been a lot of end-of year holiday parties, for my immediate team, for the platform group, and for the whole company. Our corporate parties tend to be rather boozy affairs, but I survived alright. I’ve been there long enough that I have friends in all different divisions, so it was good to catch up. Then there was a town hall in which our corporate overlords are telling us out of one side of their mouth how the company had a great year and made tons of money, and out of the other how internet piracy is destroying our business and killing innocent people and must be stopped. Umm, yeah.

All this has been great fun, but it’s really hard to get stuff done. Looking forward to taking a few days off this week and getting caught up.

Back in the New York Groove

I was sick with a cold Thanksgiving week, and it took me a while to recover. My energy was really low the last couple of weeks and I mainly worked from home and even (gasp!) took a couple of sick days. But the last few days I’ve been feeling better and I’m back at work. It’s good to have my strength and energy back. Been catching up on a few things.

I finished the diagrams for origami Inchworm. Now it’s on the my new Butterfly II and my Rocketship. Hoping to re-establish a groove with that.

My neighbor lent me a stack of Bob Dylan albums a while back. Believe it or not it takes me a long time to listen to music, because the first time I hear it, I want to listen to the record the whole way thru with no distractions. It’s harder to find the time than you might think. I did manage to get thru a few when I was sick, and only have one to go now, but it’s a double live album. Listening to it now.

I finally got together with Blick to jam over the weekend. It’s sounding really good and fun as always. I love that he’s really focused on working out vocal harmonies and making them sound good. I think my singing is better after the Cabaret show; all that horn playing got my breath support back in shape. I want is to get together with the Cabaret rhythm section soon, but it’s the scheduling question makes it hard. And I think it’s about time to start looking for gigs.

My only issue is that I want to spend more time on originals, because they take longer to develop. But this is partly my fault. Every time we get together we spend the first part of the session just jamming songs that one or both of us know, rather than working on getting our originals tight. And I keep calling tunes. This time we tried to figure out a good Zeppelin and Floyd song to do. It’s harder to pick one than you might think, since both groups have lots of long songs with many complicated parts that may not come across stripped down. Ah well.

And All That Jazz

The big news here is that this weekend was the ICS cabaret show. This is a big fundraiser for the kids school and I volunteered to play in the band. And I must say it was a smashing success and alot of fun!

It’s a pretty big group, with about 20 singers and 4 in the band, plus a chorus of a dozen or so high school kids who are alumni of the ICS middle school. It’s largely parents and faculty of the school. The core of the group have been together for a long time, and used to do a similar thing at their old church. Lizzy’s math teacher, Michelle, is the show director, and also has 2 kids at the school. She has a powerful, brassy voice like Streisand. Her husband Mike is musical director and plays piano. He’s excellent at that style music. Another couple, Kristen and Brian, are stage manager and artistic director, and both excellent singers too. And yet another couple, Dean and Susan are two more outstanding singers, although I don’t think they have anything to do with the school. In fact there are alot of really good singers in the group, and the general level is quite high. It’s really interesting too, hearing how different everyone’s individual voice and sound and style are, yet how they all blend.

For me it’s totally worked out. I got to dust off my horn and play in a live show, which I haven’t done in years. I got to meet a bunch of parents at the school, and a bunch of local musicians. The band was made up entirely of guys named Mike and John. The drummer (John) and guitar player (Mike), who also plays bass, are both very good, and cool, and want to get together and jam. So I may have found my rhythm section for my rock project with Erik.

Everyone seemed to agree that having a horn in the band raised the whole level of the music, so I’m very happy about that. I made plenty of mistakes to be sure, but mostly they weren’t obvious, and I nailed all my solos. Not bad considering I had to learn 40 tunes in a month, and pretty much put it together all on the stand, and this after having barely played my horn at in ages. Some of the songs I only played for the first time at dress rehearsal. I had a CD and some of the sheet music ahead of time, but the two often didn’t match, and then when I got to rehearsal Mike was doing something altogether different. Keys were changed, parts were skipped or repeated, all the usual stuff. They were all to worried about getting their own parts together to pay much attention to me. Everything I was reading was in concert key, so I had to transpose +2 in addition to whatever transposition Mike did for the singer. I played tenor and soprano sax, and some keyboards too, mainly organ, accordion, and some brass and string sounds. In rehearsals the hall was cold so keeping the horns in tune was an issue too.

The week of the shows we had rehearsals every night. The dress rehearsal on Thursday was the first full run thru with everybody. I took Friday off work to be well rested for the show, but then Thursday I caught a cold walking to work in the rain, so I pretty much stayed in bed the whole day Friday. I was actually pretty under the weather most of the weekend, but I’d take a few Sudafed and a shot of whiskey before showtime and was able to keep my energy up, um, in classic jazz musician style.

Friday was opening night. It went really well. In fact I’m amazed given how rough the dress rehearsal was. I got a standing ovation for my solo on Scenes From and Italian Restaurant. I’m the hero of the hour of Eastchester housewives, who it seems are all big Billy Joel fans. We did another show Friday night and a third Sunday afternoon. In the middle of the first set on Saturday a key on my horn broke, but I was able to fix it with some tape at intermission. Now that it’s all over, it feels like it came and went really fast. It was a great time, but I’m still recovering from my cold. The house full of the sound of the kids singing show tunes, particularly Anything You Can Do and The Song That Goes Like This.

Set 1:

The Nicest Kids in Town (Hairspray) – Brian and Company
Key -1, tenor sax. Lots of key changes and page turning. Brian has a great, booming voice and energy.

Anything You Can Do (Annie Get Your Gun) – Janet and Phil
Tenor sax. Followed the melody and added some extra flourishes.

Goodnight, My Someone (The Music Man) – Jen and Francesca
Ballad, laid out. Francesca is a girl at the school who is a talented pianist.

Seventy-Six Trombones (The Music Man) – Roy
Tenor sax. Followed the melody and added some extra flourishes. Turns out Roy is my neighbor, and my kids know his, but I only got to know him in the course of doing this show. His daughter Jacklyn was part of the Alumni chorus.

Somewhere (West Side Story) – Corrine
Key -2, soprano sax. There was a violin line in the score that I was able to pick up.

New York, New York – Brian, Dean, and Mike D.
Tenor sax. This is Leonard Bernstein song. A challenging part, great fun to play, but lot of page turning and faking it, um, improvising. The three best male singers.

Try To Remember – Bob
Soprano sax, just on the “follow follow” bit.

Tradition (Fiddler on the Roof) – The Papas, Mamas, Sons and Daughters
Soprano sax, mainly Klezmerirific noodling and picking up riffs from the score. Reminded me of the scene in the movie Bird where Charlie Parker was playing at a Jewish wedding. This was a big, fun production number.

If My Friends Could See Me Now (Sweet Charity) – Linda
Key +5, tenor sax. Mainly double the melody, plus an intro part. A nice jazzy number. Linda is a really good singer for this kind of song.

Happiness (You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown) – Alumni
Ballad, laid out.

I’ll Never Fall In Love Again – Julieann
Key -2, soprano sax. There’s a nice intro. Burt Bacharach was a philosopher.

Sit Down You’re Rockin’ the Boat (Guys and Dolls) – Brian and Company
Key -5, tenor sax. Another big fun production number.

Standing on The Corner – Phil and Men
Key +4. This is a great song with a jazzy feel and interesting chord changes and cool counterpoint horn riffs. Unfortunately, the key they picked was for me a tritone away from where the sheet music had it, and it was really awkward to transpose so I ended up basically improvising a new part on the stand. It worked out pretty well.

Morning Glow – Vinny and Company
Ballad, laid out.

Corner of the Sky – Mike D.
Ballad, laid out.

Get Happy/Happy Days – Michelle and Susan
Tenor sax. These are two of the best singers and they really made this slow bluesy duet sizzle. I played on the intro and in the last chorus.

Phantom / Les Miz Medley – Company
I played keyboards on this one. I did the organ for Phantom while Mike held down the piano part. Later on I did some string pads and brass fanfare. This number was long and had alot cuts, and we didn’t rehearse it until near the very end.

Set Two:

Every Story Is a Love Story / Fortune Favors the Brave (Aida) – Susan and Mike
Soprano and Tenor sax. I took a nice intro on ESIALS. That song really grew on me. With FFtB, it turns out Mike can sing as well as play piano.

Belle (Beauty and the Beast) – Kristen and Townsfolk
Key -1, soprano sax. This was another big production number. I thought I might play some keys on this but I mainly laid out again because we didn’t rehearse it until late.

Poor Unfortunate Souls (The Little Mermaid) – Janet
Tenor sax. Janet more preformed than sang the part. I played in a sort of Tim Burton/Danny Elfman style. Worked out really well.

Day By Day (Godspell) – Lisa and Company
Tenor sax. Big ol’ jam at the end.

They Can’t Take That Away From Me – Christina and Roy
Key -2, tenor sax. Jazz standard. Smooth and smokey.

Once Upon a Dream – Jennifer.
Ballad, laid out.

Elaborate Lives (Aida) – Dean and Susan
Played keys in the middle section, not enough time to work out more than a basic comping part. Dean can really sing the hell out of this song.

The Song That Goes Like This (Spamalot) – Brian and Kristen
I played some brass fanfare stuff on keys. Could have used more rehearsal time on this one. It didn’t matter much, though, because Brian and Kristen did an amazing job.

Someone Like You – Corrine
Ballad, laid out.

Age of Aquarius (Hair) – Julianne
Tenor sax – big jam at the end.

I Don’t Know How To Love Him (Jesus Christ Superstar) – Linda
Ballad, played a bit of soprano sax. Not sure why Linda does all the songs where the character is a prostitute.

All That Jazz (Chicago) – Susan
Key -2, tenor sax. This was great fun to play, but it had alot of key changes and page turning, and I’m afraid I messed up somewhere every night. Still the energy was good and Susan brought the house down.

This Is The Moment – Mike D.
Ballad, laid out. It seems like there were alot of ballads in the set, but they were all sung very well and Mike is great at playing them, so I can’t say I’d want to cut any of them. This song in fact I thought was a bit of clunker when I heard the CD, but Mike D. did just such a great job singing it he really won me over.

We Need a Little Christmas (Mame) – Alumni
Key ???, soprano sax. A late substitution, figured this one out by ear.

For Good (Wicked) Michelle and Kristen
Ballad, laid out. Key changed from night to night. Michelle was worried about her voice going, but they did such a great job on this, really moving.

This Night (Movin’ Out) – Dean
Tenor Sax. This was another late substitution, I think cuz they liked my playing on Italian Restaurant. Dean is such a fantastic singer. The sax solo is really hard, mainly cuz it’s very high (I think it was originally done on alto) and in a weird key, and I didn’t have enough time to memorize it. But still I pulled it off.

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant (Movin’ Out) – Mike
All instruments. This was Mike’s big number, singing and playing piano on Billy Joel’s one-and-only long format, multi-part song. It was also a good number for me. And we actually rehearsed it twice and ran down the parts! I played the accordion part behind the vocals, and then there were no less then four sax solos. The second was the dixieland bit, which I did on soprano. The others I did on tenor. The fist and last ones were slow, the interlude and the outro, and they were probably my favorite parts. John the drummer did a really good job too, capturing all the parts from the record. This number went over really well.

You Can’t Stop the Beat – Company
Key -1, tenor sax. A high-energy production number to close the show. Again lots of page turning and key changes, and I blew at least one cue every night. But it still was fantastic.

…

Now, back to the rock band, which had been on the back burner since Hallowe’en.

Any Jobber Got the Sack

The recent death of Steve Jobs has put me in a surprisingly contemplative mood, thinking about how Apple has affected my life and career since 1982 or ’83 when I first programmed on an Apple II. In particular I’ve been thinking about the fall of 1996, when I first arrived in Silicon Valley, just as Mr. Jobs was engineering his prodigal return to Apple. Here’s an article I read last week, an interview from Playboy magazine back in 1985. Might’ve been the Madonna issue. I feel like I read it back in the day, because some parts ring familiar. It’s amazing how on he was about the future of the industry, and also how much everything has changed.

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

Lawnmower Man

One side effect of all this travel and work was that my lawn was way overdue to be mowed. My lawnmower was kinda old and had a couple of spots in the main shell where it had rusted thru and I’d patched it over with duct tape. Last time I mowed I heard a ka-rack noise, and after that the engine seemed a bit wobbly. After I was done mowing I peeled off the duct tape to see that the rust holes had joined to form a C-shaped void that left the engine attached to the shell on only one side! I thought for a while about various ways to fix it, but they all seemed potentially unsafe, or not worth the hassle. A replacement shell would have been $110 anyway, without knowing the availability. So I decided to go shopping for a new lawmower.

The sales people at Sears were dreadful and didn’t even know the diff between a 2- and 4-stroke engine. In the end, I guess a lawnmower is a lawnmower, and I ended up getting a basic one. Even though I’m a former professional landscaper, my yard is petty small so I figured the simpler the better. It took a while to put it together and siphon the gas out of the old mower into the new one, and by the time it was ready it was almost dark. The days are getting shorter already. The new mower started up on the first pull, and it’s lighter and more maneuverable than my old one, and mows more evenly, so I’m pretty happy with it. Now to figure out what to do with the old mower. I has a perfectly good engine, which I guess I’ll save to use in a robot someday.

Saturday was all kinds of yardwork and random tasks. I finally got to doing the gutters with Lizzy helping out with the ladder. Since we cut down the trees on the north side of the house it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be, so I removed the gutter guards. Sunday I got a chance to get back to origami and music. We also had a surprise visit from my homeslice Mark, in town from the Adirondacks to try and line up new tenants for his place in Brooklyn.

The Adventure Continues

This was the first weekend I’ve been home in a month. So here’s a quick post to bring you up to date. After our big vacation in mid July, we spent last weekend camping with Martin’s and Nick’s. It was a great time, and great weather. Just a bit of rain as we were setting up camp, but then it cleared up. We were lucky; they were predicting a major storm. The whole thing was nice and mellow. Did some hikin, swimming’, barbecuein’, storytellin’, and just hangin’ out. Charlie is bright, well tempered and energetic, and getting big fast. Martin is moving on building his new house, so it’s only a matter of time until asks for his guitars back.

When I’ve been home I’ve been crazy busy at work the last two weeks, staying late and going back to work after the kids were in bed. Friday was our big demo. It was a tree browser for related records in our content management system, with all kinds of complex functionality for auto-expanding the tree and including related records, and managing duplicate records, circular dependencies and other kinds of relationships. I was pair programming with a colleague much of that time, and it was an interesting experience trying to build a huge, complex feature set under time pressure. We didn’t always see eye to eye on the approach, but in the end what we came up with was probably better than what either of us would have done on our own, and certainly faster. Olga is clever at using hash tables to speed things up, and good at low level implementation. On the other hand, her communication skills aren’t great, and I had a better understanding of the feature requirements. So I was focused on the architecture, the classes and methods, and how to keep it forward-maintainable, which often gets sacrificed in these situations. A well-written application should read like a good story. I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of here work to put all the business logic in one place so it could be easily read and (if necessary) modified down the line. Anyhow, we made our deadline and the application looked great and performed fast, so it was a big success and things will hopefully get back to normal.

Next up: I need a new lawmower.

1655 Trip Miles, Part 4: Mountain Jam

Friday afternoon we departed the Thousand Islands for the high peaks of the Adirondack Mountains. Our friends Mark and Kelly, who live in Saranac Lake were our hosts. You may recall Mark was recently in NYC for a gig with his band Crackin’ Foxy. It was a pretty chill hang, and great to catch up. We stayed up talking late into the night about life, music and the internet business. (Mark runs whiteface.com and other ORDA sites.) Saturday we did some sightseeing. Drove up to the top of Mount Whiteface. I’d tried to get the top of Whiteface quite a few times before, in both winter and summer, by car, tram and skis, and every time the weather has forced me to turn back. But this day was perfect and clear, and you could see for miles and miles. Lake Champlain the east, the high peaks to the south, and the St. Lawrence river to the north. Totally spectacular. Plus a cool little trail from the parking area to the weather station at the top, featuring carved stairs and solid stone architecture. Later in the day we went blueberry picking, which was a real treat for everyone, especially the kids. We brought home a big jar of blueberries which I’ve having for breakfast every day this week.

That evening we went to see Harry Potter 7.2 in Lake Placid, for the second time (first time in Buffalo). It was the best movie of the whole series IMO, and in some ways even better than the book. Placid was really jumpin’ that night cuz the triathlon was in town. Took a nice walk around the main drag by Mirror Lake after the movie.

Sunday was the big drive home, but we still got one more visit in. We stopped in Albany for lunch with Marin, Kathleen and Charlie, checked out some weird/cool book stores and toy stores, and even got a little shopping in. The ride home was smooth and devoid of major traffic jams.

It’s been a crazy week at work, trying to meet a deadline. Looks like we made it. Also back to working on a live set of music. I finished my Adirondack Moose diagrams, but no time for new origami this week. Still, I now have 10 models laid out for print, including three that weren’t in my ebook.

Next up: I have to fix my lawnmower.