Category: People

Origami Site Update

I just completed a major revision to my Origami web site at www.zingorigami.com (also www.zingman.com/origami). Attentive readers of this blog will recall that I started on this endeavor way back in September. I had to get around to a bunch of other projects first, but I’m happy to have completed phase one of the operation.

I invented about ten new origami models this year, so the update was long overdue. Major features include reorganizing the collection of models into a series of pages according to a set of major categories. The index page now links into these pages and presents a comprehensive index of thumbnails. I also created a page of Adirondack Origami, to highlight the feature I did for Adirondack Life magazine earlier this year. Additionally I created a page for info about Origami commissions if you’re interested in having you own origami handmade by me the artist, and a page about my forthcoming book, mostly a placeholder for now.

The next step will be a new round of photographs. For many of the recent models I simply put up snapshots, but sometime over the winter I plan on folding exhibit level versions of all my models and doing a proper photo shoot of them. This will also be useful for the book.

Then phase three will be to make the pages served dynamically. I need to research some kind of lightweight CMS and template engine, or maybe make my own. That will be a pretty good project.

And in related news, my friend John has a new web site to showcase his origami: www.johnmontroll.com

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 II

More works in progress:

I’ve started work on a new song, “Who Can Fool Me?” Sort of an angry and defiant song, inspired as a response to how people in authority use lies and manipulation to maintain their power: the government, corporations, the media, etc. It’s basically a jazz blues in C minor, played in a stride style. But it’s dressed up by a 7/8 time and lots of chromatic harmonic movement for a sort of tense, edgy feeling. It’s coming together relatively quickly, which is nice. Got the arrangement worked out, got rhythm section down, and a MIDI sketch of a horns and strings, and did first pass at the vocals last night. I will do one more pass at that as I am still finalizing the lyrics.

Work on my origami book continues. I’m close to being done with diagramming my moose. This is a long one, over 60 steps so far. It’ll probably end up just a few short of 70. This one will present some new challenges when I do the page layout, since the size and shape of the individual step drawing very greatly, I’ll need to expand my palette of layout templates. I’m folding a moose as I do the diagrams. I had folded my previous mooses out of Wyndstone Marble paper, but that is no longer available in the United States. So I’ve been searching for some new and different kinds of origami paper recently. For this one I ended up using a piece of paper called Tant that I ordered from Nicolas Terry in France. It’s working out very nicely. Very strong and reasonably thin, very workable, and it comes in largish (35cm) sheets. I would love to be able to get the stuff even larger (like 50cm). Anyway, you check out Nicolas’s origami shop and order the stuff here.

Another project I’ve decided to start on this fall is to redesign the origami section of my web site. I’ve been wanting to do this since the summer. I had a big burst of creativity last May and June, and came up with eight new models in that period, and since then of course I’ve decided to so a book. The big problem with this is my web site is really old. Parts of it date back to 1995, which is truly ancient in internet time. I’ve added on it over the years, but the core is flat html. So the origami galleries don’t scale well, and every time I add a new model it’s a fair amount of hand coding. I want to completely redo it, with a more modern looking, CMS-backed, Javacript-driven front end. Maybe something like this. BTW, Giang Dihn is my favorite origami artist out there right now. His stuff is so lyrical and flowing, so beautiful.

But that’s a rather large endeavor, beginning with researching available code libraries and seeing how they fit in with my design concept. So it will have to wait. Meanwhile I’m overhauling the current set of pages on last time. I swear this is it. The most labor-intensive part of this is I have to photograph all my models and bring them into photoshop to size the images. This is something I’ll need to do anyway for my book. But the more I do it, the higher my standards get, and I’m starting to realize I need a better camera or better lighting setup, or maybe just need to become a better photographer. Ah well another bridge I’ll cross when I get there. For this rev I’ll just use the pictures I have.

Lastly, I spent some time last weekend with the girls on the movie Rollercoaster of Cheese, their little timeline animation project. Created the soundtrack by editing together and layering 3 takes of our the voiceover. Showed them how to use Audacity, a simple but reasonably powerful audio editor for the PC. Brought the soundtrack into Flash. The next and last step is the actually animation, using the library of drawing they built up.

This led to us exploring some old multimedia pieces I have on my web site. So here’s some shockwave stuff from a few years ago. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/mmedia/index.html

Camping, Storms, Guitars, Cars and Rest

We finally had a weekend with no travel and no commitments, and hung around the house and relaxed and got a bunch of things done. So now’s a good time to bring all y’all up to speed.

Last weekend we went camping. It was our second camping trip of the summer and it was a big group of people. Us, Erik and Jen and Ellla, Max and Miguel, Shannon and Shawn and their three kids, Bob and Lisa and Jimmy and Lisa and Emily and Lauren. Wow. We left Friday afternoon, although some of the other families waited until Saturday morning because of the threat of rain. And sho’nuff it started raining just as we were packing the car, and by the time were on the road it began raining really hard. We actually pulled over and discussed whether to turn back, but we were able to get a weather report on Jeannie’s blackberry that said it was clear up in the Catskills. So we went head and passed thru a wave or two of heavy storms. Later we found out that there was some serious flooding and even tornado warnings in Westchester, and they closed the Hutch, Saw Mill and Bronx River Parkway shortly after we got out of town. But after an hour the sun came out, and we got to the camp site and set up our tents and got the fire going, before a scattered shower that went away after half an hour or so. The rain came again after dark and the kids were asleep in the tent and Jeannie and I were watching the fire. Another scattered t-storm rolled thru and after that we still had to put water on the fire before we went to bed. Saturday and Sunday were clear and all in all it was a beautiful trip, although they always feel too short. Got some nice canoeing in, and the girls got to play on the beach and catch salamanders. We got home there was a good amount of leaves and branches on the ground, but no real damage.

I spent some time jamming on guitar on the trip. Guitar is maybe my fourth best instrument, which is to say I know the basics and never practice. Most of what I know I picked up from watching guitar players in my various bands over the years. I can play a good number of Neil Yong songs (Powder Finger, Heart of Gold, Mr. Soul, etc.) and some other tunes, just accompany myself singing, no prog or jazz chops. I’m not very good at bar chords so there are a lot of songs I can’t play. So I decided to start practicing guitar for a little while and see if I get any better. And its so far so good. I know the chords so came up with a few little exercises to cover them in all keys. And then I picked a handful of songs to work up, with some of the new chords. I have a good number of music books. I’m practicing Burned, Down to the Wire, Broken Arrow by Neil Yong, and I Will and Mother Nature’s Son by the Beatles. When I get those down I’ll pick some others. Right now I can only practice about a half hour every other day because it’s hard on the fingertips.

I actually own two guitars. One is acoustic that I traded for a boom box many years ago. It has almost no wood in it (plastic body and metal neck, an ovation knock off), and is kinda hard to play cuz the action is high and the intonation isn’t great, but it has a good resounding tone and is a great guitar for camping. The other is an eclectic, a Guild solid body with two humbuckers, which has great action and good tone, and is a nice versatile electric guitar. However the tuning seems to drift and I have to tune up after every song. Ah well maybe it’s just that the strings are old and I haven’t played it in a while. Anyhow, I’m thinking I want to get a new guitar, a better quality acoustic, and with a pick up so I can use it for recording. I’ll give myself a month or so to see if I’m gonna want to keep on practicing (this also means I’m going to have to cut back on piano), and if the answer is yes, I’ll start looking for one sometime this fall. Luckily the big music store district is only a couple blocks from my office, but I have a feeling they’ll be pretty expensive there.

I also fixed my car over the weekend. There had been a leak in the exhaust manifold, where a clip to attach a heat shield, which had been welded onto the pipe with a different metal, had rusted thru. My local mechanic gave me an estimate of $1600 or something outrageous like that to replace the manifold. So I just kinda let it be for a while, but the noise has been getting worse. So I got one of those muffler fixit kits. Basically it’s a bit of aluminum foil and special wrap that bonds to the pipe from the heat of the engine. I put it on and seems to have done the trick. Only problem was that the directions say to use a piece to tape to temporarily attach the wrap to the pipe, and then run the engine for a while to heat it up. Well Sunday all the kids in my neighborhood were hanging out in my driveway which made finishing the job difficult. So I left a bit of tape on, and this morning drove to the train station. The tape has some plastic in which started to melt and burn. I checked it out when I got home this evening and it looks ok, there’s just a little black stripe left on the pipe.