Category: People

Road Trip 2

We were unexpectedly back in Canada last week. My grandmother, Lenka, died at age 88. I talked to her just a couple weeks ago and she was in good health and great spirits. The end came suddenly which I suppose was for the best. She was a remarkable woman in many ways and lived a long and full life. She had a strong personality and a big heart and liked people and was good at listening and giving advice. She loved having company and was a fabulous cook and her home was centered around her dining room table. There were over a hundred people at her funeral, a testament to the impact she had on people’s lives which is all the more remarkable in that she outlasted almost everyone of her generation. We will miss her.

So for me and Jeannie it meant another big road trip, even though it feels like we just got home. I’m actually surprised about how well the kids were about the whole thing. We left Wednesday after work and arrived around midnight. Thursday was the wake and Friday the funeral. In between time we hung around my uncle Ron’s house because he lived only a few minutes away. My cousin Tom and his wife were there with their kids, who are about the same age as mine. So they all hung out together and got along great, and that made things easier on everyone. Also Barb and Al and their kids Ryan and Curtis.  It was in fact a great chance to see lots of relatives and catch up with everyone. The Singer cousins were there, and they have some new kids I haven’t met yet. And Peter from Florida, and Bert from Chicago, and the list goes on.

We were supposed to go camping that weekend from Friday thru Sunday, and so we left early Saturday morning to try and make the best of it. The camp site was in the Catskills, on the way back to New York City. Of course, being in Canada the day before, Jeannie thought it best that we bring some Canadian beer with us. We were camping with a few other families. Every year we get a bunch of sites together right on the lake. This time it was Nick and Lisa on one side and Seth and Cathy on the other. It’s a very nice scene. We weren’t able to pack a lot of things we normally would like coffee or our camp stove, but we were able to get our little canopy shelter in the car. And it’s a good thing too, because it rained hard for about and hour Saturday afternoon. Apart from that, though, the weather was great, and we did plenty of canoeing and barbecuing and just relaxing and having fun.

Monday morning back to work, the train was late, the web site full of problems. Cosmic Monday in the city.

1585 Trip Miles

We just got back from a trip upstate to see family and friends. It was over a week, a double trip split between Western NY and the Adirondack mountains. It was a very nice time, relaxing and invigorating.

First stop was to visit my parents. We drove up Friday and spent Saturday relaxing. My brother and his fiancé came over for a barbeque, with their dog Loki. Did a bit of fishing and took the girls on a hike along the creek in the park near their house. Sunday we went up to Canada for a family reunion. Good to see all the cousins and uncles. Martin blogged about it too and put up some pictures here.

My grandmother told I should take a trip to Hungary. This is something I’ve been considering doing in a few years, when the girls are old enough to handle a big international trip. There is an origami conference each year in Budapest, and it might be a cool thing to check it out. I had already talked to my mother about the possibility of coming along, as she is fluent in the language, and she likes the idea. So one step closer to reality and added to the list of destinations. With luck the next few years will be a good for traveling with the family.

On Tuesday we went out with my Mum and Dad to my Dad’s woodlot. It’s a piece of land he has out in the countryside with a meadow and a creek and a forest. He goes deer hunting there in the fall. It’s a beautiful place and it was a perfect sunny day. We had a picnic there with bacon cooked over the fire, then went for a hike in the woods and let the girls splash in the creek and try and catch minnows in cups.

Wednesday we went out to Victor, NY to visit Jeannie’s brother and their family. Carrie was delighted to have Michelle over and they played together. But the big news is they just had a baby! Little Anna, only a few days old, and as tiny and cute as can be. A very peaceful baby.

Then it was on the Saranac Lake, NY, in the very heart of the high peaks country of the Adirondacks. We stayed with our friends Mark and Kelly. It was great to catch up. They had just bought a new house and have been busy fixing it up: drywall, paint, a pretty big amount of work. Alot of it was done but the place was not yet ready to move into.

On Thursday we went for a hike up nearby Mount Baker. It’s about a mile up the hill and then again back down, and the kids complained a bit because whenever we stopped the mosquitoes came at us something fierce. But the view was great and it was worth it for the character-building. Later that day we went to a place called the Wild Center in Tupper Lake, a sort of natural history museum of the region. They had had a big hall of exhibits with native plants and animals including frogs and turtles and salamanders and fish and even an otter. They also had some (taxidermically) stuffed fauna including a loon. I must admit I’ve never seen a live loon, and when I made my origami loon it was based on pictures from Google image search. So I kind of have this thing about loons now, trying to get to know them. The bird was a good deal larger than I expected (almost 2 feet long), and wider. I think I did a pretty good job at capturing its essence.

Went to a great restaurant in Placid called The Caribbean Cowboy that night. They had all kinds of good stuff I had some seared tuna over a bed of jambalaya.

Mark works at the Olympic center in Lake Placid, and Friday we took a tour. There was a triathlon in town that weekend so the roads were all full of cyclists, and the town it itself was pretty packed with people. First we went up the car road to the top of Mt. Whiteface. We had to drive around to the far side of the mountain and put up with the kids clamoring to stop at Santa’s Workshop in North Pole, NY along the way. And when we got to the toll we were told the top of the mountain was shrouded in clouds and visibility was zero. So we turned back. This might be a good time to mention that we used to come up to the Adirondacks alot in the days before we had kids, and in three trips on three different winters I went up with the intention of skiing Whiteface and the mountain was closed because of extreme cold, extreme wind or a combination of the two. So this really came as no surprise.

So we spent the morning at a place called High Falls Gorge on the north fork of the Ausable river. It’s a neat little canyon with some falls and rapids and some nice hiking trails including some bridges and catwalks that let you get in close to the action.

By the time we were done there, the weather was clearing so we thought we’d get up Whiteface while we had our chance. Rather than motor all the way back to the north face, we decided to take the gondola, which was nearby. The ride up was pleasant and soon we arrived at the top of Little Whiteface (elevation 3900 ft), which was just as well, as Big Whiteface (elevation 4700 ft) was still obscured by clouds. After hanging out in Tahoe and the Sierras for a few years these peaks don’t sound that high, but it’s about as tall as it gets on the east coast! The view was great, of the surrounding peaks and lakes and the sky was properly dramatic.

Maybe a bit too dramatic at that. We’d had a good look around and were ready to come down, when all of a sudden up came a fierce wind and pelting rain. A dozen or so people up there all went into the ski patrol cabin to wait it out, as they stopped running the gondola. After a short while the rain stopped, but they were reluctant to start the gondola up again, cuz another storm was on the way. Finally there was a break and they decided to get everyone down at once. The ride up took 18 minutes but the trip down took maybe 5. And not a moment to soon. By the time we got back to our car it was raining again, and minutes later it there was hail and rain so hard I had to pull over.

We went into Placid and got some lunch. By the time we were done the storm had passed so we went to check out the ski jump complex. Boy ever neat. There were guys practicing acrobatic jumps and landing in a pool, which was fun to watch. Then we went to the main tower. It’s amazing how tall that thing is. And it’s built on top of a mountain! You have no idea seeing it on TV; you really have to check it out in person. I don’t think I’d ever have the fortitude to be a ski jumper. In fact when I go to the gate where they start the run I got a but spooked. On the way down –- you have to take a chair lift up the hill to the tower — I noticed it was one of the highest lifts I’d ever been on, and there’s no kind of seatbelt to keep little kids from falling out. But we all landed safe and sound.

The last stop of the day was the ice skating center. They have 2 rinks there, one from the 1932 games and one from 1980. On the older rink was a figure skating show, featuring girls from all over the northeast. A girl who did a Tinkerbell routine won. Michelle, who had taken ice skating lessons last winter, absolutely loved this. She has been thinking of ways to pretend to practice ice skating since we got home, mostly sliding around our wood floors in socks.

There was also a “Virtual Reality Simulation” ride there, which took you down the bobsled run, luge, ski jump and some other events. It was pretty cool except for the heavy, clunky, lo-rez, 15-year-old headmount displays from VPL which didn’t even do any motion tracking. They would have been better off (and I’m saying this now as a former professional VR software and systems developer and designer) with a big screen in the front of the room for everyone to look at. The fans were a nice touch I’ll admit. Also they could’ve used Adirondack chairs. That would’ve been cool.

Saturday was much more mellow. We went swimming in Middle Saranac Lake, at a tranquil little beach accessible only be hiking trail. Twice it started to rain, then rained hard for a minute or two, and then cleared up again. Crazy mountain weather. Later that we took a really nice canoe ride around Lake Flower, and checked out all the cottages. It really reminded me a lot of when we used to go up north in Canada as a kid. Mark’s landlord, also name Mark, was a really nice guy. We struck up a conversation and he offered us the use of his canoe. He also gave us a ride in his powerboat to take the girls for ice cream.

Mark had spent most of the day working on his house and missed all the fun. Saturday was big painting day for him, so I went over there and helped him out for a few hours. He had a They Might Be Giants boxed set on his iPod, which made the whole experience pretty pleasant.

Sunday it was pouring rain from the time we got up. We went to brunch in town, and the place was packed, but the food was good. It was also triathlon day so we decided to take the scenic route home, via Tupper, since the roads would be closed near Placid. Drove a good 100 miles in the rain on the mountain roads. The weather finally cleared as we got on the Northway. Almost as soon as we got past Albany the Thruway slowed to a crawl, so we took an alternate route home.

While we were on the road, my car passed 90,000 miles. Woo-hoo! I put more miles on my car on this trip than I have the whole year before that. While were on the road, I listen to the girls sing songs from Hannah Montana. I now have every song memorized even though I’ve never heard the CD! Also Lizzy and I concluded that an RV that turns into a house boat and then turns into an airplane would be a really cool thing to have. I have it all worked out in my mind. Remind me later and I’ll make some sketches.

Coming soon: Pictures!

Origami Convention 2008

Last week was the annual OUSA Convention. It was a great time and it was great to see all my origami friends. Most years I work intensely to come up with a new design, but this year I had so many new designs it wasn’t necessary. I did fold some of John Montroll’s unpublished polyhedra, and talked with him about some polyhedra ideas I have. But mostly I hung out. I met some Brits, and a Canadian / South African folder (Hi Quentin!), plus all the usual suspects. (Hi John, Brian, Marc, etc.) Although not strictly origami, T. J. Norville had a cool thing he did making geodesic balls out of paper plates.

Jeannie and the girls came this year. It was Michelle’s first time, and Lizzy’s first time going 2 days. The girls made crowns and flowers, and Jeannie folded tessellations and flexicubes. Both kids had their models in the Origami By Children exhibit. Back in the spring when the kids did their models, I had them fold a bunch and picked the best ones to submit. Michelle didn’t want to part with her Candy Cane at the time, but shortly forgot about it. When she saw it on display she suddenly remembered, and got upset until I explained to her the whole point of the exhibition was so people could see her model. She seemed to like that.

I taught my Adirondack Moose, which is a new model, not diagrammed and I hadn’t taught it before. I rated I intermediate because it had no closed sinks or other crazy moves, and is not as difficult as many of my other models, but in retrospect maybe I should have rated it complex. The students of complex classes self-select and are all expert folders. With intermediate classes it can be more of a mixed bag. In this case it seemed most everyone was up to it, but the class was very full and the desks were large and far apart, so most people couldn’t see as well as they would like. I spent most of the class walking up and down to make sure everyone got a good luck. In the end everyone came out with a successfully folded moose.

I put a lot of work into my exhibit. I came up with about ten new models this year and folded new versions of some of my existing designs out of better paper. Of course as I get better, everyone else does too, and lot people had interesting cool stuff. On Sunday Dan Robinson led a critique of a group of people’s displays, sort of a round-robin atelier, which I found quite productive. I got some complements from folders I really admire. Dan, who folded an awesome Egret and is into birdwatching, praised my Loon. Robert Lang, who had a whole chapter on elephant design in his book, liked my elephant for it’s massiveness and power. And Brian Chan, who does alot of sci-fi themed subjects, liked my Rocket, UFO and Balloon.

The Monday sessions were interesting, especially the afternoon ones. Dan had a discussion on the aesthetics of origami design. There was alot of discussion of paper. I haven’t used alot of this, but need to find better paper, larger thinner sheets. There are a handful of exotic papers people use for origami: Washi, Hanji, etc. The are very hard to find in larger than 25cm sheets. I’m also out of Wyndstone paper, which had been my main paper for extra-large models, but I can’t seem to find it online. I also ran into Marc Kirschenbaum in the morning; he was on his way to do a seminar on publishing. This lead me to realize that I now have over 30 original models, and seem to be generating them at an accelerating rate (I just came up with a Wizard this morning because I friend brought a Balrog action figure into the office.)

So I decided to start work on an origami book of my own. I have 10 or so models diagrammed and need to diagram a bunch more. I’m hoping to get the diagramming mainly done in a year and then turn my attention toward assembling the book and getting it published.

Coming soon: Pictures!

Origami Baluchitherium

Still catching up here. Last week, as previously mentioned, was the annual Origami USA Convention. Robert Lang led his annual design challenge, and this year’s subject was a prehistoric animal, non-dinosaur. I had considered this topic for a while, and settled on an Ice-Age mammal, a.k.a. Megafuana. I mean, how could you not like the name, Mega-fauna? It means giant animal!

I had made a start on a Megaceros (giant horns), a.k.a., the Irish Elk, an extinct deer which has the largest antlers of any member of the deer family, up to 3 meters across! I had used my Moose as a starting point, and changed the proportions to get even bigger antlers. But once I got to the point where it was time to sculpt the model it became clear this approach wasn’t going to work. It didn’t look distinctly deer-like enough, and working out the details of the antlers would require some time, and probably a deeper redesign going all the way back to the base. Else I’d just end up with a funny-looking moose.

So I put it aside for a while to give it some thought. And then suddenly it was Friday, and that evening I would be setting up my exhibit, so I if I was to participate in the challenge I’d have to come up with something fast!

Luckily I had another idea in mind: a Baluchitherium. This extinct giant may have been the largest mammal ever to walk on land! It was as tall as a giraffe and had the girth of an elephant, and although it was a member of the Rhinoceros family it had no horn on its head. So I combined the back half of my elephant with a long neck and a head with ears and snout similar to the moose. I folded one test out of a 10″ sheet of kami and then went straight on the display model, made of a 20″ square of Wyndstone. And it came out pretty well, if I say so myself.

The challenge display was full of diverse and exciting work, and I was happy to be a part of it. And as for the Irish Elk? It’s just as well I didn’t do that because Robert folded one that totally kicked ass!

New Recording: Fine Red Wine Rough Mix

(River Flows Like) Fine Red Wine
Fine Red Wine (Alternate Take)

I was inspired to do a love song after Jeannie and I celebrated our Twennyversary. It’s basically a classic R&B kind of groove and the changes are all based on the 7th chords. It also has intro which uses an ostinato over descending bass line that wraps around, creating some dark and interesting chords. (This intro is a bit unusual for me in that almost everything I’ve written for this project so far and for the Brothers Zing before tend to have chord progressions that move upward. Regard this as a coincidence, or maybe a phase I’m going thru, but I noticed it and think it’s kind of intriguing.) No worries though, the main riff moves upward. As so often happens, I had a couple musical patterns I was playing around with and the lyric made the whole thing come together.

It’s a fun number to play, and fairly easy compared to a lot of my tunes. I laid down the vocals fairly quickly. The harmony was pretty spontaneous, I didn’t really try and work it out ahead of time. I just had an idea and decided to go for it. I like the way it came out. It has bit of a rough quality to it, but I think that’s part of its charm. I put a full horn section arrangement on it. Four saxophones: soprano, alto tenor and baritone. Thanks again to Martin for loaning me his bari sax. I had so much fun playing it I decided to give the bari a solo. This turned out to be great song to solo on, and I did a few takes. In the end, I mixed down a second version with alternate takes of the solos.

This is the fourth song in my current recording project, so I have a logical album side or virtual EP. I have another set of tunes ready to start in on, but I want to take a break, so I’ll probably mix and master this set before starting in on the next batch. So watch this space.

Meanwhile, Martin has agreed to add some guitar tracks to these tunes. This should be interesting and cool. I really enjoyed working with him on the BZ project. He’s a versatile and creative musician who is good at coming up with parts that contribute to the arrangement, often in unexpected ways. By the end of the BZ project our writing and arranging was growing closer, and was looking forward to continuing with that. However Martin had other things going on at the time. So I continued on my own, and it was difficult at first because: 1.) it’s good to have a creative partner to bounce ideas off of, and 2.) everything takes twice as long when your doing it by yourself, and 3.) it’s hard to make rock music without a guitar in there. But I decided not to worry about it and went ahead and made my peace with not having a guitars in the arrangements, and you know, took it as a creative challenge.  As it turns out I’m actually quite happy with this set of tunes. Now some time has gone by and Martin is putting back together his recording studio again, and says it’ll be good way to get back into recording to help me with these tracks. So I’m thinking of it something like Andy Summers sitting in on Nothing Like the Sun. We’ll see where this leads and what influence it has on the second side of the record.

Terrible Idea | Great Idea

While we’re on the topic of amusing office annoyances, here’s another.

I work for a really big company. Big enough that people’s idea of what they think is the right thing do in the corporate context can vary greatly depending on their particular role. This can get rather surreal. My floor alone is well over 100 people, all working on just one small set of applications.

The other day I’m working and I get a last minute and urgent request from a project manager to implement some absolutely boneheaded feature ASAP. This is actually not that uncommon, but more often than not it’s the result of poor communication, so usually the solution is to find the person who made the request and go talk to them, figure out what they really want and implement something sensible instead of their flaky hack.

(The project manager is a neither-fish-nor-fowl role in our organization. They not developers or technical managers, nor or they produces or have anything to do with defining features or product direction. They are basically organizers and mediators and their job is to schedule and track things and make sure people who need to know what’s going on know what’s going on. And to insulate developers from random noise from creative.)

This request came from a producer over in creative, so I go over to ask him about it directly. This particular guy is often more of a “big picture” than a “details” person, but he’s a nice guy and smart and if he can see that his idea doesn’t make sense to a developer he’s usually willing to listen and find a solution that works for everyone.

But not this day. I explain first issue, which is with usability. “You’re right, it makes no sense,” he tells me. ” I know it’s a terrible idea, but we have to do it anyway.” He actually said this. Pressure from the legal department apparently.

I’m sure it seems like a simple request to him but it actually would require some substantial reworking of a nontrivial set of code, and it touches other parts of the code base, so I’d have to get other developers involved. This would make the whole thing run over schedule, and have cascading consequences. So I think it over and tell him, “Actually I think it’s a great idea, but the problem is we can’t do it.”

Professionalism?

So the other day I’m at work, writing code, in the zone, working out some complex and esoteric problem. Concentrating, you dig?

The phone rings. “Hello, is this John [horribly mispronounces my last name, which is not even that hard, and doesn’t even come close the standard mispronunciation most people use]. My name is Michael [somethingorother] and I [blahblahblahblahblah]”, talking a mile a minute, without a comma and without getting to the point. No good morning how are you, am I interrupting? or anything.

Eventually he has to pause to take a breath so I ask him “Are you a recruiter?” We’ve been having a growing problem with headhunters cold calling random people in my office looking for an in. They go onto LinkedIn and see your job title and the company you work for and then call the main switchboard and navigate the phone directory to get out numbers at our desks. I don’t know why they do it; it’s a complete waste of time. It aslo seems to me extremely rude. We all tell them about our HR department, whose job it is to listen to people like them. Usually the headhunters are pretty pushy, and some developers will wait patiently to get a word in edgewise, and plead “I’m really sorry but I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to call HR.” Sometimes the hapless developer will repeat this 3 or 5 times.

So the guy says “Yes I am I work for [some recruiting agency] and I [blahblahblahblahblah]”. So before this gets too out of hand, I tell him to talk to our HR department and hang up the phone.

Steve, who sits across from me and is not a developer but a “Resource Manager” and has to put up with more of these calls than anyone, looks up and says “Good answer.”

A minute or so later the phone rings again. I should mention I’m expecting a legit phone call right about then, so I pick it up again. “Hello this is Michael [somethingorother] and I just want to say that it is very unprofessional of you to hang up the phone on me …” Well I’m just floored! This is your sales pitch Mike? You cold call a complete stranger just to spam me, and when you’re told the right way to pitch candidates to our organization you don’t listen? Then you call me back just to insult me? And you expect me to help you because why? I thought for a second or so about trying to explain to him that it really is appropriate to hang up under these circumstances, and that had the info he called me for anyway. But I figured he probably wouldn’t listen to that either. I never found up what his second point was, cuz I hung up again.

I guess I should cut the dude some slack. He was probably just having a bad day. He’s probably just figured out he’s going to get fired for being such a lousy salesman.

Life and Origami

I’ve been really busy the last few weeks. More on that below, but first a few preliminaries.

First, both of the girls had their models accepted in OUSA’s origami for children exhibit! Look for them this June.

Next, it turns out that Nick.com won a Webby. Thanks for all your votes. I have no idea how canihazacheezeburger.com did.

Spring is really, really here.  The weather has been really, really beautiful.  Out in the garden we planted tomatoes a few weeks ago. Critters ate them.

I haven’t had a chance to work on music in a couple of weeks, although I want to get my last song of the current set done soon. Hopefully this weekend I will get back to it. One or two more sessions and I’ll be able to post a rough mix; it’s down to vocals and horns. A couple things came up that delayed the music work.

One is I got some malware on my PC. It looks like it’s under control now, but I’m afraid that next time I reboot it will come back. I had to go out and get anti-malware sofware and all, and it didn’t even fully clean it. I might have to go back and restore my OS from and archive I made last fall. Oh such fun. Glad at least my new computer’s a Mac.

The other is I’ve been really jamming on origami, making a ton of models. I’ve been working the last month or so on an origami commission, and I finished all the models last Friday. It was a cool set of subjects; each on presented different and interesting challenges. I’m please and satisfied that I was able to come up with good designs for all of them pretty much on demand in a short time, and while I was at it, came up with some new ideas I can apply in other models. These were more in the intermediate than complex level, so it was also good to take a step back towards more readily doable subjects. I’m particularly fond of the bear and the moose.

The Bear is in the modern style, which is to say it doesn’t really use a base. With a model like this it’s all about the pose and the posture. I came with the basic form and approach pretty quickly, but it took a couple of days just to work out the ears! And it changed around the design quite a bit.

When I was done I noticed an underlying structural similarity to my Elephant. So I went back to look at my Elephant, and it seemed needlessly complex to me, especially the back legs. I remember a few years ago when I came up with the design really struggling to work it out but never being fully satisfied with the fold sequence. So now I’m redesigning my Elephant. The new version is closer to 30 steps than 50, and the same size paper yields a substantially larger beast. The overall appearance is very similar, and the head is almost exactly the same. Of course one thing leads to another, so now I’m working on the head.

For the moose, I had a bit of an idea about how to approach the antlers. I saved this model for last, cuz it was the hardest and I figured I’d work up to it, but by the time I got there time was running out. So rather then do a free body design I fell back on the tried-and-true bird base. (A modified stretched bird base, actually.) I pretty much nailed the model on the first try with not alot of experimentation and some lucky guesses on the proportions. Using the base turned out the be a good thing because it left me with a thick body with lots of layers; it was strong and the legs could support the weight, and the model doesn’t tend to flop forward despite the big antlers.

I took the day off Thursday and pretty much folded continually from first thing in the morning into the evening and the wee hours of the night, all the final models in one long session. I was amazed at how exhausted I was by the end of the day. It was intensely creative, and my brain felt like it does at the end of a 16 hour marathon of writing code. My hands hurt right at the base of the joint of my thumb too.

Sunday was a folding session at the Museum of Natural History. I took Lizzy and my friend John was in town to teach and hang out. He’s working on a new book that includes a lot of theory, and I looked thru some of the material. Lots of math; very intense stuff. It’s going to be up there with Robert’s ODS. Lizzy learned how to wet-fold. It’s also kind of cool to see how she can function and enjoy herself in an all adults kind of setting. All in all a really good day.

Jeannie stayed home and re-planted the garden, and built a little fence out chickenwire to keep the critters out. Tomatoes again as well as various peppers. So far so good on the critter front.