Category: Software

Fall Forward

Been trying to get back to normal life the last few weeks, and settling into some kind of fall routine.  There’s been alot of random tasks piling up.  Did a bunch of yardwork the last few weekends.  Almost at the end of the late summer cycle, nothing to do after but wait for the leaves to start falling.  Also been doing work on our various cars. Michelle and I patched the bumper on the camry before she went back to school.

One piece of good news of good news is that I got the Mustang fixed.  Way back in July one day I took it out of the garage to take it for a spin, only to discover the brake pedal felt soft.  I did a little research and determined it was probably nothing I could fix myself.  Being an old car, I didn’t want to take any chances.  However I didn’t have to time to actually take into the shop until September, and then it took them a couple days because my mechanic needed to order a new master cylinder.  So I finally got the car back and took it for a spin last weekend.  Good as new, woo-hoo!

I’ve also been getting back to biking and working out.  For a while my energy felt very depleted, and it was hard to concentrate.  Working out was one thing I could do that was good for my focus, but I had to drop down to like 70% of my regular weight.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been building back up, and now I’m basically I’m at the point where I was before, and building up to surpass my previous plateau this fall.

Meanwhile, back in July I had built up to biking over fifty miles a week.  The first Sunday in August I decided to go for a little further than usual.  On the ride, I passed a woman who then asked if I’d mind if she rode behind me to catch my slipstream.  She looked all cute and sporty in one of those one-piece spandex biking outfits, and in any event why would I object?  After a few miles she had caught her breath and pulled up next to me, and we got to talking, mostly about biking and going further and faster.  She said she was going 30 miles that day, and told me “never plateau”.  When I was done my ride I saw that I’d gone twenty-two and a half miles in a little over ninety minutes.  I was really looking forward to telling Martin, but never got the chance.  In August I scaled back, averaging closer to 30 miles, going out only three or four times a week.  Now I’m ramping back up again.  September is the perfect time for biking.  The weather is not so hot, and you’ve been training all season.  This last weekend I went 22.5 miles again, beating my previous time by about three minutes, closing in on the ninety-minute mark.  Next weekend I’m gonna go for 25 miles, and hopefully do a 30 mile ride before the end of the season.  I’d like to keep on biking into November if possible.

I’ve also returned to working on The Global Jukebox and getting that back on track.  I’ve recruited my friend Nick to work with me as a second engineer.  Nick and Martin and I worked together to create an online version of the game Iron Dragon back in the year 2000.  For now the main tasks is to get him ramped up.  Also, Martin left behind some unfinished work in the form of an experimental branch that he never committed.  I’ve pulled it of his old computer but I have yet to merge it.

In my day job I had been finding it hard to focus too, but that’s steadily improving.  If I can find a task where I can follow a prefab pattern or script rather than have to do deep, open-ending thinking, that suits me better these days.  Fortunately, on one of my project I get to just that: building some new web pages and updating other based on mocks from our designers.  Ginny said that building web sites is my happy place, and that’s not so far from the truth.  In my other project it’s all herding cats, pulling together multiple engineering and management teams from multiple companies for integration testing.  I think I finally found the root cause of a strange, intermittent bug that’s been bedeviling us and blocking our progress, and designed a workaround.  Hopefully I’ll have it implemented this week and progress can resume.

There’s lots going in in music these days too.  For one thing Jeannie and I saw Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago, two of the greatest horn-section bands of all time, at some amphitheater in New Jersey Saturday night.  We attempted to go see this show the first Saturday in August, but it go rained out.  This time the weather was good, but the traffic, limited ways into the venue, and chaotic overcrowded lawn seating arrangements made for a less than promising start. 

I’ve always been a big fan of both bands, but particularly Chicago, with their prog-jazz influenced stuff from the Terry Kath days in the 70’s.  They played plenty of that, including some great deep cuts, and were quite good.  But I guess I’d mentally blocked out their cheesy power ballad phase from the 80’s.  They played a good number of those too, including not one but two about You being the/my inspiration. 

Alot of people seemed to have left after Earth Wind and Fire, so it was easy to move closer for a better view.  At then end, both bands played together, which was pretty epic.  A six-piece horn section, plus two or three of everything else: drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards and singers.  You’d think it might be a giant mess, but they were really tight.  They closed the show with an extended jam of 25 or 6 to 4 (presumably in answer to the question Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?)  It seemed we were among the younger people at the show, which was great because by time we got back to car at the end of the night, the parking lot was mostly empty, and it was a breeze getting out of there.

Lots more going on in the music work including a new guitar, a tribute concert, and a new Buzzy Tonic record about to drop.  More on that in a future post.

Summertime Grooves

First off, I’m happy to announce the Spacecats record is complete and submitted to all the streaming services.  The release date is July 1.  I’ve also sent off the order to print a small quantity of CDs, just because I feel like it’s important to have a physical artifact to really make the project complete.  More announcement around this as the links go live.

For the first time we’re also looking at doing a vinyl record.  It turns out you can get 100 vinyl records made for a thousand bucks.  Not a bad deal when you think about it, even compared to CDs at two dollars apiece.  However, you can only fit a little over twenty minutes of music on a side, and our record is over fifty long, so we’d need to cut two songs for the vinyl addition.  On top of that, we don’t know anyone who has experience mastering a record for vinyl, and it’s really it’s own thing compared to digital.

We’ve had continued nice weather until just a few days ago, and then it turned hot toward the end of last week.  Lots of barbecuing, and got the mustang out last weekend.  Did a big round of trimming the willow tree growing into our back yard, and now the cycle starts over again with the weeding.

I’ve been doing lots of biking.  In fact, I’ve been biking seven of the last nine days.  I’ve reversed my route thru New Rochelle, so it starts downhill, then the middle is mainly uphill, then a big downhill at the end.

I finally got on the Empire State rail trail with Jeannie and Michelle on Father’s day.  Found a new place to park off Tuckahoe Road.  I got a flat tire, 6 miles out, which was a bit of a drag.  So I took it to the shop, all better, but now I’m thinking of getting a new bike.

On Juneteenth Jeannie and I both had the day off, so we took our bikes down to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, and took the bike trail out to the little towns on Fire Island.  There’s no cars allowed there so it’s really cute and fun to bike around, kind of like Hobbiton but full of rich people’s beach houses.  Ended up with a nice hang on the beach and a swim in the ocean.  A perfect day for it.

By Friday the weather turned hot — ninety-five degrees, so I actually got out early and did my ride before work.

Saturday Nick and Lisa came over for a visit and Martin came down from Albany too. We did a big ol’ barbecue and built a fire and played games, it was a great hang.  For the party I made a new playlist, as is becoming tradition.  This summer the theme is 76 Favorite Saxophone Songs.  I’ll post a link to it soon, so stay tuned.

Martin stayed over and Sunday morning joined Jeannie and me for another bike ride.  We went fourteen miles, the longest of the season so far.

He also brought his guitar so we jammed a while.  I’ve been re-organizing my big book of rock songs.  I used to have it alphabetical by artist, but then as I moved thru it I’d spend a couple weeks doing only Steely Dan or Billy Joel for example.  Now I have it alphabetical by song title.  I’m in the letter B and recently added a bunch of B songs, including Bad Sneakers, Bloody Well Right, Break On Thru, and others.  Martin brought his book of rock songs too, so we basically took turns calling the tune.  We tend to know alot of the same songs, but if not there was a chart.  I learned Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which I’ll now have to put into my book.

A couple other things:  The OUSA convention would normally be this weekend, but this year it’s in July instead.  Feels more relaxed.  I’ve ramping up my folding the last week or two.  Right now I’m refolding a bunch of models I have out of good paper to exhibit and photograph, including my Platypus and a new and improved version of my Space Cat.  Next it’s on to new models, including some more single-sheet polyhedra ideas combined with tessellated flowers, and some animals and insects.

Lastly, at my day job in the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, my MVP prototype integration the Data Rights Protocol into the Permission Slip application is on the cusp of completion.  I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase, where every day brings me half the distance closer.  I’m nominally code complete, and have moved on to integration testing which involves two separate apps, and am encountering pesky deploy roadblocks, cross-domain permission issues, and that sort of things.  Ah well, hopefully I’ll be able to declare victory soon.

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is Live

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is now live at https://theglobaljukebox.org. The major feature this release is a tool for users to submit corrections to song cantometric coding data and song metadata, along with and admin workflow to accept changes and migrate them into the app database.  There’s also a new journey about The Roots of the Blues by Lamont Pearley. And of course numerous UI, UX and usability enhancements, bug fixes, etc.

Meanwhile at my day job at Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, we just launched a beta version of AskCR, a chatbot-style application to answer user question about product comparisons, backed by our extensive databases.  I’ve been enjoying taking part in testing sessions, and happy to reports so far it’s actually accurate and helpful, even if sometimes it’s just a more verbose way of finding information you could just use our search tool to find.  I’ve been asking it alot about hybrid luxury SUVs and high-performance sports cars recently.   I learned that there’s a hybrid Corvette out there now that has all-wheel drive with electric front wheels and can go from zero to sixty in two and a half seconds!  No information, however, on the storage capacity of the frunk.

The weather had been great, warm and sunny but not yet brutally hot.  I took my first longish bike ride of the season last week, going up into New Rochelle towards Larchmont. Pretty hilly, like most places around here, but still fun.  Just under ten miles, just under an hour.  I’ve also been having a run of good workouts, back up to nominal full weight on all my sets.  Although today was kind of rough; I was tired from being up and down a ladder and swinging a chainsaw around over my head to trim the neighbor’s willow tree that hands into my hard.  I ended up chopping of a pretty good branch landed my shrubbery and rolled off into my other neighbor’s yard.  Talk about a bustle in your hedgerow!  Unfortunately, I have not gotten around to taking the Mustang out for a drive in a few weeks.  By the time I was done the yardwork yesterday the Hutch was all backed up.

My friend Nick had a barbecue party Saturday, a most excellent time.  I ended up talking to his kids and Michelle at length about music, and what people are listening to these days, and how music continues to evolve.  Giovani, who is a musician, has weird and interesting tastes, including jazz, prog, metal and lots of stuff I’ve never heard. He’s gotten as far as appreciating Alan Holdsworth, which is super fun.

And finally, the Spacecats album cover is complete.  Now I can get on to getting CD’s made (which at this point is really just for vanity) and publishing it to the streaming services, which is more important.  I actually got a check last week from people streaming my music.  Less than I make in an hour of work writing software, but you know, it’s something.  I also got a check from royalties from my origami book, which was more than a day’s salary.  So anyway, watch this space.

Another Sunny June

Summer has arrived in earnest.  I’m still busy with work and projects, but have been making time for some low-key relaxation and enjoyment.  This is important because I feel like I’ve been working since February on the same set of things, and while I’ve been making progress and getting things done, I’ve also been getting weary of the grind.

Michelle is home from school for the summer.  Today she started her new summer job, an internship for her study in civil engineering.  She’s very excited.  The work is mainly inspecting, reporting on and supporting repairs on train bridges in The Bronx.  It’s the kind of work where she needs safety boots and a laptop computer with AutoCad. Apparently steel-toed boots in women’s sizes are hard to find at shoe stores around here so she had to order them over the internet. The company provides the computer and software.  Rock on!

Meanwhile, Lizzy has enrolled in grad school to get her Master’s degree in Business.  This is a mainly online program she can do while continuing at her day job. A year ago she told me she had no interest in grad school.  I think she changed her mind because her boyfriend is pursuing a medical degree, but she says it’s to open up her carreer options going forward.  Either way, rock on!

In my own little scene, things are grinding along as I’ve said.  Things are getting done, but everything is harder and taking longer than one would hope.  My day job has entered an unusually chaotic phase, and I was temped to write in my weekly status update today “EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!!!” but instead wrote “repeated build failures; we are working with the enterprise team to resolve the issue,” which is really just the tip of the iceberg.   We’ve hired a new in-house engineer who will start in July, which should help things going forward.  Meanwhile the MVP for my more R&D-ish project moves ahead one obstacle at a time, when I have to time to work on it.

The Global Jukebox is approaching the release of version 3.1.0.  We’re in the final testing and bug fixing phase.  So stay tuned to this channel for future announcements.

The new album by my jazz group Spacecats has been mixed and mastered and ready to publish for a few weeks now.  All that remains is the album cover.  I put together a cover featuring images of the band members taken from video stills.  We all agreed the quality was not the best, so at rehearsal a week ago we took a bunch of new pics of the group as a whole, both playing music and posed at various spots around the studio.  I’ve gone thru the images and narrowed it down to a handful of semifinalists.  The next step is to drop them into to composition, see how they look, and play around with them until I get somewhere cool.

The OUSA convention is drawing near.  I’ve dusted off my list of ideas for models and begun folding, starting with creating exhibit-quality versions of models I’ve already done, then moving on to explore new territory.  This year the convention isn’t until late July, so I have a whole extra month to get it together.  I also need to decide what I’m going to teach.  Probably one of them will be my Spacecat, a variation on another cat, Sophie.  I’ve recently refined the Spacecat, changing the proportions and folding sequence, and the final model looks better.  Trying to work thru the final sculpting now and looking for the right paper.

I’ve been working out and biking alot, but it’s been a bit uneven as my energy level hasn’t always been the best I’m working thru so weird random pain in my shoulder.  I seem to be mainly over it and back up to full weights on everything the last week or two.  I still haven’t taken a ride with Jeannie on our local rail trail, but hope to this weekend.  I’ve been doing the local loop of my neighborhood (about 4 miles with hills and traffic) about three times a week, and have done the Nature Study woods (longer, no cars, some bumpy trail-ish hills) twice now.  We’ve only done one two hikes this spring too.  Need to get our into nature more.

We did do some fun things the last few weeks, and at least the major spring yardwork cycle got done, although next weekend starts a new round.  Memorial Day weekend I went to a Mets game with Jeannie and Michelle and Mary and Lou and their kids.  I don’t care that much about baseball but it was a fun hang, and our seats were in the shade.  Amazingly, the Mets rallied in the bottom of the ninth for a come-from-behind victory!  We’ve also been doing a bunch of barbecues and hanging out by the firepit in the backyard, listening to playlists from summers past.

Last weekend Jeannie and took a mini-vacation to wild and exotic Connecticut.  We went to Mystic, where they have the Seaport Museum featuring tall ships and lots of stuff related to ships and shipbuilding in the Age of Sail, including things like a blacksmith, cooper, printer and other 19th century shops, crafts and industries.  They’re also actively restoring several historic sailing ships.  There’s also an aquarium there, with penguins, sea lions, beluga whales, and all kinds of fish and even octopus.  After that we went out to sushi for lunch.  There’a cute little downtown a bunch or restaurants and shops, including a great seafood place.  There’s also an 80-foot sailboat parked right there, a three-masted schooner, so we did a two-hour sunset cruise of the sound out beyond the river.  The harbor is actually up the river a little bit, so first we had to navigate the channel out to sea.  We crossed past a swinging train bridge that seems like the perfect focal point for an action set piece in some adventure film.  There’s a train coming and there’s a tall ship coming, and the hero and the villain are fighting up in the control room, trying to gain control of the switch to swing the bridge open or closed.

Liftin’n’Shiftin’

After what feels like and endless amount of effort, I’ve finally migrated my web site to a new host.  The site had outgrown its old host, and the hosting company was absolutely terrible with their costumer service and trying guide me to an upgraded tier of hosting, so it was time to move on.

Ideally, everything would appear and function as it did before.  But I was in the middle of doing some upgrades to various parts of the site and some things have gotten out of sync, so if you click around you may find the occasional broken link or missing image.  I hope to rectify this soon.

The major area of concern right now it this blog.  You may notice the its styling has changed.  Not that it was particularly beautiful before, but at least it matched the rest of the site.  I was able to migrate the blog content, but it had been using a customized version of a very old theme and I was not able to migrate that.  So I picked something in the ballpark, and will have to do some new customization it.  Plus whatever widgets and config setting need to be brought up to date.  Then it’s reviewing all the old posts to make sure the links and media are correct there.  Hope it doesn’t take too long.

I’ve also begun putting together foto galleries for 2023, as is my habit in late winter.  2023 was a huge year for travel, with three major airplane trips and lots of other stuff.  I’m halfway thru the year, up to our big trip to Italy last July, which will be a bunch of galleries by itself.  So watch this space for updates coming soon.

Meanwhile, it seems winter is over by spring has not yet begun.  We got one more ski trip in the last weekend of February, but conditions were not great and the mountain was crowded with kids on winter break skiing in all random directions.  One cut me off at the bottom of a run and I had to swerve to avoid running him over, and ended up falling.  Ugh.  After that the weather turned warm and rainy, so unless we get a major late-season snowstorm, it looks like we’ll have to wait for it to turn nice enough to start biking and doing things outside.

A Season of Darkness

It’s been a few weeks since my last post.  Nothing really exciting going on.  Been getting ready for the holidays.  Put up our tree, sent out our Christmas cards.  We saw the new Miyazaki movie.  It was amazing but he’s totally lost his mind.  Lizzy was home for a visit for a couple weeks ago with her new boyfriend.  They saw my origami elephants at the tree in the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.  Both girls will be home for the holidays soon.  I’ve been trying to wind down work for the year, and been thinking about old friends I miss, and how I’d like to make the time to see people.  Luckily, the plan for the end of the year is pretty laid back, so it looks like there’ll be some time for that.

It feels like it’s been dark all the time the last few weeks.  Only a few hours of tepid daylight before the sun sets in the mid-afternoon. At least the weather has been mainly pretty mild, even warm, and there’s been a handful of sunny days mixed in with the cloudiness and rain.  Been trying the get psyched up for skiing, but it’s not time yet. 

We did go ice skating the other day, which was lots of fun, and good exercise.  I haven’t been on my ice skates in years, and neither has Jeannie.  It’s good to know our skates still fit and we remember how to skate.  We’ll have to do that again soon, hopefully when it’s less crowded.  It seemed like I spent all my time maneuvering around a kid who fell over in front of me, pretty much every lap around the rink.

Even though my energy level has been up and down, my strength is up these days.  Usually the winter is a difficult time for weightlifting, but it’s been really solid since we got back from California.  My elbow, shoulder and back all feel great, and I just went up in weight on my last few sets of exercises, and I’m going to up on the rest in the new year.  

I’ve been trying to lean in to the season by getting more sleep, and although I must say I’ve never been good at going to be early, I find it easier these days. But try as I might, I remain very busy at work right up to the end of the week, which makes it hard to slack off too much. We’re into a new planning season, and things are always in motion.  I compare myself to water seeking its natural level as I slosh around to the most needful tasks from day to day. Good news, I may have just gotten approval to add another engineer to my team.

And, just in time for the holidays, The Global Jukebox 3.0.1 is now live.  This release was basically a hardening of 3.0, with numerous bug fixes and usability enhancements, an a beautiful new splash screen when you enter the app.

I’ve also been working on a new song, called Head Downtown, and there may a Spacecats record in the offing.  More on that next.

The Global Jukebox 3.0 is Live!

With all the craziness going on around these days, I’m very happy to announce The Global Jukebox 3.0 is live. You can see it at:

https://theglobaljukebox.org

It’s a big release with alot of new stuff. One is that the whole map interface has changed. This we necessitated by mapbox, whose map software we use, sunsetting their old api and introducing an all-new, completely different one. Our map is very complex with lot of data, lots of layers, and different kinds of visualizations, animations and styles on top of it, so this involved a pretty deep restructuring of the code. The original goal was feature parity, but as we got into it, we realized the new api offered affordances with should take advantage of. First was the the map tile load much quicker, and panning and zooming around the map are much smoother, so a bunch of tricks we had to compensate for the shortcomings of the old map could just be thrown out. Another is the new map api supports 3-D projection, with one possible mode being a globe instead of a flat map. We redesigned the visual experience to take advantage of that. The fully zoomed back view allows you to model an atmosphere and background starfield, and even make the Earth turn, so that was fun. Zoomed in, it resembles the previous flat map, but with a great, seamless zoom-in transition. At the end we redesigned the app’s landing page to show off the globe and freshen up the design style.

The other big new feature the introduction of routes, that allow for a unique url for every app state. This in turn allows for sharing links, moving and forward back thru the app, generating a spiderable sitemap so all our songs, cultures, journeys, etc., will show up when google for those things. It turns out the app states are numerous, and sometimes deep and complicated, with lots of edge cases and corner cases. Previously this had been a single page app, so this work required us the think thru all the various states and how they can stack and compound and transition from one to the another. Additionally, the whole app is basically built out of bespoke javascript, so we couldn’t just drop in a framework and retrofit around it. We built our own, of course following best practices for good design patterns.

Martin and I have working the last six month or so on this, with Martin mainly doing the routes and me mainly doing the map. It was a big lift, and I must say he is a great partner to work with. Compared to a lot of software engineers I’ve worked with, I care alot about code quality, not just for it’s own sake, but for extensibility, readability, correct logic, names and abstractions, and very low bug rate. And Martin was right there with me, reasoning things thru, puzzling out thorny problems as the arose, and being patient and meticulous with quality control and attention to detail. I guess it helps that we learned to program computers together as kids, and have similar attitudes and sensibilities as to what make good software and what make a software project worth doing.

And of course I must acknowledge our project director Anna Lomax Wood, without whom none of this would be possible. Her deep knowledge of world folk music and cultural anthropology, her intelligence and positive attitude are all big guiding lights. It’s an honor and a privilege to work her. Kudos too to Kiki who, although has been pretty light-touch on this project recently, has contributed in numerous way including project management, organization, visual and UX design, devops, creating and formatting content, metadata, audio assets, and generally running things over at the Association of Cultural Equity.

Next up, The Global Jukebox 3.1. Stay tuned!

Cadence and Cascade

Over the last month I’ve been really busy with our product launch at work.  The name of the project is Permission Slip, and at its heart is an app that acts as an agent for people excising their online privacy rights.  

The main app is on ios, with a brand-new version now on android, and a backend made in python/django and postgres.  The main development was contracted out to an external software house in Canada.  There’s been some churn over there, and we’re on the third round of managers and engineers. I’ve been doing tech leadership with the team, which coming to the end meant lots of code reviews, acquiring credentials for all the different systems, coordinating with the product and marketing teams, and with apple and google, and doing develops, CI/CD, setting up pipelines from github to our deploy servers. Lots of extra drama about goggle ad tags, goggle auth keys, and back’n’forth with legal over the privacy policy.  And oh yeah, building the web site.  

Building the web site was actually kinda cool and fun, if not for the deadline pressure. Got to learn about QR codes, and do some nice responsive mobile layout in CSS.  By the end of the last week we were in QA, fixing bugs to the very last minute.  We did a pre-launch deploy of the web site and backend, and submitted the app to the apple and google stores.  Everything came together and went fine and there were no bugs or glitches.  Monday we got approved and for sale on google (the ios app already was released) and updated the web site with the goggle links.  We were live, and could take a deep breath of relief.

Tuesday morning our app went live with the “true launch”.  The marketing push included an article in the Washington Post, and on NPR.  Around 11:30 in the morning the app is getting slow due to heavy and we start investigating.

The app had previously gone thru a beta phase, then a soft launch last winter, and we had about 12,000 users.  In about six hours we had over 20,000 new users.  Two days later we were above 50,000.  That was our goal for the whole year.  Over the weekend we passed 100,000.

Being deployed on the cloud, we scaled up our app dynos and added workers, and migrated the DB to a container with 4x the ram.  Investigating, we discovered that the database was the critical bottleneck.  We looked at what are the heaviest queries in terms of both invoked the most often and most expensive to run, and began optimizing the code there and pushing new changes on the backend into production.  Amazingly, all this actually worked, and within a few hours the mischief was managed and things were trending back to normal.  It took until after midnight to get all the loose ends tidied up.  A long day that started with panic, but ended with a big victory.  Being more popular than expected by an order of magnitude is a good problem to have.

Over the next few days we reviewed all the patches we made, and deeper, more robust fixes where necessary.  We were able to deploy and roll back the commits one at a time to really understand the performance impact.  I’m certainly glad now I spent time upfront to develop a deploy pipeline integrated with our code repo; it really paid off.  A few months ago the devs were just deploying from their local dev environments, that would’ve been a huge disaster.  I’m also happy about having in metrics and analytics in place that gave use info we could use and respond to with code changes in real time.  Most of all, I’m very impresses with how everyone on the team came together in problem solving mode and got it done quickly and effectively.

You should know that my job is running a software R&D group within the company.  We have a peer group, that’s more directly tasked with commercialization and productization of R&D projects, and indeed they worked closely with us on the marketing and other things.  But they lost a few key people in the tech and leadership areas in the last few months, so we had to do what was necessary on our own.  And, like I said, we made twice the target number of new users for the year in just three days.  Happily, now our corporate enterprise department wants to migrate our app into their infrastructure, so down the road my team won’t have to worry about devOps and can get back to doing R&D.

That was just one adventure last week.  The second was that it was time to make the class schedule for the upcoming Pacific Coast Origami Conference, happening in San Francisco at the end of October.  This has actually gotten fairly routine.  The tool that Robert Land and I build it working and stable, with the latest round of improvements making it easier to match teachers that want A/V equipment to classrooms that have it.  Also this convention is alot smaller than the OUSA New York Convention in June.  Still the work is over a weekend and tends to be late and night, and there’s always some last minute changes, shuffling, and special considerations to be accommodated.  Anyway, we got it completed without any problems.

Also over the weekend we took a trip up to Buffalo to visit my parents and my kids. It was a pretty quick trip, we drove up Friday night and home Sunday night.  Saturday we visited Michelle on campus, saw her new apartment, which is quite nice, walked around the campus and later went out to dinner at Pizza Plant at Canal Side.  Pizza Plant used to be one of our favorite places when Jeannie and I were dating.  It’s nice that they’re still around and their food is yummy.  Sunday we watched the Bills game with my parents, which for some strange reason was being played in England, where they have an entirely different game called football, and was on at nine in the morning.  After that Lizzy came over for dinner and we all enjoyed and nice afternoon.  And wouldn’t you know, it was rainy on the drive up and home again.

In other news, we’re closing in on the release date for The Global Jukebox 3.0, and I’ve turned the corner from tacking to mixing on my song A Plague of Frogs.  Today I layered up a nice fat, 80’s style synth sound for the part called “Synth 1”, using an analog lead sound, synth brass and strings.

Super Blue

Lest all y’all think life these days is all going to see bands and fun trips to beaches and mountains, I’ve actually been busy with the software thing this whole time too.  A couple of big project milestones in my day job.  Firstly one of my projects, the Data Rights Protocol, has reached version 0.9 and we’re entering the initial deployment phase, which involves passing live data end-to-end among consortium members to implement actionable consumer data rights requests. Meanwhile, we also put up a new web site where you can learn all about it at:

https://datarightsprotocol.org

Second, another project of mine, Permission Slip, is going live with version 2.0 of our this week, including an all-new android version of the app. And there’s a new web site for this one too:

https://permissionslipcr.com

Finally, we’re getting very close to releasing version 3.0 of the Global Jukebox.  This is a major rev I’ve been working on for months with Martin.  One big new features is an all-new map visualization that starts with a spinning globe, and is much more powerful, flexible and performant than the old one.  The other big thing is the app now has routes to express the app state as a unique url.  Each of these was a big lift, and we’re now in the final phases of QA and tweaking the styles and messaging on the landing page.  So watch this space for an announcement sometime soon.  But for now you can get a sneak peak on our staging site at:

https://stage.theglobaljukebox.org

In the world outside of work, it’s been one of the rainiest Septembers I’ve ever experienced. Three out of the last four weeks it’s rained some or most or even all of the weekend, were’ talking epic, heavy, ark-building rains here, to the point where I’ve only gotten out on my bike one Sunday the whole month for a big ride, and not at all for a weekday evening in the last two weeks.  The days are getting shorter faster, so soon the opportunity for a ride after work will be gone.  

As luck would have it, we did go out to see another concert last weekend.  It was Superblue, a funk-fueled collaboration between Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter, at Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village.  Poisson Rouge turned out to be a pretty nice club, although the waiters were kinda disorganized and incredibly slow.  The band itself was great.  The opening act was the horn section from the main group, backed by a different rhythm section.  They were really fun, funky and entertaining.  At one point the trumpet player switched to tuba and the trombone player to beatboxing, leaving just the sax player.  They did a Stevie Wonder medley which was just mind blowing.

The main act was most excellent too.  Charlie Hunter plays a guitar with extra strings and an octave effect so it functions as both the bass and the guitar for the group.  Needless to say his technique is innovative and incredible, but he spent most of his time in the pocket, just groovin’ and grinnin’.  Kurt himself was great, picking diverse source material such as “Naughty Number Nine” from Schoolhouse Rock, delivering them with powerful, soulful phrasing, and interjecting philosophical soliloquies a la Elwood Blues. 

Just yesterday we were supposed to see yet another shoe, Tuck and Patti at the Irridium, but it got cancelled due to the weather.  There were such heavy rains and flooding in New York City that the seals in the Central Park Zoo escaped their enclosure and were were freely swimming/sliding around the whole zoo.  I guess they went back on their own without having to be rounded up.