Category: Software

Windin’ Up the Main Spring

It’s been a busy couple of weeks.  Our band had our gig at the Green Growler a week ago Saturday.  It went great!  The band is playing at a really high level, together and free at the same time.  We debuted two new originals.  One was What You Bring to the Table by Rick, which has undergone considerable evolution since he brought it to the group.  The other was mine, Son of the Sun, replete with meter and key changes, and borrowing from the prog idiom.  I’m impressed the group wanted to learn it, and stuck with it until we got it together.  Of course it evolved alot too as this group made it our own.  We rounded out the set with a mixture of originals, jazz standards, and funk and rock covers.  We had a good crowd, including Michelle who was home for spring break, and Nick and Giovanni came up from Long Island.  Giovanni was fascinated by playing mainly improvised music and how it works, asking me what I had written down on my charts and that sort of thing. 

And hey everybody – we have another show coming up two days at Jazz on Main in Mt. Kisco.  This one features special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals, so we’ve been learning a whole ‘nuther repertoire for that one.  The band songs are mainly our originals since we have alot of them now, while the vocal songs lean heavily into standards and vocalese.  Lots arrangements with dramatic beginnings and endings.  Should be an excellent show.

And right on the heels of that my team at work had an onsite in the Manhattan the better part of the week.  Lots of people came in from out of town.  I took the train in to Grand Central, and each day walked one way down to or back from Union Square.  It was an excellent week to be in the city, with the beginnings of spring stirring.  We had a few meetings in the park or just waking around the neighborhood.  I the middle of that I met Jeannie after work on evening to see Kurt Elling at Birdland, doing a tribute to Weather Report. Kurt remains one of my favorite jazz singers, and has such a great voice and phrasing and a unique take on things, and rock-star level cha-rasma.  

The Innovation Lab as grown to twelve people, and we have alot more confidence to think big this year.  We also have a new CEO, who met with us for an extended roundtable discussion and asked us what resources we need, and what new ideas we have cooking.  Nobody really knew what he’d be like until he arrived; it turns out he’s friendly and bright and sees his charter as turn-this-ship-around, and signaled he’s willing to to put some resources into it.  My VP used the phrase tip of the spear to describe our role this coming year.  I’m in sort of transitional phase right now because the two main projects I’ve been working on the last three years have successfully transitioned from R&D to production, and the challenges with them are to make them scale up and be cost effective.  Indeed three of our new hires this year are involved in that endeavor.  So I successfully lobbied to be a sort or researcher-at-large for a while.  My boss said I should look around and think about what I want to work on next.  I haven’t had that luxury since the 1990’s.  And, on the train ride home the last day, I thought of an idea that looks promising.  It cut across several things we have going on, and would move our agent AI work forward to enable productization at a multi-dimensional level.  But first, to understand some critical technical systems.  So this week I’m starting to talk to the other engineers and managers about what it would take to pull it off.  Wish me luck!

And then this last Saturday, spring arrived in earnest, if only for a half day.  It got up to seventy-five degrees.  Jeannie and took our bikes out in the morning to the local trail.  I’ve been biking most of the winter when the weather permits, but mostly short rides (five miles or so) on the streets near my house.  This is the first time I’ve gone a long distance straight and flat.  I did sixteen miles in a little over an hour.  Not bad for the first real outing of the season.  Last year it took me until May or June to reach that distance.  Last year my longest ride was thirty miles.  This year I hope to reach forty or even fifty.

Also over the last two weekends I started the spring yardwork cycle, clearing out nine cans and bags worth of leaves and trimmings and other debris, plus a big bundle of sticks and branches.  And, I took the Mustang out for the fist time of the season.  It started right up and ran just fine.  Woo-hoo!  Of course by the time we were on the way home I was anxious to beat the gathering rainclouds.

Next up: the D&D adventure comes to the final boss!

Oh What Fun to Ride and Sing a Slaying Song Tonight

We’re in the midst of a long and languid holiday break.  I’ve been off work for a whole week and a day, and don’t go back until Thursday.  I finished off work on a high note, having successfully merged my R&D branch of the codebase back into the main branch, deployed it and all.  The project is turning the corner from R&D into productization, always a fun part of the curve.  Also lots of planning meetings for big ambitious new features and new R&D threads in the coming year.  After a long uphill slog into strong headwinds I now feel that the tide has turned, the wind is at our backs and filling our sail, and we’re gaining momentum as we cruise downhill.

Michelle came home from school a week before Christmas, and Lizzy a few days later along with Josh.  We even got snow a couple times and it remained cold enough for the snow to stick around for a white Christmas.  We did Jeannie’s family party the Saturday before Christmas, and went to Mary’s on Christmas day.  In between was lots of food and drink, movies and games, music, wrapping presents, opening presents, hanging out and getting things done at a relaxed pace.

We’re shaping up for a new release of the Global Jukebox in the new year.  Nick has come up to speed as my new second software engineer, which is great.  I still miss Martin whenever I work on the jukebox.  He wrote so much amazing code and did so much of the devops stuff too.  I’m always inside his thoughts and mind when I read thru the code.  Anyway, Nick is now filling that role and bringing his own approach and perspective.  The major new feature we’ve been working on converting the existing Cantometric codings for all the songs to a new simplified schema, to make it easier to train new coders and to eliminate some ambiguities in the original system.  Nick wrote the script to do the conversion, which required understanding alot of domain knowledge as well as the architecture of the web application.  Meanwhile I created the spec for the new schema and did all the UI and UX work on the client side.  Now it’s all on the staging server and we’re looking at finishing off some P2 features to get into the next release.

I bought a drum mic kit as a present to myself.  It’s bundle of eight microphones for all the different drums plus overheads, along with stands and cables.  I’ve decided I want to use more real drums on my next record (more on that soon) and so it’s essential to be able to mic it up.  Next step is to get it all set up and learn how to use it.  Oh, and I’m going to upgrade to a 16-input preamp/DAC unit as well.

Oh, and Jeannie got a Nintendo Switch, so I’m gonna get some games for that too!

We went up to Buffalo for a few days after Christmas.  They had a ton of snow when we arrived, but while we were up there it got warm and started to melt. Kathleen and the kids came up too.  It was a little sad because we all felt Martin’s absence, but we also felt his presence. There was coming together and healing energy, and it was good to see everyone.  I’ve been trying to bond with the kids and get closer to them.  I took them out for a long walk around the neighborhood one morning to the park and the lake and all the local playgrounds.  Played some chess with Match and Abbie. We also had dinner with Larry and Jackie and place in Allentown called Mother’s which was really good.  To top it all off, the Bills demolished the Jets on Sunday.  Looking good for the playoffs.

I’ve started a D&D campaign with Martin’s kids as a fun way to try and be a presence in their lives.  We’ve had three sessions so far over the last three weeks.  The first week we rolled up characters, the second we did a warm-up wilderness encounter en route the the start of the main adventure, and this last weekend the party got the the base town, met some of the locals, stocked up on provisions and all that, and set out for the ruins of the Sunless Citadel, where the adventure begins in earnest.  They climbed down into a ravine and are now at the front door of the main dungeon (where a trap awaits, unbeknownst to them).  The party consists of the three oldest kids, Charlie, Matthew and Abbie, as well as their cousin Rylee, all aged 12 to 16.  Also joining in are Michelle and Jeannie.  It’s a good mix of races, classes and alignments.  Rylee is and Elfin Fighter, and Charlie and Elfin Ranger.  Match is a Dwarven Barbarian, and Abbie a Gnomish Bard who rides around on a giant rabbit.  Michelle is playing a Halfling Cleric and Jeannie a human Sorceress.  I’m DM’ing, which is something I really enjoy.  Everyone is first level, and their alignments are centered on chaotic neutral, which fits with their general attitude. 

We’re using a combination of software.  It’s amazing how all this stuff has advanced since I first started playing D&D online twenty years ago with Nick.  We’re using google meet for the video conference.  This mostly works great by the call only lasts and hour, so I have to start a new meeting halfway thru.  We’re using DND Beyond for the character sheets, stats, and related stuff like spells, weapons, bonuses, modifiers, and hit points.  And we’re using Owlbear Rodeo for maps and combat.  All free apps that run in the browser, very convenient. 

So far it’s lots of fun, and good to be able to spend time with everyone in a casual, semi-structured way.  They’re all definitely enjoying it.  My plan is to keep it going thru the winter at least, and maybe longer if everyone remains into it. 

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.