Category: Software

Now With Style

Today was a rainy day, so I took a break from doing stuff outside to finish off a task leftover from the winter, another part of my ongoing site redesign. Remember way back when this blog was new, when blogging was the new trendy thing, and I promised to upgrade my blog’s style to be consistent with the rest of the site? Well I finally got around to it. Only took a little over five years.

The thing is, editing wordpress themes is a real pain. All I really want is a miminal, clean theme, but all the site themes are crufted up with lots of persnickety layout details that don’t do much to enhance the site. I picked a new theme for my site and the style sheet file was over 2000 lines long. This was one of simple ones mind you, and I still ended up throwing away a lot of it.

And there’s still more to go. There’s spacing issues, and I have to get into the various views, particularly the ones for individual posts, and for comments. Soon I will have gone as far is I can go with the css and will have to get into editing the php templates. Hopefully it won’t take me another five years to finish it off.

Origami Publications

Winter lingers on. Believe it or not, we still have some snow on the ground from last week’s freakish snowstorm. It looks like random chunks of styrofoam. Still can’t do much to get started on the yardwork.

So instead here’s another update to my web site. I created a page for my origami publications. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/origami/zing_origami_publications.php

Speaking of which, the video for my book is done, and I’m back in waiting-to-hear-from-my-publisher mode. I’m starting to work on a new batch of designs, including some advanced polyhedra, so I have some new stuff to exhibit at this year’s convention.

Everything Going on at Once

This was a really busy weekend. I was sort of stressed and feeling down in the middle of the week, but now I feel great about everything. I’ve probably talked with more different people in the last 48 hours than I sometimes do for weeks on end.

First off, work has been busy. Thursday night into Friday was a big messy snowstorm that cancelled school and made going into the city an epic adventure. We’ve had three releases of our product in three months, all with pretty bug new feature sets. The last of them was last week. On Friday we had a big demo for the new stuff going into the next – as yet unplanned – release. I’ve been spending a good deal of time on refactoring with an eye to improving runtime performance and the architecture. I found a set of bugs where components were slow to initialize or put themselves away, and discovered they’re caused by some object disposal code implemented recently by another developer to try and staunch memory leaks. But his approach is really heavy and creates more problems than it solves. So now I have to rip the whole thing out and do it right. Ah, what fun.

Friday night I went to an open mic. I hadn’t seen my friend Erik in a while and he showed up too, which made it fun. I played Making Miles and Get On Back 2 U. Somewhere along the line my singing just sort of came together and I don’t really have to worry about that anymore. Also I’m getting used the feel of the piano there. Making Miles was written by Martin, but at this point I have my own version of it. The song is not hard to play and it went over well. It always makes me miss him though. GOB2U is one of mine and I know it well, but it’s full of altered jazz chords and prog meter changes, and has a big solo section in the middle. My songs often seem to have a passage where the left hand does some advanced thing, and if I find myself consciously thinking about it it’s too much to handle. So there was a moment when I had to let the left had go for a bar or so, but no one seemed to notice. And then at the big ending I somehow landed on the wrong chord. It fit with the key and I was able to improvise my out of it. So at least I’m getting better at covering my mistakes smoothly.

Saturday I had the time for a nice long piano practice, and actually got to work on some things in depth. Taking apart and reanalyzing some of my songs, and starting to learn a few new songs. In keeping with my policy of trying to perform a new original song every time, next I’m work up It’s Gonna Be a Beautiful Day, which as harmonically pretty straight forward (just a few sharp 4’s in there) but is largely in 5/8 time. I’ve also stared looking at the classifieds to see if I can either acquire a rhythm section or join a group that would be into playing my material.

Saturday night was the school’s annual father-daughter dance. This year I took both girls. It was a lot of fun. I know more of the dads and kids than I did last year, and some of the dads brought beer. My friend Mike, who was the piano player for last year’s Cabaret show, told me he’s now doing a lounge piano gig at a neighborhood restaurant/bar on Saturday nights, and what a challenge it is getting together an evening’s worth of standards. I’ll have to go check it out. While the dads hung around and talked the kids had a great time dancing up a storm.

Today I did an origami special session at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Had to get up early with the clock change. I taught my Squid and my Cuttlefish. This British kid from my class is ten years old and already an amazing folder and designer. He brought a box of his own models that looked great. I encouraged him to put together an exhibit for the convention in June. After the class I did a quick cruise thru my favorite parts of the museum – the giant halls of dinosaurs, animals and sea creatures – and then went for a walk around Central Park. It was really warm this weekend and most of the snow has already melted. You can really feel spring is coming soon!

When I got home this afternoon I did the final bit of video for my book, the introduction. For this I’m talking into the camera rather than show closeups of paper on a light stand. It was the perfect day for it, since the kitchen was filled with sunlight.

This evening I worked on Lou’s record. His songs are nice and easy to play. I’m on track to have all the rhythm instruments, plus a midi guide track for the lead vocal done by Easter. Last week I laid down the bass parts and today it was rhythm guitar. (I did the drums and piano a few weeks back.) I’m getting a good sound with a combination of direct inject and mic about 2 or 3 feet in front of the guitar. I got two and a half songs out for done before my fingertips started to get sore. I’ll finish the rest one night this week.

More and Merrier

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve posted, and I’ve been keepin’ on with my various projects and stuff. Work has been busy. It feels like everyone is waiting for spring to arrive now. The kids were originally supposed to have the whole week of for Prez day, but they had only two days off so they could make up days they lost to Hurricane Sandy. Jeannie and the kids and I went up for a quick visit to our friends Seth and Cathy in the Berkshires last weekend. Jeannie and Michelle went skiing with our hosts, but Lizzy and I hung around the cabin for the day. It was bitter cold and I didn’t think I’d enjoy it much. At least I had a nice day to relax, and I did go for a nice hike in the woods. Maybe there’ll still be a chance to ski in March.

I put up another big update to my web site a couple days ago. This one brings us most of the way to new origami presentation, with view-by-subject and view-by-year in place. It also updates the nav bars and headers to make the layout nicer and save space. And of course as I go, bit by bit I’m converting things to divs with style definitions to make it all more flexible and modular. The next update will mainly focus on the module items in the origami section. I want to put back multiple images per item, and I want to introduce some kind of inline image viewer. I also wwant to put up some new pages for my various books and publications.

The kids’ school musical was supposed to be two weeks ago was postponed because of a snowstorm. It was rescheduled for this coming weekend. I went to a dress rehearsal today, and there’s another Friday with shows on Saturday and Sunday. Lizzy is really good, and so are the other leads. The band consists of me on sax and two teachers from the school, one on piano and one of drums. I’m also doing a bit of guitar. The music itself is really fun. They still need to work out some of the logistics of getting the little kids on and off the stage in a timely fashion, and moving around the scenery between scenes, as well as getting a good mix from the wireless mics the leads are wearing. Hopefully it’ll all get ironed out.

Update Update

Been working on a bunch of things. Settling into the long winter and trying to be productive. Starting in or continuing on project that will take a while.

First off, my open mic the other night went pretty well. People told me I sounded good at least, and they like my songs. Before I’d played in a duo with Erik, but this was my first time as a completely solo artist. It’s not easy keeping both hands going and singing while no one is backing you up. Plus there’s always things on the stand the you don’t necessarily think about but you have to adjust to ont he spot: the sound and feel of the piano, the placement of the mic, the lighting. And there’s no sound check or warmup, you just go for it. Anyway I think I did pretty well.

I played two originals, Checker Cab and Get On Back 2 U. I’m trying to do one new song (as far as me performing it live is concerned) per show, and Checker Cab was it this time. On Checker Cab the left hand art in the chorus was a bit off one time thru, and I decided to skip the instrumental section in the middle for the safety of the groove. Still the vocals were strong on the groove was swinging the whole time. Get On Back 2 U went fine, no particular problems. I’m more comfortable with it, and maybe I should have opened with it but, ah too late now. When I debuted GoB2U live it was a bit shaky too, but now it’s solid and can focus on delivering a performance rather than worrying about messing up.

I can’t go to the open mic next month cuz of the kids’ school musical, but for the one after that the plan is to debut my version of Making Miles. Also gonna start looking for other open mics and try and find a rhythm section soon.

It looks like I’m mainly over the hump as far as moving into my new computer goes. It’s a Mac workstation with a great big screen, to replace my older mac workstation with a more moderately sized screen. Of course this means have to update all my software and everything. I really only use this computer for two things. One is software development on the days I work from home, and the other is music production on ProTools. The ProTools in particular took a while to migrate because of driver updates, and having to re-register all my plugins. But that seems to have all worked, and I can see lots and lots of channels in the mixer on the new screen. The last big thing remaining is to migrate my old windows partition to my new machine via VMWare. In fact I even started working on music on the new rig, add click tracks and stretching the chords on Lou’s songs. Soon hope to lay in the rhythms sections.

I’ve also been experimenting with recording video for my book. The idea is to demo folding the models. I’ve been learning more about my camera because I can use to shoot video in HD, so I want to try and use that rather than my miniDV camcorder. I’ve hooked it up to the computer and can see the viewfinder image on my monitor. I’ve also left the safety of fully automatic mode and am learning how to independently control the ISO, F-stop, exposure and focus, and started coming up with setups that work. It’s a bit tricky, because I need to be zoomed in pretty tight by still have a large depth of field. Adding more light helps. The next I’m gonna do is change my setup around so that the camera is looking down over my shoulder. For my first go I had the camera opposite me, but this made it harder to explain clearly because the audience POV was opposite my own. Also have to make sure I’m capturing good audio. I might add an external mic.

So look forward to progress on all of that and more in future updates.

Buzzy Third Music Site Update

I added some new pages to my web site, for my work-in-progress album, whose working title is Buzzy Third. There’s a page for the music and one for the lyrics. Check them out. These will continue to get updated as more songs are completed. While I was at it I made a bunch more updates to the main pages on my music and spew sections, and templatized and added style definitions to lots of second-level pages. There’s still a few things to do, most notably to come up with some album art for the new record, or at least a better placeholder.

Meanwhile, the new year seems to be off to a good start. The weather has been mild and my health has been good. January is always the roughest month of the year, and its too early to say the days are getting longer, but so far so good. We had a major deadline and demo at work earlier this week, and it went really well. All the bosses were impressed. I feel like all my hard work whipping my team in to shape is finally paying off. No random late-breaking bugs or snafus to contend with this time around.

At home, I got a new computer. More on that later. I started working on video for my book. I’ve been spending a good amount of time on music too. Started work on Lou’s EP, and getting back to working out the middle section of my song Black Swan. Been practicing sax and learning songs for the kids’ musical next month. Glad so say that since I got my tenor fixed it’s sounding great. Also been playing piano, concentrating on my originals. I’m doing an open mic tomorrow night a place called the Purple Crayon, in Hastings.

ZMP 2013

With my book done, I’m starting some new projects in the new year. Among them is a long-awaited update and redesign for my web site. I’m starting by templatizing the entire site. This is something I began a couple years back, when I introduced headers and footers as page includes. Now all the content items on the main pages are also php includes, and template driven. You can see the results on the music, art, multimedia, and movies pages. This turned out to be pretty quick and easy, and should it make it much easier to add new content to the site going forward. Of course this is just the beginning. I have a bunch of style updates in mind, and some new features around content presentation. But the next few updates I have in mind are for content. I’m going to add a page for my new work-in-progress record, whose working title is Buzzy Third. There are four songs done, so there’ll be info, lyrics and audio tracks. The other updated in the offing is to the origami site. It’s been a long while since I’ve updated that, and I have tons of new models, as well as new and better photos for older models. Plus now I’ll be able to present content by year as well as by category. Beyond that – back to the Foldinator!

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

It was twenty years ago today – half a lifetime ago – that I quit my job, broke up my band, sold my car, left my hometown, friends and family behind, and moved to New York City to attend grad school and begin my career in “Mulitmedia” as it was known at the time. The great leap into the unknown. It’s been one heck of a ride, at the vanguard of interactive media, software and entertainment, including some great years spent in Silicon Valley. Sometime when I’m in the mood to reminisce, I’ll tell you all about it, particularly the years before the crash. For now, I just want to give a shout out to the ITP class of ’94 and say wow, how the times have changed. What used to be visionary is now just everyday life. My kids take the existence of iPods for granted, and care more about accessorizing them than anything else. They’ll never understand the work and imagination it took to drag the dream into existence.

I Learn to Work the Saxophone

Good news about work. After having worked last weekend, we got a release candidate of our app done by lunchtime Monday. So now we’re in QA and waiting to see if there are any bugs. Meanwhile the release date has been pushed back to mid-July because Abe our QA guy is expecting a baby any day now. Meanwhile, I’m writing unit tests, which is something we’ve always meant to do but never seem to have time for, but our Corporate Overlords have mandated it, so it’s actually fun and cool, and will have lasting payoff in terms of the quality of our code.

So I got to take a summer Friday this week, and dedicated it to catching up on random tasks. High on the list I have to have work done a couple of my horns, and needed to find a sax repair main. I used to repair horns myself, but I don’t have any of the tools or supplies. So I’ve been asking around, and one of the local music stores recommended Virgil Scott in Yonkers. So I went over there and it turns out he was great. I had him check out my alto, and he fixed it on the spot. The main thing was it needed a new cork on the neck, be he also spotted and fixed some minor leaks. Very friendly guy, and we got to talking. He hadn’t seen a Selmer USA. He thought it was basically identical to a Mark VI, although I pointed out a few differences.

Clearly he knows what he’s doing, and he’d even fixed Michael Brecker’s horn. So its great to find a saxophone repairman. Next week in I’m bringing in my tenor, which is a classic sax but in worse shape. It has some serious leaks in the lower stack.

Origami Site Update

I posted an update to my origami site at http://zingman.com/origami. The main page now features larger thumbnails and an update image for the Fox. I added a few new models from 2011 including the Inchworm and the Dual Cube. I still have a bunch more new models to add, including some new tessellations, and while I’m at it take better pics of the Fox, and add the CP for Dual Cube. In the descriptions of the model I’ve added links indicating where diagrams for that model have been published.