Foundation’s Edge

Ah the joys of home ownership. Having things means having to fix things. Is maintenance a creative act? I suppose in the sense that it opposes destructiveness it is, and also that you may make something new along the way to fixing something old and broken.

Earlier this spring I noticed some cracks in the concrete along the foundation of the north side of my house. The concrete is below the siding, a protective/decorative layer that covers the actual foundation of the house. It’s a generally damp and mossy area, and in the spring sometimes puddles can form there. I suspect the cracks were initially caused by water freezing.

Meanwhile just outside out front door one rainy day, there was a mushroom growing from the bottom of the door frame! It turned out the wood down there was rotting cuz the weather seal had worn out and was leaky, so the end of this piece of wood was sitting in a puddle in the door jamb every time it rained.

A couple weeks ago I finally got around to tackling these projects. For the door, I cut away the old rotting wood, the bottom few inches of a piece that runs vertically on either side of the door frame. Then I cut a couple pieces of new wood to fit the void, glued ’em in to place and filled in the gaps and cracks with wood putty. Later that day I sanded of the excess putty and gave it a coat of paint. More paint and new caulk would have to wait for another day.

As for the foundation, I thought I could just put a little fresh cement over the cracks to seal it. But no. When I started to clean the moss and dirt out from the cracks, it became apparent the facing cement had separated from the layer underneath as big slabs of the stuff fell away. Some moisture had gotten up between the layers, and tree roots followed. So I ended up digging a trench along the side of my house to get to the bottom of the damaged area, and pulled of quite a bit of the facing cement. This took the better part of a day and I had only exposed the damage, not even begun to fix anything. What I though would be a quick fix turned into a major project!

From here things turned slow because I only have a little bit of daylight left in the evenings when I get home from work, and we were away the intervening weekend, so I had to break things down into bite-size tasks and do a bit each day. This worked OK for the front door. I ended up having to give it a few coats of paint for adequate coverage. It only took couple minutes to do the paint, and then wait a day for it to dry. Finally I was able to put down new caulk and the job was done.

An interesting consequence of this was that there is a population of ants who make their home under my front steps. When I sealed up the repaired area I must have blocked of the way in and out of their home, because that night I opened my front door and there were dozens of ants in the space between the front door and the screen door, and some were making their way into the house! We sprayed the area and put down ant traps, and that was pretty much the end of the ant party. They have found a new way out, because yesterday I saw a bunch of ants climbing around the side of the steps near my rose bush.

With the foundation it took better part of a week to clean the area and apply a layer of patching cement just to cover the crakes that were left when all the bad concrete was removed. So two weeks after I started I put down a whole new layer of facing cement, a job that took the better part of a day and was not really a whole lot of fun. Finally last night I put down the patching cement to seal the joint between the old and new cement. So we’re in the home stretch now. The only thing left is to refill the trench with dirt.

Of course this leads me straight on to the next project. I want to get some dirt to fill in the low spot so rain water will flow away from my house rather than form a puddle. While I’m at it, there a few paving stones around the area that were left over from when I built my patio. >I want to buy a few more and make a proper little foot path. I hope to get this done this fall.

Summer Camping, Part II

We just got back from another weekend of camping, this time in the opposite end of the Catskills, with our friend Seth and his daughter Erin, and our friends the Blickers, and bunch of friends of theirs. We’ve been doing this a few years now, and it seems to get larger every year, so we’ve dubbed it Blickapalooza. More hiking, canoeing, hanging around the campsite making fires, cooking food, singing songs and drinking beers. How can you complain? Well this trip was too cold for swimming, and hikes we took were kinda short, but we had lakeside campsites and I got to do a lot of canoeing with Michelle and Lizzy. And it rained Friday night, but at least the fire kept going and then the stars came out and our new tent stayed dry, so now we know it rocks!

Also, after years of never practicing guitar and having only a basic knowledge of simple chords and a repertoire consisting mainly of Neil Young songs, I’ve decided for what I do it actually sounds pretty good, and it might be worth it to learn some more chords and some new songs, so I’m thinking of getting a new acoustic guitar to replace the one I got for trading an old boom box years ago. That guitar is amazing in that it has almost no wood at all in it, but it still has a great bright tone. Unfortunately neither the action nor the intonation is very good, so it’s a bit hard to play.

We took tons of pictures. I think Lizzy took about 20 just of Erin’s feet. Here are a few to start with; a more complete gallery will follow on sometime later. Most of the feet pictures will be removed as part of the curating function.

Fun with Flex

Things have been getting interesting at the cartoon factory lately. I spent most of July working random little projects, mainly fixing bugs and filling for colleagues who were out on vacation. But now I have a new project to get into. It’s a mass personalization area for our site. And I get to do it in a whole new development envioronment and platform, Flex. So I’ve been learning Flex, checking out the docs and tutorials, and trying some experiments. For someone like me Flex is pretty cool, cuz it’s basically Flash: The Next Generation. It’s much more developer- (as opposed to animator-) centric, and shows a heavy influences of J2EE. The IDE is the Eclipse platform, and it uses ANT build scripts and all that. Like Flash it’s centered on the ActionScript programming language, and introduces a new markup language MXML, which allows for rapid scripting of UI’s, and some basic but nontrivial behaviors like event mapping and data binding. It has a massive amount of pre-rolled objects and common plumbing built in, too.

So I’m off to a good start, but it doesn’t take long to get to the point where MXML is not sufficient and you have to use good ol’ Actionscript. Still, the level of built in support out of the box is pretty impressive. I know tutorials are generally designed to show off a product’s strength but this one is pretty cool: I built a feed reader for my blog in only an hour or so. You can play with it here:

http://zingman.com/experiments/flex/feed_reader/main.html

And the best thing about it is that the source code for entire application is only half a page long.

So stay tuned, I’ll let you know sometime this fall how the project turns out.

Summer Camping, Part I

We just got back from a weekend of camping in the Catskills with our good friend Nick and his family, and my brother Martin and his girlfriend Kathleen. The weather was great (no rain!), and we got to do some good hiking, swimming and canoeing, and lots of hanging around the campsite making fires, cooking food, singing songs and drinking beers. Ahhh, good times.

Icthyometry

Summer continues. Getting right into the soft soggy center of it, rainy barbeques and all.

So in lieu of anything new to present, here’s a Flash animation I did a while back featuring hypnotic geometric fishies. I came across it over the weekend while I was culling old material from my hard drive. It’s a simple, non-interactive linear animation, although at one point I had the idea of making some kind of pattern-oriented game using these visuals as a theme. In any event, I still like it and I’d say it stands the test of time.

While your at it, check out my multimedia gallery.

Interim Update: La La La La Life

Well another whole week has gone by without my updating my blog. Ah well, what can I say, it’s summertime. Time to take a break and go play outside. In addition to summertime party fun I’ve been working on my various projects: origami polyhedra galore and recording a new song “Angel Or Alien” trying to fit in an extra hour here or there at night, but both are fairly laborious mentally.  Well last Monday I kind of hit a wall, and spent the next few days feeling tired and burned out. I’ve also been nursing a knee injury which has been taking a long time to feel better. On top of that, my computer died last week.

Things were slow at the cartoon factory with lots of people out on vacation, so Tuesday I worked at home, and ended up sleeping late and going to bed early. Wednesday I woke up early as a big ol’ summer thunderstorm rolled in. I decided to wait at home until the storm calmed down and take a later train into work. I left the house 45 minutes late, and arrived to find the platform crowded with soggy commuters. As luck would have it, my usual train was there within minutes of my arriving at the station, also 45 minutes late.

Heading home on my way to Grand Central Station, I heard a huge rumbling, like thunder or maybe a plane flying overhead, but longer and louder. (Still feeling kind of beat) I didn’t really think about what it might be. I found out on the news that night that a steam pipe had broken underground one block over, and spewed a geyser of steam higher then the Chrysler Building into the sky! I found it a bit odd that they kept saying on the news that it was not the work of terrorists. Sign of the times we live in I guess. They didn’t say, however, that it wasn’t the work of bears!

Thursday work was busy again and I wound up working late to meet a deadline, pinch hitting for a colleague who was out on vacation. Toon dance party online!

Friday I was still pretty tired in the morning, but I had the day off and once I got going my energy finally picked up. Jeannie, the girls and I took a day trip to Jones Beach on Long Island with her sister Mary’s family. A perfect day for it too, 82 and sunny. The surf was pretty strong, and the beach itself is as beautiful as any on the East Coast. Afterwards we went back to their house for a barbecue. It was a great time for everyone and some much needed R&R.

So now I’m in the process of moving into my new computer, which is really not new, but up until last week had been only for running proTools, and now it’s for everything. I have a lot of data to migrate, and a lot of configs to setup and setups to config. My old computer didn’t completely die, just the screen, making it *almost* unusable. I was able to turn on remote access and file sharing on the basis of the position of the UI widgets on the screen. Yeesh. Now I can drive my old computer from my new computer, which is pretty cool actually.

My knee is also feeling better, and I literally have a spring in my step again.

I’ve also been making progress on my new song “Angel or Alien”. It”s fairly long (over 7 minutes right now, but I”m thinking of cutting a section), and is sort of a pseudo-prog number with an existential theme and scifi overtones. Structurally there’s a slow jazzy first part, a fast middle part with meter changes and churning, swooping, blazing gonzo synthesizers, and then a recapitulation and elaboration of the first part. The chords are based mainly on stacked 4ths over shifting roots, which is a pretty cool sound.

I’ve been getting the bass and drums together. The bass part involves a lot of two-note chords, and I recorded it twice but was not happy with the sound either time. Then I tried double-tracking the part, which sound much better than either part on its own. It introduces a natural chorus effect and comes out something like Joco Pastorius. Drums for me always involve a lot of editing, building up and pulling down, creating dimension like a chalk drawing, and they’re taking shape. I’m ready to get down to the piano part, which will really give some flesh to the whole song.

Bonus: More Fun With Shapes

Here are CP’s for the complete set of shapes “Icosahedra with One or More Slices Cut Out of Them, Whose Faces are Composed of Pentagons and Triangles.” I have not yet tried to fold any of these yet, but the layouts all look doable. As luck would have it, I picked a good reference point (half the distance from the edge of the paper to the center) to begin developing the CP for the three-pentagon shape, and can readily develop the other shapes with the same edge length. Four out of the five are remarkably efficient! However the smallest of them, the pentagonal pyramid, wastes a lot of paper. I ought to find a good smaller size sheet to use for that.

Double Feature: Road Trippin’ *and* Fun With Shapes

Part 2: Fun With Shapes

Now the Origami part of the trip: At the Strong Museum there was a place to play with shapes, and I discovered something interesting. An octahedron made of three regular pentagons and five equilateral triangles. I’ve never seen this shape before and don’t know if it has a name. It will make a nice addition to the Periodic Table of Polyhedra I’m compiling. The goal of that project is to identify every topologically unique combination of edges and vertices for polyhedra (mainly low polyhedra –complete up to Octahedra, as coincidence would have it, and selected interesting ones above that. Variations in angles and edge lengths don’t matter for the purpose of this enumeration.)

So I went ahead and made it out of origami. It has a pretty neat folding sequence and symmetry in the layout. I don’t use Robert Lang’s Reference Finder but instead rely on ratios incumbent in the design to to develop the layout, usually going for maximizing the size of the figure in the paper and still having enough left to make the lock. This one turned out very good in the usage department, although I may have to tweak the lock itself a bit.

This shape has the interesting property that if you replace each pentagon with five equilateral triangles you get an icosahedron. Several other shapes have this property, including pentagonal antiprism and a pentagonal pyramid, so they constitute a set. There’s another with 15 triangles and one pentagon, and yet another still with two pentagons and 10 triangles, but it’s not an antiprism because the pentagons are not parallel.

I’m thinking it’d be fun to do this whole series, especially if I can get the unit edge to be the same size across all the different models. Meanwhile, here is the CP and some pics of the a first (not too neat) version of the model.