OK Computer

You might recall I bought a new computer, an iMac, about a year ago. The plan was to use is as the centerpiece of my recording studio. But ProTools didn’t run on 10.5 so that led to a big OS reinstall. I finally got ProTools, my Box and my MOTU MIDI interface all working together on the Mac under 10.4, only find out that SampleTank, which is my main onboard sampler, wasn’t compatible with Intel Macs and I’d have to get a whole new (as opposed to an upgrade) version of SampleTank. So that kind of bottomed out here. I did manage to install Boot Camp and Windows XP, but by the time I was done with all that I just wanted to get on with making music, so I went back to using my laptop again.

Well that laptop has been acting funny, and I don’t know why, and I went thru all kinds of pain to replace the hard drive last month. So over xmas vacation I finally got around to installing ProTools, SampleTank and all my samples, and the MIDI software on the XP partition of my Mac, and doing all the authorization rigamarole.

All was looking good, until I went to work on some actual music. Then to my dismay I discovered that after a few seconds the thing came to screeching halt. I tried again and it was the same thing. It was completely unusable. So I googled “protools xp bootcamp” and found lots of other people experiencing similar problems. Well misery loves company I guess. I learned that I probably needed something called the “microsoft dual core hotfix” so I googled that and it led me to this link:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256

Shawnuff I installed the patch and now everything is working splendidly and completely copasetic. The one caveat is I have to turn off wifi on the mac, which is something I never had to do on my laptop. The good news is that mac is a way more powerful machine. Mixes that would max out my old machine are only using about 40 percent of the CPU. Also, with the big monitor, I can display a full 24 tracks worth of faders without having to scroll! So a longstanding goal has been realized and I’m back in business in the recording front.

And it’s a good thing too. I’m in the middle of a new song called “Earthbound”. Or maybe it will be called “Perihelion”. After a month of downtime I can finally get back to it./p>The next problem is that if the machine sleeps while XP it kinda crashes when it wakes up, and then reboots in the MacOS. I think Microsoft has a fix for that too.

Winter Break

Well the holidays have come and gone and the tree is sitting by the curb, and it’s back to the ol’ grind in the new year. Getting up before dark and standing out in the cold waiting for the train is what I love best about January. But I don’t want to sound to grumpy. I had a really nice winter break. Got to see some friends and family and do a bunch of traveling and other things, and just as importantly, take some much needed time to rest. Of course the vacation was too short and there were people I wanted to see but didn’t get the chance to. Sorry John, John and Larry.

Here are a few assorted highlights:

Way back over two weeks ago, the Friday before Christmas was supposed to be the night of the kids’ big xmas concert at school, but nature had other plans. A big snowstorm meant school was cancelled so the concert was postponed until the following day prompting all kinds of frenzied reordering of plans. In the end the concert was a success. Lizzy had a Flute solo (the only solo in the band) and did very well.

It was a big xmas for legos. The kids had a lego advent calendar and they both got some lego sets as presents. Jeannie set up her lego train from a few years ago around the tree, carrying presents and all. To I got a lego Avatar Air Temple set as a gift from the office. So we put ’em all together under the tree in a big ol’ explosion-at-the-genre-factory kind of legopalooza extravaganza.

We played a good amount of Nintendo after playing virtually none at all since last winter break. Up to 59 stars in Super Mario Galaxy, plus played a bunch of other games at various people’s houses.

I had some good Origami time. I finally got a chance to get back to working on my book. I finished diagramming and laying out my Elephant II, which weighs in at 33 steps, well down from my previous pachyderm with its 57 steps. Also closed in on my Moose, which will be about 70 steps — just the antlers to go — and am more than halfway done with my Adirondack chair. So I now have models diagrammed, and 2 more in striking distance. Not too far off the pace of one a month, which isn’t bad considering I did no origami at all the last month or so. Winter has always been my big origami time, being dark and cold outside and all, so I’m optimistic that I can continue in this groove. (Last year was a bit of an anomaly, as it was right a year ago I started a three-month marathon of working 7 day, 60+ hour weeks. Luckily I don’t have that sort of thing on the horizon now.)

Also my friend John Montroll asked me to fold some of his polyhedra for the cover photo of his forth coming book. I recently bought some Canson, which as an art paper normally used for pastels, thicker than regular kami. I thought it’d be perfect for these models. So far I’ve made 4 out of 5 of them in 12″ squares, and they’ve come out quite well. Nice look, good and very strong.

I also spent some more time on the continuing saga of fixing and upgrading my computer and music recording system. I will talk about that in a separate post, since I’m sure you’ll want all the tedious geeky details.

Lastly we took the girls for a day trip skiing. After staying up and sleeping late every day for more than a week, it was hard going getting up and out the door, and the mountain was the most packed I’ve ever seen it, but the snow was good and we all had a good time. Lizzy is doing quite well. She picked up right were she left off last year and got here groove after a run or two, and even went down a blue trail in the afternoon. Michelle is not as big or strong, and needed some coaxing. I spent a good deal of time with Michelle on the bunny hill, getting her used to basic sliding, turning, stopping, shifting and holding weight and skis. I think she progressed pretty well. I’m hoping she’ll be ready to get on a lift by the end of the season.

Worse Computer

So my computer repair project took a turn to the strange. When we last checked in with the little adventure, I had recovered and backed up all my data and bought a replacement 160 BG hard drive. Well, then I formatted the drive using an external drive bay, on my Mac running Windows. I made 2 partitions, one at 40GB for the system and another at 120 for my data. I opened my laptop, which is a big pain, and pulled the old drive and put in the new one. I ran Ghost to recover the system partition, but I failed with a mysterious “disk geometry error”. We tried a few things, but ultimately we reformatted the drive in the laptop using an XP install CD. From there were able to restore the C drive from Ghost and the data on the D drive from the recovered files. The weird thing was, the size of the D partition somehow changed from 120 GB to 90 GB and the total size of the drive to 128 GB. Some part of the drive had become orphaned.

Throughout all this, Jeannie was helping me figure out how to proceed, with extraordinary patience. It was slow going, so we’ve been working our way thru HBO’s “Rome” while the computer was doing its thing. So, knowing at least we could recover the system, we wiped the drive clean and started over, but the same problem persisted. We figured there was a problem with the replacement drive, so I bought yet another replacement drive, this time a 250 GB one. We followed the same path. Formatted it from the Mac via a sled with a 40 and (this time) 210 GB partition, took apart the laptop to swap the drives, restored the C drive from Ghost, and watched it fail with that geometry error. We reformatted the drive in the laptop and again the size of the drive dropped down to 128 GB. Yeesh!

So we have determined that the problem is not with the drive but probably with the machine itself, maybe something to do with the drive controller. I’ve never encountered anything like this before and I don’t really know. So I’m giving up. I sunk a huge amount of time into it and at this point I have a working, if old and creaky, computer so that’s will have to do. Come the new year I will probably look to getting a new laptop. It is mostly likely to be a Mac, so this means I will be leaving Window behind, hopefully for a long time.

Origami Blast From the Past

This was from a couple of weeks ago, but I was just writing it when my computer turned bad. So here you go.

Many years ago (1994 I think), before I joined the Origami Society I attended one of their annual conventions. It was just for the day and mostly just saw the exhibition and hung around the common area. I hadn’t really done much origami in a number of years but I remembered that OUSA was based in NYC, and had always been curious about it. It turned out to be a really cool experience and I was amazed at how origami far origami design had progressed since the 80’s. In fact it was in the midst of a revolution that is still playing out today. One model I remember well for it’s artistic impact was a fossil, a lizard skeleton rendered as a precise but random-looking set of wrinkles and creases in a torn up old paper bag.

I decided to contribute a model to the annual collection. It was my dragon, one of my first successful origami designs among only a handful of models at the time. It used a modified blintzed frog base, a variation on the base John Montroll used for his Pegasus in Origami for the Enthusiast. I diagrammed it using pen and ink and drawing board over the course of a few months and submitted it to OUSA. It was a tumultuous year for them as the founders (Lillian Oppenheimer and Alice Gray) had recently died and there was a turnover in the leadership. In any event I never heard back from them.

Years later I found out it had been accepted and published in the 1995 Origami USA annual collection. I had tried to locate a copy for ages, but it was the one year of all the back issues that was sold out. Finally a couple of weeks ago, my friend Marc Kirshenbaum (who is on the OUSA publication committee) located an old copy and offered to me. Shortly after Thanksgiving I went over to his place to pick it up. Like I said Origami was undergoing a major design revolution, so it’s really interesting to see the combination of old and new styles in a collection from that time. It’s also really gratifying to see my early work along side established origami masters. So a great big thanks to Marc!

Marc also deserves credit and thanks for encouraging me to get serious and systematic about designing my own origami models. The year after I joined OUSA (2003 I think), I took a Monday class that he was teaching about design, and was inspired to invent a lizard. I realized then I had all the knowledge I needed, and I just had to go do it! It sparked the beginning of a creative streak which I am still mining for new ideas.

Bad Computer

Astute readers of this blog may have noticed a longer than usual interval since my last update, and concerned readers may be wondering why. Well I’ll tell you. The last few weeks have been pretty tumultuous. I’ve finished work of a bunch of projects, including home improvement, an update to my web site and a music flash app fro my friend Erik. (More on that later.) In completely other events, my company is undergoing a major restructuring, having laid off a whole bunch of people a week ago Thursday and moved a bunch of others, including yours truly, into new and different groups, which makes for fun and exciting time at the office these days. (More on that too later as the situation unfolds.) And lastly, as a concession to it being dark and cold out all the time, we’ve been playing Super Mario Galaxy and watching HBO’s “Rome” on DVD.

Last weekend was the first in months that we’ve had basically free with no major commitments or work to do. It was very nice and relaxing. Caught up on my rest, hung out with the kids and played legos, that sort of thing. I finally got back to my origami book and made good progress on diagramming my elephant. I updated my todo list with random tasks for the holiday break. One of them was to backup my computer, since I haven’t done that since the start of the semester.

And then, Sunday night I was settling down to work on music (I have a new song I’m working on called Earthbound – more on that later too.) and I rebooted my computer, and guess what, it wouldn’t boot. Turns out my hard drive chose that moment to turn bad.

So it’s taken me three days of downtime to recover all my work and order a replacement hard drive. Tonight I’ll be formatting the drive, putting it in my computer and restoring all my data. Fun fun fun. So that’s why it’s been almost two weeks!

Origami Site Update

I just completed a major revision to my Origami web site at www.zingorigami.com (also www.zingman.com/origami). Attentive readers of this blog will recall that I started on this endeavor way back in September. I had to get around to a bunch of other projects first, but I’m happy to have completed phase one of the operation.

I invented about ten new origami models this year, so the update was long overdue. Major features include reorganizing the collection of models into a series of pages according to a set of major categories. The index page now links into these pages and presents a comprehensive index of thumbnails. I also created a page of Adirondack Origami, to highlight the feature I did for Adirondack Life magazine earlier this year. Additionally I created a page for info about Origami commissions if you’re interested in having you own origami handmade by me the artist, and a page about my forthcoming book, mostly a placeholder for now.

The next step will be a new round of photographs. For many of the recent models I simply put up snapshots, but sometime over the winter I plan on folding exhibit level versions of all my models and doing a proper photo shoot of them. This will also be useful for the book.

Then phase three will be to make the pages served dynamically. I need to research some kind of lightweight CMS and template engine, or maybe make my own. That will be a pretty good project.

And in related news, my friend John has a new web site to showcase his origami: www.johnmontroll.com

Thanksgiving Weekend

We had a really wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. First of all, we’ve been working really hard on home improvements, software development and whatnot, so it was good to have a few days off to rest and enjoy family and feasting. I really feel blessed this year just to have an opportunity to have some good family time and appreciate my loved ones.

My Mum and Dad came down from upstate NY for a few day’s visit. They brought with them a dining room table and chairs, which came from my uncle, who inherited my grandmother’s dining room set. For years we’ve been using a folding card table in our dining room so this is a great improvement. The style is very much to our taste — minimalist mid-century Scandinavian hardwood — and goes with the rest of our furniture. So we really appreciate it. You can see us breaking it in enjoying our Thanksgiving dinner (the kids sat in the kitchen). Also it looks really nice in everyday mode (we put random stuff on it).

In addition to the furniture my Mum brought some traditional Hungarian folk motif pillows and some crystal and a few other random items that had been in my grandmother’s house so we have a few nice things to remember her by.

In the karma department, I recently got a new bed frame and dresser for Michelle, so I’m passing my old dresser on to Kathleen and Martin. My Dad has been very helpful to both of us hauling furniture all across the state.

Thanksgiving dinner was really nice. Jeannie did a great job cooking a huge variety of foods, including the turkey, most excellent stuffing, potatoes and gravy, home made cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and two pies. In addition to my folks, her folks came over, as well as Mary and Lou and KVAP. Everyone had a really nice time.

Friday we took it easy and I caught up on some random tasks such as covering the fig tree for the winter, fixing the screen door (broken by an enthusiastic kid at Lizzy’s birthday party), putting away all the supplies from the recent painting project and throwing out the packaging from Michelle’s new furniture. That evening Lizzy, my Dad and I played few games of chess. It’s been a long time since I played an opponent at his level, and with Lizzy I always start with a handicap of missing knights and bishops. So I’ve gotten used to opening aggressively with the Queen, which turned out to be a mistake every game. The best game between my Dad and me lasted over an hour and a half, a long slow war of attrition with lots of maneuvering punctuated by the occasional capture of a piece, always in an even trade. Eventually it was down to a king, a bishop and two pawns on each side, and I finally managed to get one of my pawns promoted to a queen, and that was the end of that.

Saturday my folks, Jeannie, the girls and myself all headed up to the Albany area for Martin and Kathleen’s baby shower at K’s parents’ house. They live out in the countryside to the south of our state’s capitol, not too far from Ski Wyndham and Hunter Mountain. The house is on a huge plot of woodland, so while the wimmen were in showering Kathleen, Martin, my Dad, K’s dad Charlie and I went of a hiking tour of the property, spotting deer tracks and birds and 200-year-old stone walls and millions-of-years-old fossilized seashells. Charlie is a really nice guy and it was a good day. Unfortunately on the way home we got stuck in some serious heavy traffic before the Tappan Zee bridge, so it was a two hour trip up and a four-hour trip home. Note to self: remember to take the bridge at Bear Mountain!!!

Sunday we played lots of Nintendo. Up to 38 stars in Super Mario Galaxy.

Painting Project Complete

Our major home-improvement project this fall was to paint the bedrooms. They needed to be done cuz the original paint was kinda cheap and thinly applied and beginning to show it’s age, and the girls had both done a good job making a mess or their walls when they were toddlers. Plus there was some spackling to be done as house has settled and there were some cracks. We did one bedroom a month in September, October, and November. We’d do the ceiling one weekend and the walls the next, and then take a couple weekends off between rooms. The setup, moving furniture, taping and putting out tarps, and then tearing it down again and putting everything back is actually substantially more work than the actual painting.

Last year we tiled and painted our bathrooms. This was the first introduction of color into the house interior scheme. Our house is fairly new, and everything is white walls and honey oak wood. Very nice, minimalist and classy. When we did the bathrooms, we did one in a very pale green and the other a very pale blue. Subtle and light. This fall when we told the girls we were going to paint their rooms, there was a clamor for color.

Now lots of people have strong colors in their homes. Some of them even look really good. But not for me; my taste is more just plain white or light shades. Luckily we all agreed we wanted pastels, so we set about helping the girls pick their colors. One bedroom was a pale yellow, and the other a pale lavender. So far so good. Colorful but still airy, and they go together well, and go with the bathrooms, and the whole place is like a musical chord.

So it was down to the master bedroom, and we had to face the question of what color to make it. We already had one room in blue, green, yellow and purple. Where to go? Somehow another blue emerged as the natural choice, although I was concerned it would be too close to the bathroom so as to be discordant. The blue we picked was a bit brighter and bluer, and knowing that you can’t always trust the little paint chip, went ahead with it.

It seemed really nice while we were painting it, and Jeannie liked it without hesitation from the start, but once all the tape was off, I felt kind of overwhelmed. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something was not quite right to me. I suppose I would have preferred a lighter shade of pale, but then it would have been too close to the bathroom. Also, unlike any other room in the house, this one does not change color in daylight versus electric light. Still, that was two weeks ago now, and alot has happened already and the idea of going back to do it over again seems unlikely. Jeannie says I should think of it like a jazz chord. So I’m growing to like it more and more.

Anyway it was a large amount of work and I’m happy it’s done and everything looks great. There will be some touch-up painting to do in the hall and stairs and on the trim, but that can mainly wait until after the new year. Now I can get back to working on my book!

…

In the irony department, we had a big crowd over for Thanksgiving and the next day I discovered some kind of pencil or metallic scratch marks on Michelle’s freshly painted wall, so there’s a new repair job already!

Winter Workout

Well winter is here. One morning last week we had our first snow flurry of the year to the absolute delight of the kids and the mild consternation or utter indifference of everyone else. I work out regularly with weights and yoga-like exercises, but on the days I don’t do that I like to do some kind of aerobic (i.e. speed-oriented) thing, which is rollerblading or biking most of the year. About a month ago when it got too dark to go rollerblading after work, I switched to night biking, a mode of transport that has a light and a brake. Now it’s too cold out to do even that. So I need an indoor aerobic activity to see me thru until the spring.

Jeannie has a NordicTrack cross-country skiing machine that she’s been using happily for years. Just a few weeks ago when the clocks shifted an hour she started getting up early in the morning and doing a few kilometers on it before everyone else gets up for school and work. I must say I am really impressed at this; it’s something I could never do. She says it’s better than working out after the kids go to bed, which is what I usually do, and can indeed be harsh at the end of a long day.

I have not used the Nordic Track all this time, but last week I finally decided to give it a shot. I’ve never really liked the idea of working out on a treadmill, stationary bike or anything like that, because it makes you feel like a droid, in an existential post-modern post-industrial post-ironic kind of way. Meh! I’ve always thought it would be cool to hook an exercise machine up to some kind of VR or videogame to provide some fun and adventure, or at least some scenery. Ah well, I can listen to music I suppose.

Once I tried the NordicTrack I remembered another reason why I don’t use it. I’d tried it once when it was new, only to realize that it was not designed for really tall people (as is the case with so many things). It was simply not high enough or long enough for me to use properly. The pad you’re supposed to lean against was too low for proper balance, and I kept kicking the back of the machine. So it was time to start hacking! It turns out the pad is on arm that can swing up and forward when it’s time to put the machine away. I was able to make a shim and jam it in under the arm, so that it would stay in a semi-deployed position, which made enough of a difference that I could use it comfortably.

And now, having used it a couple of times, I can say it’s a pretty good workout. I can go 5 kilometers in 25 minutes or so, which is comparable to what I do on real skates, and with a similar level of effort. So it looks though it will do to see me thru the winter. Now I just have to find the right music to work out to.