Seasons change and so do I. I’ve been trying to focus on springtime projects these days, and striking off a bunch of long-standing tasks from my todo list. Last week I took the mustang into the shop for some maintenance, including an oil change and inspection. The car is almost sixty years old, so it’s good to have some confidence that everything mechanical is in good shape when I drive it. I also began and completed project dirt, which started with getting a cubic yard of topsoil delivered to my house. I used it to fill in some low spots in my yard, mainly where there had been trees years before and now decayed remnants of the stumps and roots have left sunken and uneven areas. The last step was to cover it with grass seed and start watering it. We had an unusual heat wave last week, and it got up to ninety degrees three days in a row. These happened to be the days I was out working in the yard shoveling dirt. Ah well, at least once I was done it rained for a whole day, so the watering is off to a good start. Next up: project patio!
I’ve been biking more and more. Last week I did five days in a row agin. My longer rides have been getting progressively long, the last one being thirteen miles, with a good amount of pulling up hills, and half of it on mountain biking trails. Meanwhile I’ve added an extra loop to my short ride, brining it up to six miles. The weather had been widely variable from day to day, so it’s not easy to figure out how to dress. I’ve yet to get out to the rail trail this spring. That’s flat and smooth, and I usually go between sixteen and twenty-four miles on it. Last year I got up to thirty miles one time. I also went up in weight on my weightlifting working a few weeks ago. I’m now up to two hundred and two pounds on the bench press, and one hundred fifteen on the curls and other dumbbell exercises. Hoping to go up again later this spring.
I’ve been putting alot of time into The Global Jukebox lately. Plenty to do for the upcoming release of version 4.0. Recently I’ve been focusing on making the wheel and the map work with alternative taxonomies for language and peoples in addition to the default taxonomy for people. Nick did alot of foundation work for this: reading in the data and building the models in memory, and a first pass at the interactive UI stuff. I thought it would be pretty quick to finish of the remaining functionality and fix a few minor bugs, but it turned out to be surprisingly deep. I ended up doing a major refactoring across five classes. I’m pretty much done the functionality, but still want to do some more foundational work. Now that I’ve come this far it’s become alot clearer what theright abstractions and design patterns are.
This last Sunday I went into the city to teach origami at OUSA Special Sessions at the American Museum of Natural History. My class was Fun Spaceship, and included a bunch of intermediate level models from my book Air and Space Origami. The class was small, and two of the students were really bright kids. It was great because it was a fun and casual vibe, and I could give everyone enough attention if they needed it. We ended up folding five models in two hours. One of them was the Space Probe, which I haven’t folded in a long time and had forgotten what a fun model it is. Jeannie and Michelle came too, and after the class we did a quick tour of the museum, hitting the dinosaurs, which are always amazing, a loop around the planetarium, and the halls of big dioramas of African and North American Mammals, and ending with the Whale Room.