Author: Zingblog 2

Some Summertime Fun

Life goes on full of its comings and goings.  A week ago Lizzy and Josh came into town for the weekend.  Saturday they were at a party on Long Island, then they spent Sunday with us.  We did a barbecue and had a fun time hanging out outside.  Monday I went to the Bronx Zoo with Lizzy and Josh.  That was a fun time too.  It’s a big zoo and it took most of the day, but we saw pretty much everything.  Lots of birds and reptiles.  Did the monorail and the elephant was out to see.  Lots of other big mammals: giraffes, rhinos, bears, tigers, lions, gorillas, gazelle and zebras to name a few.  Afterwards I took them to the airport.  Their flight was delayed, which worked out well because we had extra time at the zoo.  However, traffic was terrible because it was rush hour, and the computer routed us on a strange route thru street-level Queens.

This last weekend Jeannie and went up to Westerlo to visit Kathleen and the kids.  On Friday, her friend and neighbor John, who is the drummer for the band Martin was in, the East Berne Band, had a backyard party barbecue jam session, and invited me to sit in.  He sent me a setlist so I spent a few days listening and learning the songs.  Some were pretty basic bar band songs, while other were interesting and quirky.  The sound was centered on groups like The Band, The J. Giles Band, and the E. Street Band with lots of extra keyboards and horns.  In fact when I got there, there was another keyboard player and another horn player sitting in, so it was a big sound.  Off to one side of the stage we a row of people in golf carts, who I dubbed the rolling VIP section. 

The bass player Dan and drummer John are co-lead singers, and alot of the songs feature harmonies.  Dan is good at directing the group from the middle of the stage, and keeping everything from devolving into chaos.  So it was a good jam and a good party, and it was great to catch up with those guys.  Only problem was midway thru the second set the skies turned dark and the threat of a downpour was imminent. So we had to pack up in hurry.  Funny thing, but by the time we were packed up the rain was lightening up, but there was no way we were going to set everything up again.  Ah well, it was a good time even if it was cut a little bit short.

That evening we hung out and played videogames with Charlie and Matthew and Abbie.  Charlie amazed me by speed running sixteen stars in Super Mario 46 in about twenty minutes.  He did all kinds of circuitous shortcuts and side paths and huge wall jumps, and all kinds of leaps and jumps, even plummeting from great heights land on a hidden ledge, and made it all look super easy.

The next day there was a Renaissance Faire in one of the nearby towns so we went to check that out.  There was a bunch of booths selling things like jewelry, chainmail, and metal goods, boots, corsets and leather goods, wooden swords, maces and battle axes, foam swords, maces and battle axes, and even real swords, maces and battle axes.  The real attraction was the cosplayers.  There were tons of them, and most were very good.  They ranged from authentic-ish to totally fantastic.  I had no idea elves and fairies were such an important part of the Renaissance!   It was a nice summer day for walking around.  My only criticism is they should have had more performers.  Apparently there was a joust but we missed it cuz we were having lunch, and the next show wasn’t for another three hours.  Ah well.

Sunday Jeannie and I got back on the local bike path.  I did twenty-two miles in a hundred minutes.  Jeannie did fifteen miles, a season’s best for both of us.  Tomorrow I will pass six hundred total miles for the year, on track to make twelve hundred by the end of the year. 

In my recording project, I’ve laid down the lead and harmony vocals for A Sailor’s Saga, and am in the process of mixing them.  Don’t tell anyone, but I’m using a touch of Auto-Tune to make them sound a bit more in tune. 

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler June 26

My jazz group Spacecats will be appearing at Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Friday June 26 at 8pm. The group consists of John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums.  Note this is an hour later than our usual start time.

The Growler continues to be our regular gig, a great environment for the band to experiment and progress. For this show, in addition to developing and sharpening our originals and jazz standards, we’re adding some new pop rock and funk material to jam out on, trying to take things that people will know and recognize and do something fun and cool with them. Also, I’ll be bringing my bari sax to play on a couple of songs! Should be a great time, so come on down and check it out!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Friday June 26, 8pm
at
The Green Growler
Croton-on-Hudson, NY

Down by the Old Mill Stream

I did a fun thing this week.  I played in the pit orchestra for a local vocal group, The Old Mill Singers.  I’ve done a good number of pit orchestra gigs over the years, most recently when my kids were in middle school, and they’ve always been a good time.  Rick from my jazz group is the regular drummer for their show, and he asked me if I’d like to play a solo for one of the songs.  The group is about thirty or forty singers, doing mainly choral and choir type arrangements of traditional and pop music, show tunes, and that kind of thing.  There were a few soloists too. 

One of them, Savia, sang I Will Always Love You, following Whitney Houston’s arrangement, which includes an 8-bar sax solo.  This is by no means an easy song to sing.  In fact, it’s a real tour de force, beginning with a long a cappella intro, and full of expressive turns and melisma, and has a big dynamic range and very wide melodic range, with a dramatic pause and key change towards the end, where she goes really high and belts out the chorus before returning to quiet sensitive tone for the ending.  Savia is an excellent singer and really nailed it.  It was a high point of the show.  My solo came in about halfway thru.  She wanted me to pretty much follow the solo on the record, but there’s alot of free expression in the phrasing, so I learned the basic shape and improvised on that, and it worked out just fine.

The rehearsals and performances were at a school up in Braircliff Manor.  The orchestra included Rick on drums, a piano player, a bass player, and a few others who played on just a few tunes, including a viola and a guitar/ukulele.  Savia and everyone there were really nice people, and when it was done they said they’d like me to come back for their Christmas show.

Origami Site Update

One of the things I want to do this summer is give my website a long-overdue update, starting with the origami section.  The last time I put up pictures of new models was seven years ago.  Since then I’ve been busy with other things, and I went thru a rather long spell when I found it difficult to do any new creative paperfolding.  I never stopped entirely, but it did slow to a trickle between origami events, and I spent alot of time on a few supercomplex ideas involving pentagonal geometry, where progress got to be slow and frustrating. 

However, now I have more time to put into folding, and my creative energy is reignited by the last few conventions I attended, plus the fact that I’m going to be a special guest at the Origami USA convention later this summer. 

I took an inventory and have created about twenty-five new models since the year 2020, and about half of those have been photographed.  So the first step was to get the ones I had pictures of onto the site, in the gallery pages and with their own detail pages.  While I was at it I updated the layout of the gallery pages with larger images arranged in three columns, replaced some photos of old models with newer better ones where available, and made numerous small improvements and corrections.

There’s lots more to go.  I’m planning a deep and substantial redesign of the whole site, and am going to re-fold and re-photograph a good fraction of the models on display to raise the quality of the whole presentation.  Also I’m going to put up a bunch of crease patterns, and add some new sections on things like exhibits and deep dives into different themes.  On top of that, I’m actively creating new models again, so there’s be more fresh content coming soon.

Still this is a good step forward.  So check it out and enjoy:
https://zingman.com/origami

Models By Subject:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_subject.php

Models By Year:
https://zingman.com/origami/models_year.php

New Origami Models 2026

Here’s some new origami models I folded between the last CoCon and CFC6.  I’ve been working at these for a while, so it feels good to have some attained some completion.  Each of these is folded from a single pentagonal sheet of paper.

Level 3 Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome with Embedded Penfractal Tessellation

Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, Plain

Level 2 Penfractal Tessellation

Vertex-Centered Dodecahedron

Starman (Pentagon Human Figure Base)

Midwest Adventure, Part 2 – Art and Origami

Where were we?  Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference.  Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule.  Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either.  Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle. 

The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics.  One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe.  It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind.  I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool.  Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.

The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community.  I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.

I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry.  It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas.  I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.

In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb.  Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun.  He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things.  Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it.  In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late.  I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games.   Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before.  I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun.  Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.

Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit.  It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings.  It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders.  David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models.  This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with.  Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.

The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens.  We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar.  Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo.  Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series.  And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years.  Lots of fun.  Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs.  Lots of fun.  Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!

Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while.  Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!

Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold.  I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide.  First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice.  I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference.  Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern.  This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome.  Very cool and effective.  I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July.  I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is. 

The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal.  Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her.  I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count.  The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still!  It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it.  Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!

The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave.  I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.

Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention.  I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.

Midwest Adventure, Part 1 – Art and Industry

I just got back from a trip with Jeannie to the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.  The trip was centered on an origami event, CFC6 (Conference for Creators, Number 6), hosted by my good friend Beth in Ann Arbor Michigan.  We’d never been to that part of the country before, so we figured we’d do a few days touristing before the conference began.

Our flight left NYC Monday morning and landed in Detroit shortly before noon.  From there we had time for one daytime activity, and chose the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio.  The main attraction here was a decommissioned lake freighter.  As the big freighters go she was bigger than most, I think they said 800 feet long.  You could go up to the bridge and down into the hold and engine room.  Pretty neat.  The rest of museum was housed in a regular building and featured exhibits about the history, ecology, climate, and economy of the great lakes region, with a lot about the evolution boats and ships, from indigenous people and the arrival of French fur trappers up thru the present day.  The museum was situated in a larger park that was nice to walk around.

The evening we drove out to Auburn, Indiana.  The main attraction there was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.  I’ve been a longtime fan of Duesenberg, Cord and Auburn automobiles since I was a kid into building model cars, and this place has been on my bucket list for a long time.  And it did not disappoint.  For those who don’t know, these were some of the coolest classic cars ever, each with their own unique character.  Duesenbergs in particular were the ultimate luxury car, big as a modern extra large SUV or monster pickup truck, but with a giant racecar engine and amazing styling and coachwork.  They typically had aluminum bodies.  (Each body was custom built on an engine/chassis platform.)  Today they’re considered priceless, rolling works of art, with only a few hundred in existence.  Twenty or so are in the museum, all meticulously restored.  The ultimate Doozy is the SJ, with a supercharged engine and distinctive external exhaust pipes.  The Auburn was the Duesenberg’s smaller cousin, smaller, lighter and slightly more affordable, but still with a focus on luxury and performance.  They are famous for their boattail roadsters.  Cord was its own thing, very advanced and a little weird for the day, being the the world’s first successful mass-manufactured front-wheel drive car, with its distinctive coffin nose and touches such as disappearing headlights.  Sadly, Auburn Cord Duesenberg went out of business during the great depression.  Amazing to think that these cars are all ninety years old or more, many of them over a hundred.

The museum was in the former company showroom and headquarters, and had a good selection of all of these cars, plus other historical autos including a Cadillac V-16, and a Lincoln and Chrysler from the same era, as well as a fleet of earlier models going back the the beginning of the 1900’s and the origin of automobiles.  They also had some rare prototypes, some engines and few historical airplanes, and exhibits on E. L. Cord, the automotive design studio, and the history of the factory and the company, and the rise and fall of the automobile industry in Indiana.

Next door was the former manufacturing plant, which is now a classic car museum with alot of muscle cars from the 60’s, a handful of different kinds of racecars, and a broad spectrum of mainly American historical cars from the entire twentieth century. A couple 1960’s Mustangs like my own.

I will say my one big disappointment for the trip was that my other bucket-list item, the National Brass and Woodwind Museum and the Conn-Selmer factory in Elkhart, Indiana, closed sometime in 2025, even as we were beginning to plan our trip, so we never got to see that.  Ah well.

Both days we had dinner at a bar nearby the museum we were visiting. I must say the general vibe of the tri-state region was exactly the opposite of exotic to me, rather it was very friendly warm and even felt familiar.  The landscapes, the people, the history and context, all that.  It felt alot upstate and western New York, and southern Ontario when you get out west toward London.  I guess that’s what they mean by the Great Lakes Region.

Tuesday evening it was off to Ann Arbor.  The convention didn’t officially start until Thursday, but there were activities slated for Wednesday.  The convention was at a hotel called Webers, which was a very cool and funky hotel with a sort of art deco jazz age vibe.  We watched the Sabres vs the Canadiens at the cozy, wood-paneled bar while the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Red Garland played on the PA. 

Wednesday we met a bunch of our origami friends at breakfast, including Ilan and Nicolas, who run CFC and organized the conference.  A short while later, a bunch of convened in the lobby and were joined by our host Beth for the main activity, a day trip into Detroit and the Detroit Institute of Art.  Enough of us had a car that everyone got a ride, a pattern that continued throughout the week.

The Detroit Art Institute is a very cool museum.  Its most famous and impressive work is the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, which fills all four walls of a giant hall and depicts the whole life-cycle of auto manufacturing in a complicated series of panels that merge realism, storytelling, symbolism and mythology in a way that sums up what we’ve seen so far in the Great Lakes Region perfectly.  There were several other galleries including American modernists, and some Mid-Eastern and Asian collections that range from ancient Rome to the present day.  Apparently there was also a furniture and industrial design collection that I missed.  Ah well.  It’s always good inspiration when a bunch of artists go to an art museum together.

We all got lunch, and then went to a place called Michigan Central Station, a former train station that was abandoned fell into disrepair in the later twentieth century.  The city did not have enough money to demolish it and became a symbol of Detroit’s decline and misfortune.  Over the last decade or so, it has been beautifully restored and is now a public attraction and event space, with the the building above the main concourse being an office tower, and overall a symbol of Detroit’s resurgence and renewal.  Alot impressive stonework, particularly because you rarely see stone architecture looking new and clean.

Finally, that evening we had a barbecue at Beth’s house.  It was a slightly larger group as more conference attendees came into town.  It was unseasonably cool but I helped Beth build a fire in a firepit in her backyard.  Beth has a very nice design studio in a building in her backyard that used to be a garage, including a large table for folding.  Makes me want to rethink my own studio setup.  Anyway, it was great to hang out and catch up with my origami friends in a relaxed setting.  Although there’s some overlap with the OUSA regular crowd, there’s a bunch of Midwesterners I rarely see. 

Okay, halfway thru the trip.  The conference is set to begin Thursday morning.  I’m exhausted already.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

Yeah it’s true, I got laid off from my day job as lead engineer at [company’s] Innovation Lab last month, as part of a massive company-wide restructuring.  Or, putting it another way, I got replaced by an AI bot.  You see, [company] has been losing money for a while now, its core value proposition of well-researched and authoritative product comparison information being attacked and eroded by AI internet chatbots that, while perhaps not as accurate or nuanced, tend to be cheaper and more convenient.  So, the Innovation Lab is no more. They got rid of a bunch of us including Ben our VP and visionary leader, while the rest got reassigned into other business units in the organization.  Ah well, it was a good run while it lasted.  We built some excellent products in the space of consumer privacy protection, advocacy, and digital rights, including the Permission Slip app and the Data Right’s Protocol.  I was the tech lead for both projects, and they rank high as proud achievements in a career that has included many fun and cool accomplishments in software R&D and product development. And I learned alot about alot of things in my time there too. Sadly [company’s] commitment to continuing working in that space had diminished prior to the restructuring, so the writing was on the wall. Meanwhile, the other main thread of the lab’s work, focused on AI chatbots of our own, had pretty much graduated from R&D and folded into the main digital group.  I have no idea what has become of the remaining R&D initiatives.

But there’s no point in sitting around feeling bitter about it, although they do try hard to make you feel as bad as possible when they give you the boot, suddenly cut off from your friends and colleagues and your own work that you’ve put so much into over many years.  For my part, I had a lucky bounce in that I’ve been able to increase my level of commitment to The Global Jukebox, and it’s a good time for it too.  We’re building towards a major release later this year and there’s tons of work to do, and it’s a fun project.  Last week I listened to over a hundred and fifty pop songs to review the Cantometric codings done by a team of consultants.  Kind of amazing how vast and diverse the last hundred years of recorded music is, and how many great songs are out there. 

Other than that, my plan for now is to relax and enjoy the summer, and not worry until the fall about whether I want to look for another full-time job or just continue doing consulting.  My sense is that now is not a good time to try and jump back in, since all the big tech companies are sacking their workers by the thousands and replacing them with AI.  Eventually this will blow over like every previous cyclic downturn.  What really matters to me is to find a cool and exciting project to work on that is worth my time and effort.

Anyway, it’s a good time of year to have some time off.  As mentioned before, I’ve been doing alot of biking.  I’m averaging about sixty miles a week now, and plan to for the rest of the summer.  This past weekend Jeannie and I finally got out to the Empire State trail.  I did sixteen miles in an hour and twelve minutes.  Not too bad, but a little slower than my best times last year.  I’ve also increased the level of weight in my weightlifting workout, up to 202 pounds on bench press, and 120 on curls and the other dumbbell exercises.  200/120 was the goal I set for myself a long time ago to hit before I turn sixty.  I’ll be fifty-eight this year, so from here on out it’s gravy.  Oh, and I’ve lost ten pounds since the winter too.

There’s tons to do outside this time of year, and I’ve been spending time every day working on the yard.  Project patio is nearly done.  It involves spending time outside and lifting heavy things, so double fun.  My patio is made of flagstones laid on a bed of sand and compacted gravel, and over time the stones tend to settle and shift.  Five years ago during the pandemic I enlarged the patio, so this year I’m straightening up the new area.  This involves lifting up the stones one by one with a crowbar, putting in some new sand under them, putting the back and filling in the gaps between the stones with more sand.  The new area all done and I just have one more spot near the stairs to go.  I might need to go out and buy more sand before I can finish.

In music, my jazz group Spacecats has a gig coming up in late June.  We would have liked to make it sooner, but different members of the groups have scheduling conflicts, so we’re off-and-on for rehearsals for the next few weeks.  We’re also trying to schedule our long-awaited recording session.  Meanwhile we’re continuing to learn new songs and have fun.

My recording project Spellbound is progressing as well.  I’ve been working in the 18-minute epic that fills most of side two, which I’m calling The Sailor’s Saga because I don’t remember what title we gave it back in the day.  I’m tracking the first three sections, leaving the big instrumental fourth movement to the end, because I’m going to rewrite it pretty dramatically, whereas the first three parts follow the original demo fairly faithfully.  Back in the winter I started with a click track and basic piano part.  To this I’ve now added a pretty much full (midi) drum part, and electric bass.  The first section is fast and grooving, the second is slow and atmospheric, and the third features a carefully crafted slow build in the rhythm section over a long, repeated chord progression. 

Now I’m up to the first of the guitar tracks, basic rhythm guitar.  The jaunty first section went down pretty easily, although I had to practice the part a few times to get it together.  There’s no part in the section section, so now I’m up to the third section.  It starts out doing arpeggios on the eighth notes, which is surprisingly hard for me.  I’ve been practicing every day, and consistently improving, but I imagine it’ll be a few more days at least before I’ll be able to get a good take. 

Finally, we have an origami event coming next week.  It’s CFC, the Conference for Creators, and this year it’s in Ann Arbor Michigan, hosted by Beth Johnson.  I’ve never been to that part of the country before, so Jeannie and I are going out a few days before the start to tour around the upper midwest.  Also, I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Folding with Fivefold Geometry, so I need to get my presentation together.  And, I want to have a new model for my exhibit, a perfected version of my Pentagon Human Figure that I came up with at CoCon in Chicago in March.  More on all this as it, uh, unfolds.

Wait for a Springtime Tide

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 Spaceships, 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.