Category: General

Up To Eleven

Been on winter break. Time off work and lots of adventures. Rewinding a few weeks, Lizzy had a flute solo at the school Christmas concert. Frosty the Snowman. Nailed it. Also, I took the kids to the American Museum of Natural History one day when they were off from school. The museum people gave me comp passes as thank-you for my contributions to the holiday tree. It was a very cool outing. It’s been a couple of years since we really did the museum. We got to see the iMax movie about repairing the Hubble space telescope, and the planetarium show about the big bang and life, the universe and everything. The kids loved the butterfly house too. Stopped for a a look at the tree too, and convince the guard to let me adjust one of models. The exhibit that really resonated with me was about the race to the South Pole between Amundsen and Scott 100 years ago. Just amazing what a cold and remote place. It’s been a cold December (although the last couple of days things have thawed a bit) and the thought of freezing to death out there just gives me chills.

I spent the first couple days off doing random tasks like defragging the house. I’ve been trying get some shopping done. One of the big ironies of modern capitalism is that there’s pretty much an inverse correlation between how easy it to buy something and how much you need it. I needed new, comfortable winter boots, a new ski jacket and new ski pants. The boots weren’t too hard to find but I struck out on the other stuff. I eventually found that Columbia has tall sizes, and ordered from them online. It turns a triple-extra-large-tall is the best fit. Of course when something is big enough to fit in the shoulders it’s like a circus tent around the waist. It’s a good jacket, though and had drawstrings at the bottom for both the shell and the liner, so I’m happy about that. I finally did get my new mBox too. More on that later.

We had Christmas at our house this year, and Mary’s and Jeannie parents came over. This was a first. In years past we’ve done visiting on xmas eve but this year Mary’s kids were singing in the choir on xmas eve so everyone came over on xmas day. It was very nice.

On boxing day we lit out for a trip upstate to visit family. Got the Jeep all loaded up and ready to go. Only problem was it wouldn’t start. Funny cuz I had a bad vibe out it the day before when I was loading up the skis. Since we got the Prius, the Jeep has only been to the train station and back, and had been driven only once at all the last couple weeks; otherwise it just sat out in the cold. So the battery was dead. I tried to replace it but the bolt was rusted on, and besides it was starting to snow pretty heavily. So we punted on that and took Prius. Had to leave all the ski stuff home, as well as a huge pile of gifts (sorry, they’re on their way) but other than that it turns out the Prius is big enough road trip car for a family of four and handles well in the snow. We just barely got out of town in time. NYC got two feet of snow and was totally shut down for two days.

Upstate was nice. Got to see my parents, Martin and Kathleen, Barb and Al, Larry and Jackie, and Denis and Sara and their families. Caught a Sabres game on TV and a Nova about Antarctica in the 21st century. I’ve still been trying to find a nice warm pair of pants, wool or something. I’d looked online but couldn’t find any in tall sizes. I was telling my dad about this, and it turns out one time he ordered a bunch of woolen pants to wear hunting from an East German army surplus catalog. They came in packs of three in random sizes, so he ordered 2 packs, and of those three of them fit him (ah the joy of being medium). So he gave me an extra pair in tall size. Most random gift ever but much appreciated.

Got home, shoveled out, broke in the new show blower and it proved its worth. Got fixed the Jeep. Watched the ball drop with Nick and his family. Got the kids to pick up their rooms. Finished off a freelance music software project (more on that later), and have been getting going on an origami eBook (more on that later too), and continued with the studio. Which brings us up to eleven.

Again With the Turkeys

Let’s see … a few things. Yesterday was our big deadline at work, the release of v2.2 of out software. We almost made it, but our QA guy was hung up by our server going down all the time the last few days. Meanwhile the last bunch o’ weeks of working extra hours while trying to keep everything else going have caught up to me and I was kinda under the weather yesterday. I’ve been watching some Galactica to unwind a few nights over the last few weeks, TV as a sedative. Everyone says BSG is awesome, but I’m not so sure. For one thing, it’s very dark, gloomy and humorless. Not very entertaining in the sense of providing entertainment. Second, EJO is great as Adama, but the only character with any personality in the whole show is Starbuck. Everyone else is just in the situation, and pretty dark and gloomy and humorless about it. Third the pacing is very slow, like a soap opera. A lot of inconsequential stuff happens every episode, and some of it moves the Big Plot forward a degree or two. Lastly, the genius scientist and his imaginary Cylon girlfriend are just too much! Still the thing is strangely compelling, and I expect I’ll be making my way thru the series just to see what happens.

The big thing we accomplished around the house last week was to paint the ceilings downstairs. They kinda did a crappy job when they built the house and it always bothered me, but it sometimes takes a while to get around to things. It’s a big room that includes my studio and our family room and Jeannie’s office (the size of all 3 bedrooms plus the hall and bathrooms and part of the kitchen), and it was a big job. We started Friday night and did most of the rest Saturday night, and finished Sunday afternoon. It’s the only way to fit in a big job like that. And of course that’s probably part of the reason I’m so burnt out right now. Still, we’ve been meaning to get around to it for a long time, and it’s much better than it was before. Cross another item off our hydra-headed todo list.

But you came here to read about turkeys, and by that I mean origami turkeys. In between everything else, I taught my Turkey at the Origami USA Special Sessions Saturday at the museum. I get a lot of great feedback on this model. I taught it last spring, but decided to it again this fall because of the tie-in with Thanksgiving. And I’m happy to say it went over quite well. It was a good group and they all did great at the model. Including one kid about Lizzy’s age. Wow.

I hadn’t folded the model in about a year couldn’t really remember how it went. It’s a pretty complex model (probably over 100 steps once I diagram it). As luck would have it, Friday at work our servers crapped out so I had some downtime and was able to fold a few attempts and get as far as the base. When I taught the class they were all advanced folders and got the idea of free-form sculpting the details from the base, so that wasn’t a problem. Still it’s good to work it out and take it to the next level. Absolutely necessary for diagramming for a book. Along the way I got some of the previously improvised parts a bit more formalized too, particularly in the tail, so I feel a lot better about this model then I did before. The only thing left to work out now is the head. Now if I can only find the right paper I can make an exhibit quality version.

I had some time a the end of my session so I taught my Walrus. (I usually bring whatever new models I have to these things to see what people think of them, and there were some requests to teach this one.) This is the kind of model I really like. It’s only 20 or 30 steps, but communicates so much, and not being so hard, a much wider range of people respond to it. This one will definitely get into my book. The slate is already pretty full for my first book and most of the diagrams are drawn, but I guess there’s the potential for a follow up. I only wish diagramming didn’t take so long. Recently people have been sending me email asking to make youtube videos teaching my models. I guess I should be grateful they ask, but I have to tell them no. Boy, why doesn’t some one volunteer to help diagram for my book? I guess that’s why we need diagramming software. And so the circle of futility is complete.

Here’s a crease pattern for the Turkey Base. Probably not enough detail to figure out how to fold the final model, but enough for the basic layout. Hint: it’s a modified bird base.

Catching Up

I haven’t really had a chance to give a general update since the start of the school year back in early September. My deadline at work come and gone. The new rev of my product is in QA with the release slated for 11/15. It seems like I’m always in the middle of things.

It’s November now, halfway to winter break. Although the weather is starting to turn cold at night, it’s been really warm until a couple days ago. One day last week I walked up thru Central Park to the American Museum of Natural History to drop off my origami models for the holiday tree, and the temperature was in the 70’s. Now it’s in the 30’s in the mornings. Time to break out the hats and warm socks.

Jeannie and I got back to our house painting project. In the fall of 2008 into the winter we painted all three bedrooms, including the ceilings, plus touch-up in the living room, halls, kitchen and downstairs room. Last winter we didn’t do anything cuz I hurt my back. So this fall and winter we’re gonna finish the house. We did the ceilings in the upstairs hall, kitchen stairs and half the living room a couple weekends ago, and then the high part of the living room last weekend. It looks great and was not an overwhelming amount for work. We started Friday night with the taping up and edging. Saturday we did the roller work, and were done by mid-afternoon. The hardest part was the stairs because we needed the big ladder, which is hard to move around. We did the high part of the ceiling in one night. The only difficulty was that the extension handle to the roller broke midway thru, so I did a lot of trips up and down the ladder. The plan now is sometime before Christmas do the ceiling in the downstairs. Then it’s down to touching up the trim, which we’ll start after the new year.

We’ve had some time for fun in there too. Way back in September, we went to the Maker Faire when it visited NYC. Had fun playing with robots and electric hula hoops. Plus the event was at the New York Hall of Science, which I’d never been to before. Jeannie and the girls had been and love the place, and they’re right – it’s very cool. In particular there’s a really great discovery playground. It was also the first outing as a family with the new Prius. Tons of Prii in the parking lot. Don’t know if it’s just the effect of noticing when you get a new car, or maybe the Maker Faire is the kind of event that tends to attract the same kind of people that drive a Prius anyway.

We took a day trip up to a farm near New Paltz in October. Met up with Martin and family, and picked apples and pumpkins. Came home with three giant pumpkins, which have been carved into jack-o-lanterns and placed on the front stoop, where they are now serving as squirrel food. When we were done at the farm we went into town for lunch, and ended up walking around the historical district, where houses dating back to 1705 and older are still standing as a sort of park or museum. Pretty neat. The motivating excuse for the outing was to give Prius a good run on the highway. The car did not disappoint. It got 46 mpg.

Inspired by Maker Faire Jeannie finally got around to getting herself a Lego robot kit from her gambling winnings way back from our trip to Tahoe. While she was at it, she picked up a minifig of Jedi Master Yoda to hang from the rearview mirror of her car. “It’s a toy Yoda for my Toyota, see?”.

A friend lent us season one of the new Battle Star Galactica. The idea is to make it our main video entertainment for the coming winter. So far we’ve only had a chance to watch the pilot, which was excellent. I’d forgotten what a compelling actor Edward James Olmos is. I hope does some origami in this show.

Somewhere in there Jeannie and I celebrated our anniversary, Halloween (Lizzy was an aqua witch and Michelle a devil), and put on a birthday party for Lizzy. Now it’s time to make plans for camping and ski trips. Hopefully the end of the year will be a little less hectic. I know I have some vacation time that I have to use soon.

Hollow Heads

Happy Halloween everyone. This year we had not one but three pumpkins. It’s November now, halfway to winter break. The weather is starting to turn cold at night. It was 34 this morning. I realize it’s been a while since I wrote. Things have been really busy with work, projects and everything else. I just passed a big deadline at work, so I’ll do a catching up post soon. Meanwhile here’s some pictures of carved vegetables to hold you over.

Indian Summer

It’s fall in New York, and Indian summer is upon us. The weather’s been very nice so far, generally warm in the days and cool at night, with a few stormy days. The kids are back in the school groove, and after finishing my record, I’ve been able to start planning the next music project, as well as get back into my origami book. Diagramming the frog this week.

My work situation continues to improve. We got our release finished off a few weeks ago, and it was met with enthusiasm from our customers and managers. Now we’re sort of back to normal as far as the level of pressure and the general vibe. We have a follow-on release coming up in November. Finally getting tot he point where all the well-structured, modular, reusable code I’ve been writing is starting to pay off by actually getting reused. In related news, our corporate overlords did some shuffling of chairs recently. My team lost our nice corner shared office, as it’s going to be converted into a conference room. I got my own office right next door, which is a reasonable tradeoff. View of the Marriott wall, but at least it’s a window. The other guy in the room got sent to cubicle purgatory.

We did get a Prius a few weeks ago after all, and so far we think it’s pretty neat. Good roomy size, good futuristic looks, good handling, reasonable power and of course the hybrid synergy drive is a radical, cool technology. It takes a bit of getting used to. The controls are all electronic. Instead of a gearshift it has a videogame joystick. The car is black and completely silent at low speed, so my friend Erik nicknamed it the Stealth Car. Meanwhile the kids have dubbed it Princess Priia. So far we seem to be getting about 47 mpg. We’re gonna take it on a drive out to country sometime soon for some hiking and pumpkin picking.

Back To School

Another summer vacation has come to a close. Tomorrow the kids go back to school. They’re all packed and prepped and off to bed.

We spent the long weekend at the beach, as has become our custom, and had a mainly excellent time. Hurricane Earl didn’t bother us much, mostly wind and big surf. At one point it was raining sea foam, which was pretty weird. It came in quickly Thursday night and left just a quickly Friday afternoon. We had to stay out of the ocean for a day and all the rides were closed. But it was just as well cuz I was really tired and got a chance to catch up my rest. The hotel had a pool and game room, and we went for a big walk down the beach and around the island as the storm cleared. The rest was pretty much the usual: amusement pier, water park, beach and ocean. We went for a great nature hike at Asseteague and saw lots of blue crabs, shellfish, fish, birds, tadpoles and turtles, and some cool shells and stuff. Pictures coming sometime, maybe soon.

Lizzy got a pet hamster today and named her Delilah. She’s very excited. For a while she considered getting a pet turtle instead, but the cuteness factor won out.

Work has sort of stabilized. Our first release candidate went to QA, where a few minor bugs turned up. I’m going to build release candidate 2 tomorrow. I impressed everyone in my project by seemingly fixing a bug before it was discovered. Actually what happened was I discovered and fixed it last week before I went on my trip, but the bug tracking system was down that day, so our QA guy opened the ticket for me while I was away.

Had a chance to get caught up on a number of random tasks between all our travels. I even did some more work on my book this weekend. One thing on my mind now is upgrading my studio. I have a lot of options, each with pros and cons. But with my new record done, I really want to get into making more music, not mucking around with technology. More on that in the weeks ahead.

Camping 2010 Pics

Last weekend I went camping with bunch of friends. It’s become an annual tradition and the group grew so big we split into to two groups a few years back. We this year both groups came back together for the same weekend, so it was a huge, great time. Best camping trip so far, in fact. The kids are old enough now we can pretty much let them run around without worrying too much. Saturday I slept in, and when I got up went to my brother’s site, asking if my kids were there. No, but would you like some coffee and eggs? Went down to the next site where my friend Nick was staying. Same thing, no kids, but here’s some breakfast. Finally caught up to them across the road at Erik’s site. Best thing of all: no rain. We stayed until Sunday evening and until finally few drops convinced us to finish packing the car.

Beat The Heat Part II

Been doing some good summertime stuff. A week or so ago Jeannie and I took the kids to Rye Playland, the local amusement park, for an evening of rollercoasters and that sort of thing. A few weeks back we brought them into the city for a trip to the Nintendo store and the new Lego store.

I’ve been trying to watch more TV with the kids. I’ve heard that most American households watch 6 or more hours of TV a day, but I have the opposite problem. I’m trying to go from zero to one hour of TV a week, or at least every other week. Specifically I’m trying to watch NOVA with the kids to help them get more of an appreciation for science in the real world. We all enjoy the show, but we’re usually busy when its on and we forget. Last week remembered, and it was about a bunch of guys trying to salvage an old WWII airplane that’s been sitting out in the ice in Greenland for fifty-odd years. This led to a whole flurry of renewed interest in flying and flying machines.

My friend John the origami artist came down from Washington for a visit this weekend. He’s been working on a bunch of new books and e-books, including new editions of some of his classic books, and some all-new ones too. He’s in a very productive, prolific phase right now. He’s got a fourth Polyhedra book coming out. This one I think will be the most accessible yet (it eschews the most difficult shapes like dipyramids) and offers a whole bunch of new models. Hidden in the pages is a wealth of geometric folding techniques, such as about ten different ways to fold an 18 or 36 degree angle.

My day job continues to keep me busy but everyone is focused on our upcoming launch now, and things seem to have finally gotten organized, at least for the time being.

Beat The Heat Part I

Summer continues. The heat wave continues, with temperatures remaining in the mid to upper 90’s daily the last couple weeks. My friend Seth gave us an old air conditioner because he got central air put in his house. Normally in the summer we just have a cool zone in the bedrooms and we don’t even need that every day, but this year we were grateful to expand the cool zoon to the whole upstairs.

Seth’s dad Shelly passed away recently. Mark and Kelly came into town for a from the Adirondack for the funeral. A sad occasion but good to catch up. I’ll always remember Seth’s dad for a day I spent on his sailboat many years ago. I was a hot summer Saturday, when I was living in Queens, before I was married. Seth called me up and asked if wanted to go sailing. It told him I had planned on doing laundry. He convinced me to drop off my washing, something which had never occurred to me to do.

It was a great day sailing. We started up in Ossining sailed down the Hudson and under the Tappen Zee, almost to the George. Coming back we were sailing into the headwind and had to do quite a bit of tacking. Shelly had a pretty big boat (40 feet or so) and I’d only ever sailed little Sunfish before. I was really impressed at how he and Lynn could operate everything with ease, how coordinated they were. All the ropes were rigged that he could have run the boat himself, managed the sails and the rudder, from one spot if he needed to. It was a really great experience.

There and Back Again

Last week we took a trip upstate to visit friends and family, staying with my parents for a few days. It was pretty low key as far as these things go, nice and relaxing. Went up to my brother-in-law’s house one day and went swimming in his pool. Enjoyed a parade and fireworks on the 4th of July. Saw a nice handful of classic cars, and great fireworks show right in the field behind the local school, right over our heads as spread out on the lawn. Best fireworks I’ve seen in years.

Now that we’re home I wish we’d stayed longer and did more. We have a long list of things we’d like to do and see there with the kids. Fort Niagara, Toronto, etc. Maybe next year we’ll take a tour of upstate NY and Ontario as our main vacation. We did get to the Albright Knox art gallery, which I hadn’t been to in maybe 20 years. It has a pretty excellent collection of contemporary and modern art and I was happy that some of my favorite pieces were still there, including the mirror house. On the other hand the upstairs halls including the sculpture court were mainly empty, which was disappointing. Walked around the lake at Delaware park too.

We left the kids with my parents for a few days. Had a stopover in Albany on the ride home to have dinner with Martin. It was a nice enjoyable trip home, listening mainly to hippie rock. We crossed the Hudson up near Albany and took the Taconic home, avoided the traffic on 87 and the Tappen Zee. (I hate every Tap I see from Tappen A to Tappen Z.) We thought we’d have time to relax and hang out, sans kids, but no. It was a busy, busy workweek. My project is under alot of pressure these days. On top of it we had a major heat wave with temperatures getting up to 104. I worked at home that day and only went outside to move the sprinkler around the yard, but even being out for a few minutes was pretty intense.

At last on Friday evening the weather broke and it was merely in the upper 80’s hazy and muggy. Jeannie and took an epic walk around Manhattan, starting in times square, doing downtown. We went along the High Line, in Chelsea, which is a really cool thing. It had once been a network of elevated railroad tracks that supplied butchers in the meatpacking district with carcasses to carve up into meat. It has been abandoned for many years and overgrown with weeds. The city has turned into a long, narrow park, basically a pedestrian walkway that runs from 20th street down to the west village. On either side of the boardwalk are gardens of wildflowers — basically the same weeds, but well tended. It’s a surprisingly effective setup and the whole feels really peaceful and special.

When we got to the end of that, we weren’t too far from the waterfront. When I worked at Radical Media there was a pier nearby I used to walk to sometimes. It was a bit run down and in later days it was fenced off. Well the city as turned this into a park too, and you can walk out the end and see the Verrazano Bridge and Statue of Liberty, and even a tall ship. When we were done there we got dinner are a Mexican restaurant, and the walked thru the NYU campus and to the East Village. We finished off at St. Mark’s place, which is where I lived when I first moved to NYC many years ago. At that time it was all bong shops, but the city has become so upscale that I wondered if it’d be all changed now. It was refreshing to see it was just as seedy as it had always been.

The kids home again, all nice and tanned. They had a great time with all the grandparents, aunts and uncles. I guess they did lots of swimming. Ah summertime, and the living is easy.