Origami – Page 3 – Zing Blog 2

Origami Spiders, OrigaMIT and OUSA Holiday Tree

Busy times continue. The week after the CoCon origami convention in Chicago was OrigaMIT. This of course is MIT’s origami convention up in Boston, and one of the funnest ones out there, because of the size, venue, general vibe, and emphasis on origami math and theory in addition to the usual teaching models and exhibition. And also the crowd it attracts. They haven’t had one for three years, so it’s good to be back. I saw a bunch of origami friends I hadn’t seen in a while.

I largely reused my exhibit from Chicago. And I taught two of the same models as in Cocon, and they were well received. Brian Chan gave an excellent talk on how he’s using various CAD software to model constraints, which helps him come up with some very advanced and artistic crease patterns. His new Scorpion in particular is just mind-blowing.

I ended up spending most of the evening with Beth, Brian and Adrienne, it’s just invaluable to be able to getting into deep conversations with other folders at the level. In Chicago I started designing a new spider, which I’m calling Hallowe’en Spider. It’s inspired by some of those classic models with multiple sunken preliminary bases grafted together, but the overall technique is more modern and well integrated. The goal was a detailed, quasi-realistic looking spider with a fairly straightforward geometry that can be folded in half an hour or so. I also wanted nice fat legs to make is scarier.

I came pretty close. There’s not alot of steps, but one of them is a fairly complex sink that’s repeated four times. At one point Saturday night I was showing Beth what I was up to, and explaining how I needed to adjust the proportions and what were some of my options. She said, “why don’t you just pleat right here?”, and that turned out to be just the thing.

Over the next few days I finished a few more models, continuing to refine it. I folded a pair of large spiders out of 15″ paper. One of them is for the American Museum of Natural History’s origami holiday tree. I haven’t contributed to this in a few years, but this year the them was World of Bugs, so how could I resist? In addition to the Spider, I folded one of my butterflies and one of my inchworms, also out of large paper.

Meanwhile back home, it’s peak leaf raking season the last couple weeks, with a couple more weeks to go. And I finally got around to trying to replace the busted ceiling light in my kitchen with a new one I bought back in September, but was on backorder and finally arrived. However, when I took out the old fixture I discovered it had been screwed directly to the ceiling and there was no electrical cup to hold the weight and connect to mounting hardware to for the new lamp. So now I gotta cut a hole in the ceiling, install a cup, patch up the drywall, sand and paint it, and then I’ll be able to go ahead and install the new light fixture. Ah, good times.

Chicago Part II – A Hit by Varèse

COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention, was in the downstairs of the hotel, where they had a reception area and series of conference rooms, adjoining the lobby via a broad spiral stair. It was a perfect setup. There were a handful of vendors including a friendly woman named Katy who made tiny origami art pieces composed and arranged in little glass bell jars. Being from Chicago, she gave us great advice on places to eat.

There were ten or so artists exhibiting, so I got a whole table. My whole exhibit fit in a shoe box in my carry-on luggage, so that was plenty of space. There were a bunch of my “greatest hits” models, including a turtle, lizard, moose, elephant, dragon, flying saucer and retro rocket. Also the models I taught: the Space Cat, Flying Fish, and Butterfly. Then there were three new geometric models. I displayed versions of these at OUSA NYC in June, but wasn’t satisfied with them so I folded newer improved versions.

First is my Hydrangea Cuboctahedron. This is six hydrangea tessellations arranged on a sheet to then form a single-sheet polyhedron, a cube with sunken corners to resemble a cuboctahedron. I changed the layout of the tessellations so that it would have a symmetrical lock formed from the four corners of the paper. This went together easier and held better than that previous lock. I also added another level to the hydrangea tessellations compared to my previous version. I folded it from a 50cm square of marble wyndstone paper, which looks great and is super strong. The model could be wet folded but that turned out not to be necessary. I may still do it if the lock tends to open up over time.

The other two are Starball Variations I and II. Both of these models are based on a dodecahedron, with extra creases to sink the vertices in such a way as to reveal a star pattern on the faces, again single-sheet polyhedra. I use different geometries so that in one the start recedes inwards and in the other protrudes outward. My first attempts were made from 35cm Tant paper, but that turned out to be at the limit of foldability. I made two larger pentagons from a sheet of 70 x 50 cm marble wyndstone, and that enabled me to fold more accurately, and really understand the precreasing involved in the bottom half of the model where there layers stack up, so in the end they turned out much better.

I taught three classes, two on Saturday and one on Sunday. They were my Flying Fish, Space Cat, and Beautiful Free Butterfly. All the classes went really well, despite there being no diagrams and no document camera and projector. I thought ahead and brought a pack of large paper with me, suitable for teaching. Everyone finished the model, and I had time to help a few people who weren’t quite up to the requires skill level. Hopefully they leveled up in my class.

I took a few other classes, including Beth Johnson’s Gorilla, and a Turkey and a Spider. I’ve been thinking about an origami spider for a long time, so now I’m trying again to make my idea work. Since it was a Chicago convention, there were a good number of folders I’d never met before, so it was great to meet them and see what they’re up to. Spent alot of time just hanging out, folding, and going out to eat, mainly with Beth, Katie, and Jared N. from Oregon. Also Eric, Wendy, Patty, Kathleen, June and a bunch of OUSA convention committee people.

Saturday night Jeannie and popped out right at sunset to go to the top of the Hancock Tower, which was once the tallest building in the world, and take in the view. And it’s … flat. There’s Lake Michigan in one direction, and the plains in the otter, and past the city they look more and more the same as the eye draws out to the horizon.

We also discovered Chicago style hot dogs. These are great, served with pickles and tomatoes as well as the more common ketchup, relish and onions, with an extra large frank and bun. Jeannie says Chicago style hot dogs and pizza are on the level of Buffalo chicken wings and beef on weck, and I’m inclined to agree.

Our flight home was on Sunday night. By this time it had started to rain. The trip home was smooth and uneventful. We were able to watch the first half of the Bills game in a bar in the airport, and most of the second half on the plane.

All in all a great convention. I hope they do it again. It was a great time, and there’s still lots to do and see in Chicago.

Coming soon – photos!

Chicago Part I – Beginnings

Just got back from a fantastic trip to the capitol of the Great Lakes, Chicago. Jeannie had never been there before and I hadn’t been since the 1990’s when I used to go there for work alot, but mainly spent my time in an office park out in the suburbs.

The motivating excuse was COCon, the Chicago Origami Convention. This is the first time for a Chicago convention, and they had it in one of the big hotels downtown. We arrived a day early, on Thursday to play tourist in the city. The flight out there was smooth. We got up before daylight to get to the airport in time for our flight, and we landed mid-morning. I slept on the plane so it felt like the start of a new day. We grabbed a cab, checked into the hotel, and were out walking around the city before noon.

It must be said that Chicago is a great city for walking around. And the weather was beautiful the whole time. We were right near the waterfront at a place called Navy Pier, and there was a scenic walkway for bicycles and pedestrians. Then into a park with a funky piece of public art called The Bean. It’s basically a giant curved chrome blob that you can walk around and underneath and see really interesting reflections.

The main attraction for the afternoon was the Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a world class art museum to rival the Met in New York or the one in Vienna. It’s got a great collection, and very well presented. Famous paintings on display included Sunday in the Park, American Gothic, Nighthawks, a Van Gogh Self Portrait, and one of the missing stained glass windows from the Darwin Martin House in Buffalo (I wonder if the plan to repatriate that someday) to give you an idea. Also a wing full of great Asian bronze, pottery and sculptures, going from ancient to contemporary artists, ancient Greek and Roman stuff, and a wing of European art including lots of paintings and sculptures and a whole hall full of arms and armor. On the way back to the hotel we walked thru the Honorable Richard J. Daley Plaza where they got that Picasso, across from the Cook County assessor’s office.

Walking back to the hotel along the Chicago river we came upon a plaza with some cafes, and stopped for some beers and a late lunch. Chicago is famous for its architecture, and we were right across the river from some crazy art deco googie tower apartment buildings with parking garages spiraling up the lower half and boat docks in the basement. In and around the river, the museums and various other places downtown I noticed a pattern on the architecture that I’m calling the Chicago motif. It consists of a square divided into eight triangle by square cross and an “X”. Coincidently, this is also the crease pattern of an unfolded waterbomb base.

That night we went out to dinner at a bar across the street from the hotel where they had the football game on. I had a burger with a fired egg on top, cuz if I’m in a place with that on the menu, that’s what I’ll usually get. Later we met my friend and colleague Ann Marie, with whom I’ve been on several zoom calls a week the whole year, but never met face to face before. She invited us to join her and her friends at a different bar downtown where there was a hallowe’en themed burlesque show. It was a lot of fun, with a very positive vibe, and as she put it, classy with a capital A-S-S. Afterwards, we walked around downtown for a good hour while Ann Marie played tour guide and pointed out lots of notable things like restaurants, architecture, and historical sites.

Friday we went to another great museum, the Field Museum of Natural History. It’s alot like the American Museum of Natural History in New York which I know well, but maybe not so large and a little bit more shiny. Great architecture. The star attraction was Sue the T-Rex, named after her discoverer Sue the human. It’s the most complete Tyrannosaur skeleton every found, virtually complete. The T-Rex is the centerpiece of a great hall of the history of life on earth, with tons of fossils and other artifacts. There was also a short 3-D film about the discovery, unearthing and preparation of the Sue fossil, and how they analyzed and what they learned about the living creature’s life and death. It turns out Sue was fully grown, 40 feet long, at 19 years old, and died at 29. During his or her life he or she suffered nine broken ribs and a fractured tibia and recovered from all of those injuries. Among the things I never knew I never wanted to know was that Sue was infected by parasite worms that burrowed holes into it’s jawbone.

For all its attention to scientific detail the film’s CG animation was strangely inaccurate in several ways. For one, they showed the dinosaur’s gait as having wide-set feet like a sumo wrestler, rather than more plausibly with the feet under the the body. Second was that whenever the terrible lizard appeared, the other little dinosaurs would wait for it to get close, then turn and shreik at it before running away, rather than running off at the first whiff of trouble like real animals do. Lastly, in a visualization of an epic battle with a Triceratops a la Disney’s Fantasia, where they conjectured the T-Rex got it’s leg injury, somehow the T-Rex almost effortlessly bites the three-horned adversary on the neck under it’s protective crest. It’s almost as bad as that bit in Toy Story where the light fixture disappears into the ceiling.

There were also halls of taxidermy, a really nice collection of gems and minerals, and whole hall of jade and carved jade art, a bit of crossover from the day before with artifacts from various antiquated civilizations, shown here for the naturally historic rather than artistic value.

After the Field Museum we hit the Aquarium, which was right next door. Highlights include beluga whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, jellyfish, eels, tropical coral reefs, cuttlefish, a cool movie about octopus, and a whole section of tanks devoted to Great Lakes fish such as pike, walleye, perch, trout, and bass.

We walked back to the hotel along the lakeshore trail and by the time we arrived, other origami people were starting to filter in. We spent happy hour at the bar with some friends, and then I set up my exhibit (more on that later). We went out for dinner for authentic Chicago style deep dish pizza. Most excellent. Returned to the hotel for late night folding. I mostly practiced models I would teach the following day.

In the Spaceship, the Silver Spaceship the Lion Takes Control

It’s been a busy few weeks. The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there. Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit. That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.

I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November. Also got a new computer and been moving into that. One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros. It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.

And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills. Ping me if you fit the bill.

Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions. More on that as it, uh, unfolds.

Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.

Lastly, been working on music. I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place. Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape. The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix. EQ helps but not enough. When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range. I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs. Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone. Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.

Mo’ Origami

There’s an origami convention coming up Chicago next month, so I’ve been getting organized about folding some new models for the convention. Having to do an exhibition is a great motivator. I’ve also been busy at work, transitioning from a part-time consulting gig to a full time staff position as Lead Engineer of Consumer Reports’ new Innovation Lab. I’ll be building an R&D software engineering team to create prototypes and products around consumer’s digital privacy and data rights. More on that as the situation comes into being, but soon, having Fridays off will be a thing of the past.

So last Friday I spent a good chunk of the day organizing my origami studio. Since the start of the pandemic there have not been alot of in-person conventions and exhibits, so I’m really just getting back into it. I have lots of boxes of half-folded experiments and ideas. I want to take the best and perfect them and fold them at an exhibit-quality level. Some of the stuff is pretty complex and ambitious.

While I was at it, I threw out lots of old models. One has to do this every few years, but it’s always funny because the stuff I’m getting rid of was once some of my best work. Michael LaFosse told me not too long ago that if the model has a face, like a human or an animal, he can’t bear to tear it up or crumple it. Instead he unfolds it first, then throws away an unfolded sheet of paper. I found myself doing that a few times.

I registered to teach classes at the Chicago convention. I signed up to teach two classes, and am thinking of adding a third. Among the models I’m teaching is my Space Cat, which I designed at the beginning of the summer, right around the time my jazz and funk band Spacecats decided on its name. The model is a variation on my Sophie the Cat, restyled with a sleek, atomic age midcentury modern look. Very hip.

And, it looks like the Origami MIT convention is back this year, after three years off!

Back into the Fold

I recently folded a bunch of new origami models for an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. These were well-known designs, but it felt good to get back into folding some exhibit-quality works. As is my practice these days, I folded two of each, so as to have one to keep. Sort of a warm-up for some upcoming conventions I’ll be attending this fall, where I’ll be exhibiting some new work.

Before I put them in the mail, I figured I’d photograph them. This led to a round of experimentation with different cameras. For many years I’ve had a digital snapshot camera with a zoom lens and macro mode. I also have a pretty nice digital SLR with lots of controls, capable of taking amazing pictures.

The SLR is very accurate, and lets you control everything, but it’s painstaking. It also has various automatic modes that give you less control but are less fussy. I also have a full lighting kit but, it’s a major effort to set everything up. In fact, I have a big backlog of unphotographed work since the start of the pandemic for this very reason.

Without lots of light, there’s a three-way struggle between exposure time, exposure level, and depth of the focus field. The photos tend to be dark, or require a tripod to keep still while the shutter is open. And there’s some weird auto-color balance feature that makes all the colors strange if you have just a few colors in your view, as is often the case with this kind of subject matter.

What I’m really after is a workflow that’s quick and easy. I want to be able to put a big sheet of paper on my kitchen table, lay down some origami, and be good to go with the available light. So I tried the camera on my cel phone, and on Jeannie’s phone, which is much newer. These cameras are not as accurate, but in fact much better! It’s like have a mic with a nice warm compressor for recording musical instruments. They’re always in focus, and do a really good job with color balance and exposure level under a pretty wide range, and require alot less tweaking in post. Jeannie’s phone in particular seems to bring out textural detail with extra fine-scale contrast, and in addition to a good zoom has a wide-angle mode that lets you get super close to the subject.

In the end, each camera has its pros and cons, and gives a slightly different image in terms of exposure, color balance, focus, sharpness, and contrast. Definitely a worthwhile study. I suppose the digital SLR is still the best if you have the patience. I’ll use it again next time I do a “real” photo shoot. The digital snapshot camera is okay but kind of old and has been surpassed by newer technology. The phones are the clear winner in terms of convenience and picture quality combined. So now I’m thinking of getting a new phone just to use for taking pictures.

While I’m at it, I’m thinking about getting a new computer. Like my phone, my computer is getting pretty old, and won’t run alot of newer apps. OTOH, there are some old apps that are essential to my work, so there needs to be a plan on how to replace those. Critical among these are Adobe creative suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and the venerable Flash/Flex. The amount of money Adobe charges for a yearly subscription (you can’t just buy it) is ridiculous. And of course Flash and Flex are long dead.

So I figured I’d check out Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher, the not-a-total-rip-off alternative. So far so good. Affinity Photo seems to work just as well as Photoshop for what I do, which runs the gamut from cropping and tweaking pictures taken on my phone, to serous, multi-element, mutli-layer, effects-laden, composed image and text graphics for things like album covers or strategy game artwork. I haven’t tried Publisher yet but it seems like a cromulent replacement for InDesign, which I use mainly for page layout for my origami books and diagrams, and the occasional poster for a rock or jazz gig.

The main question is whether Affinity Designer is a reasonable app for doing origami diagrams. I had been using Flash for many years, but Flash is well past the end of its life, and it may be time to move on. People in the origami community have been migrating from Illustrator to Affinity over the last few years, but the consensus seems to be that it’s cumbersome and there’s a steep learning curve. Ah well, better than nothing. Last night I modeled a square sheet of paper with a crease thru the diagonal. It took a little while to figure out all the tools, but there’s enough control over everything that it can be made perfect. So that’s hopeful. Whether one can move quickly thru a series of steps remains to be seen.

I’ll also have to build up a new library of dashed lines, arrows, and other symbols. I guess I’ll reach out to my friends and see where they’re all at with this.

As for the automation stuff that I used to in Flash, the Foldinator project remains a perpetual work-in-progress, and last time I checked in with it, I decided to basically start over using javascript, and build on the libraries of people like Robby Kraft and Jason Ku.

Origami USA 2022

This was the first in-person origami convention in three years, at the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan. It was great to be back, to see all my origami friends and catch up on what everyone was up to.

There was an exhibit, which was a big motivator for me to get off my butt and start folding some new things. I had four new models, plus a good handful of my best prior work. One of the new models is the Space Cat, named after my new jazz and funk band. It’s variation on Sophie the Cat, sculpted in a streamlined midcentury modern style out an appropriate shade of blue paper.

The others were more ambitious: single-sheet polyhedra with tessellation or other surface textures. One was my Hydrangea Cuboctahedron, which I actually folded last year but never had a chance to exhibit before, folded out of a sheet of blue 19″ shiny paper, which has a sparkle similar to Stardream but is thinner and crisper.

The other two were variations on a dodecahedron, with various regions sunk to bring out five-pointed stars latent in the geometry of the design. One had the embedded star oriented to that its corners align with the corners of the base dodecahedron’s pentagonal faces. The other and the corners of the stars at the midpoints of the edges of the pentagons.

These took quite alot of effort to make. First the design had to be worked out with drawings, then single-hemisphere studies. Then the pre-creasing took several evenings per model, very technical and precise, using fivefold symmetry. Each is folded out of a pentagon, and creating a regular pentagon from a square is a non-trivial task in itself. I used 15″ Tant paper for these, and the model is about at the limit of what the paper could handle without getting too soft.

Up until the very end, I wasn’t even sure if they were going to work, if I’d be able to finish and close the model. The layout was such that one pentagon of dodecahedron was in the center of the paper, and on the opposite face the five corners come together to form a lock. I’ve used this technique successfully on other models including my Stellated Dodecahedron and my Great Dodecahedron. It’s the nature of single-sheet polyhedra, being folded from a flat sheet, that you have a lot of layers of paper at the end, and they need to be tucked away so that the tendency to spring open is countered, or at least minimized, while maintaining the pattern on the exterior surface. However for these two new ones, this approach created a pinwheel out of the corners on the last face, so I ended up tucking the paper inside instead. This left a pentagonal hole at the bottom (which no one could see) but allowed me to reach inside to do the final shaping, which was pretty fragile and tricky.

I’ve been doing single-sheet polyhedra for years, but sometimes I feel like people don’t really get them, because most people make models like this as modulars, fitting together many small sheets, which is much easier to do. But my new models brought out the surface in a way that could not be done with modulars, and finally people took notice. It’s particularly gratifying when folders I admire are impressed with my work. Boice Wong, who specializes in supercomplex human figures such as Samurai and videogame heroes, affectionately called them “fake modulars” and told me they were causing quite a buzz. Indeed, I got quite a few compliments on my exhibit and got into several conversations with other folders about the designs.

So, having gotten these models to work at all, I now want to fold really nice ones out of my last remaining sheet of ivory Marble Winstone paper, which I can cut to yield two 19″ pentagons. I figure if I’m going to do this, I might as well see if I can come up with a layout that lets me close the bottom nicely. So I spent a good part of my free folding time at the convention exploring various layouts for the dodecahedron. Of course John Montroll was around, and it was lots of fun to jam on pentagons and polyhedra with him.

This led me on a quest to find a source for large, accurately pre-cut pentagons in high-quality paper, but alas no such thing exists. I befriended Kathy, the lady who usually makes such things – octagons, hexagons, etc. – and sells them to the origami source. She says she has a jig for it and can custom cut some for me. I also bid on and won a silent auction item which was a nice wooden storage box filled with various papers, included a drawer full of 10″ pentagonal sheets.

As I mentioned, this was the first in-person convention in several years due to the pandemic, and it was at the Sheraton Hotel in New York city, a new venue for us. Overall it worked out quite well, with nice conference rooms for the classes and hospitality. Origami USA negotiated a really good rate for the hotel rooms. Since getting in and out the city can be a pain, Jeannie and decided to stay the night Friday and Saturday, and this also worked out quite well.

This year the convention went to a system where people sign up to take classes ahead of time on the web site, so I ended up taking alot more classes than usual. Mostly I took classes from friends of mine who are complex folders to see if I can glean some insight to their design process as well as different teaching styles. I took Brain Chan’s Cicada, inspired by the classic model but with added legs; Beth Johnson’s Circus Elephant, and an airplane by Michael LaFosse.

I taught two classes. Saturday it was Sophie the Cat. This is a high-intermediate level model and the class was full. I didn’t have a document camera in my room, so there was a fair amount of going around and showing some of the steps up close. But everyone got thru successfully. On Sunday I taught my Five-Banded Armadillo. This is a complex model and it took up two periods. Again, the class was full. This was a bit surpassing for a complex model; sometimes I only get a few students on classes like these. A document camera would have helped here as well, but still everyone folded it successfully and had a good time.

I saw alot of first-timers, some of whom were teaching and exhibiting. This is a very good sign for future conventions. Over the course of the weekend quite a few people came up to me asking me to sign their copy of my Animal Sculptures book, or to take a picture with me, or just to tell me they really admire my work. This happens a bit at every convention, but never before to this degree. Very flattering. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten since it’s been a long time.

Saturday night was a screening of a documentary film about the the artist Kevin Box, who create large metal sculptures of origami figures, and collaborates with Beth, Michael and Robert Lang on the designs. Really fascinating.

Michelle came into the city with us Friday and stayed with us overnight. She had to work Sunday – she chose to come to convention on the day with more dragons and flowers – so she drove home Saturday evening, and came back again Sunday evening. This was her first time driving in Manhattan, but she learned to drive in The Bronx, so was pretty unfazed.

Sunday night was the giant folding contest, which was alot of fun. Marc Kirschenbaum was the emcee, and I was asked to be a judge along with Beth, Michael, Richard Alexander, and Quentin Trollop. Of course every team gets a prize, so the challenge is to think of a fun category appropriate to each model. For example, the Blue Whale won the “deepest fold” and the Giraffe, believe or not, lost out to the Emperor Penguin in the “tallest” category, but won “best legs”.

Sunday night we all went home to sleep, and came back Monday in time for the start of the afternoon session. I haven’t spent much time in the city in the last three years, just the occasion meeting or concert, cuz I’ve been working from home since the start of the pandemic. The first day I was there New York felt really strange and alien to me – crowded, noisy, chaotic, rectangular, and I was noticing lots of things in a sort of heightened way. The second day I could feel myself tuning into the wavelength to appreciate everything on its own terms, and by the third day it was as if I’d never been away.

Monday I took Boice’s class on action figures. I’ve been experimenting with human figures and was looking to improve at it. He first presented a nice box-pleated human figure model. It uses a 16 x 16 grid, but it otherwise very similar to my Astronaut, which uses an 8 x 8 grid, and my subsequently developed Robot Base, which uses a 12 x 12 grid (the Robot remains unfinished, hence the base). It’s a good go-to human figure base. Then we spent most of the class working on stances and poses to make the figure more lifelike natural. Harkened back to figure drawing classes in art school. I made a figure standing on one foot as if to delver a karate kick, and another mediating in a lotus position. Picked up alot of good insight.

A fun topper to the whole weekend: As we were getting our car out of the garage at the end of the night, there was a guy in line ahead of us in a Frank Zappa T-shirt, and I recognized him as Ed Palermo, leader of a big band that does arrangements of Zappa and other prog rock artists. He does a monthly gig at the Iridium right around the corner, and had just come off the bandstand. So we struck up a conversation and I gave him links to some of my music to listen too. Asked him to keep me in mind if he every needs a sub on sax.

Next up: photos

The Analog Kid

More summer, more busy these days. The weather has been beautiful. One night last weekend we built a fire in our fire pit and hung out on the patio and considered what song we might use to break Vecna’s curse. Last summer I made a playlist of 80 favorite 80’s songs, and now I’m thinking of making a new playlist of 77 favorite 70’s songs for this summer.

I edited up some highlight form the the Spacecats gig. I’m going to update my web site soon to feature of few of the best ones, but for now, you can see the whole set here:

zingman.com/music/spacecats/video/spacecats_altmed2206/

I got out for a bike ride five days last week. I mostly go around our neighborhood, which is kinda hilly and some streets have alot of cars. Sometimes to a local place called Nature Study Woods, which is mountain biking trails, and not particularly well maintained. The steep parts tend to be washed out and stony, and the low spots muddy. Also I tend to go on fairly short rides – a half hour to an hour, and usually go as fast as possible.

All in all Jeannie doesn’t enjoy this style of riding, but we wanted to start doing some biking together.

So on Sunday Jeannie took our bikes out to Jones Beach and biked along the scenic Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway. It’s a great bike path, smooth and flat, that runs the length of the island, out from the main beach, through as series of smaller beaches, saltwater wildlife refuges, and the occasional marina, restaurant or bar. We went out a little over seven miles then turned around, for a total of fifteen miles or so. On the way back there was a pretty consistent headwind, but it was a very doable and fun ride. We had a lunch of ice cream and clam strips, then went out to the beach, but it was too cold for swimming. The water was unusually calm and there were lots of seashells. Also tons of giant container ships out at see, queued up to get into New York harbor, like I’ve never seen before. There’s usually maybe two or three, but this time there was over a dozen.

I also got the mustang on the road over the weekend, and continued with the yardwork. This time is was doing the edging on the driveway and front walk. Still to go is the walk around the back of the house, and the patio. It seems everything has grown in quite alot this spring, and needs an extra level of cutting back. Also I’ve never seen so many bunny rabbits and chipmunks in our neighborhood, nor heard so many songbirds.

Lastly, I’m continuing with doing origami and preparing for the convention, which starts this Friday. My two dodecahedron star balls are nearly complete, but it’s taking some work to finish them. They’re single-sheet polyhedra, a very advance form of origami, and closing off and locking the bottom where the edges come together is a nontrivial design challenge. I’ve also been experimenting with a new design called the Space Cat, a variation on my Sophie the Cat, with a midcentury modern look and proportions. Hopefully will get there and have a few new pieces for my exhibit.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching a couple classes, and agreed to pre-record them for people who are attending the convention remotely. This process grew out of last year’s online-only convention, in which all classes were taught live as Zoom calls. This year we’re recording Zoom sessions, with a camera pointing down at the work as it’s being folded. I kind of view this a run-thru, a rehearsal for the real class, and good opportunity to make sure I know the model and can teach it. My first class, Sophie the Cat, went off without a hitch, totally great. For my second class my Five-Banded Armadillo, I somehow skipped a stepped and messed of the proportions of the bands, which are created by pleating. I realized my mistake after I did the collapse and it was too late to undo, so I had to just roll with it and adjust the proportions as I finished the model. All in all it still turned out in the end, and I’m sure to get it right in the actual class.

These are Road Games

Summer continues. The weather has been beautiful and I’ve been spending alot of time outside. We’ve been busy. Lots of the usual, including work, practicing music, biking, and taking the mustang out for rides. Lots of yardwork the last few weekends, including trimming the trees and hedges. So far I’ve filled up all my yard waste cans two weeks in a row. Probably one more session to go, but it will be up on the ladder.

Over Memorial Day weekend we went out to a barbecue at our friend Nick’s house. The presence of a pull-up bar in his backyard inspired me to add some new exercises to my workout to focus on my lats.

We got some new furniture, including an armchair for the living room and a sectional sofa for the downstairs room. A new pair fo end tables arrived today and need to be assembled, and a coffee table is on order. It all looks nice and is comfortable, is a big upgrade from our old stuff, and represents the culmination of a long and tedious research project. Well almost. Now we want to get a new entertainment center, bookshelf and end tables downstairs too.

Of course now we have to deal with getting rid of the old furniture. A friend of mine who just moved into a new apartment may take our futon and gold chairs. Meanwhile we have to store it somewhere, so we cleaned out a whole bunch of old junk and boxes from the garage. Big step forward in project defrag the house.

The other big item is over the weekend I did the class schedule for the Origami USA convention, which is coming up at the end of June. This is our first in-person convention in three years, and around 140 people signed up to teach classes. You’ll recall I wrote the software for the scheduling for last year’s (virtual, online) convention. I made several improvements to it this year. Still not everything can be automated, so the weekend was full of back-and-forth with the teaching committed as we juggled classes around until it met with everyone’s satisfaction. I’ll be teaching two classes, my Five-Banded Armadillo, and Sophie the Cat. I’m also working on some new models for the exhibition.

Lastly, the Global Jukebox 4.2.1 is now live. The cutover to our new, node-based server is complete, and we can now retire the old backend servers.

Spacecats II

Life continues to be busy on a bunch of fronts. First, check the new poster and web page for my band Spacecats.

https://zingman.com/music/spacecats.php

So let’s see. I guess project dirt was completed a while ago and the new grass is well on its way to being grown in at this point. I’ve been mowing the lawn for several weeks now. We even did the first round of weeding, planting in the garden, and putting down mulch under the hedges. Next job will be trimming.

A couple weeks back I got up on a ladder to unclog the downspout of my gutter in one corner of my job. I used to have to get up there and clean out my gutters every year or so, when there were hundred-foot-tall trees all around my house. But one by one the trees got cut down and I didn’t have to do it for several years. This time instead of leaves and sticks, it was beads of whatever our roof shingles are made of. We got a new roof put on a couple years back, same time we installed our solar panels, and some of the material has worn off with the weather. Of all the jobs I do, this is the one I dislike the most, because of the potential danger of falling off the ladder twenty feet up. So far I’ve been careful and never met with any harm but you never know. Next time I’ll probably hire someone.

Now that the yardwork situation is under control, I’ve been trying to move forward with project furniture. I want to get a good armchair for the living room to replace the awful recliner we have, and a new coffee table and end tables, plus a new sectional sofa for the family room, and maybe and entertainment center too. By the end of the year, if possible. We started thinking about this at the beginning of the pandemic, but it turns out to be a kinda complicated research project, and there’s always something else to do, and every time we find something we think we like, it turns our to backordered for months. Nevertheless, it’s getting to the point where our kids have nicer furniture than us. So it’s time to get moving.

As the weather has been getting nicer, Jeannie and I have been spending more time outdoors. We’ve gone for a couple hikes, mostly at local places like Saxon Woods. I’ve also been getting on my bike alot more, averaging about three times a week this spring, and my strength, speed and endurance are increasing. My typical ride is pretty short, less than an hour, but the neighborhood is kinda hilly. My main ride these days is a loop into downtown Bronxville, then thru Chester Heights and back home. Also went to the Nature Study Woods once, but mostly it’s been too muddy cuz of the rain.

I’ve gotten the Mustang out on the road a few times. Even had to put a tankful of gas in it yesterday. So far it’s been running great. I want to get new tires put on it this spring. The tires I have are the ones from when I bought the car in 1997!

In the software realm, I’ve been working on several things. One of which is the Origami USA convention scheduling tool. If you recall, I’m on the OUSA convention and web committees, as the person who creates the schedule of classes and events, and the one who writes the software to make that task easier. The last few years we haven’t had any in-person conventions. Last year we had a zoom convention, and I did the schedule for that. Along the way, I discarded the existing scheduling tool, basically a bunch of macros for MS Access, and wrote a web application in Drupal/PHP that integrates with the main web site and other tools. This year I enhanced the functionality in a few ways. First, I created a workflow to reschedule a class without having to first unschedule it then schedule it again. Second I added the capacity to sort the classes by name, to make it easier to find them. On the roadmap is the ability to sort and filter by a number of parameters including the class name, the teacher name, the class type, level of complexity, number of periods, etc. But Drupal and PHP are a serious pain to work with, so I’ll save these enhancements for a future convention.

Meanwhile I have a little over a month to get some new models completed, get and exhibit together and decide what to teach. I have a big pile of half-finished models and an even bigger backlog of ideas. But for the zoom conventions don’t really inspire me and I haven’t been doing that much folding lately. Luckily, this year’s convention is live and in person, at the Sheraton Hotel in NYC, the third weekend in June (I think). Should be alot of fun to reconnect with my origami friends, and hopefully I’ll have a bunch of cool new models.

Been working hard at my new consulting gig at Consumer Reports R&D Lab. Hard to believe I’ve been there three months already. They’ve just extended my contract to the end of the year, which is good news. My group is involved in this thing called the Digital Rights Protocol, which is designed to make it easier for consumers to exercise their rights to opt out of online data collection, tracking, etc., and easier for companies to comply with requests around these rights. We lead a consortium of startups involved in the internet privacy business, and last week we had the first end-to-end test of the Protocol with partners in various roles. Meanwhile Consumer reports is involved in several business-oriented capacities as well, so I am building a reference implementation of the DRP to live in our application ecosystem and provide a touchstone to our partners. Anyway, the end-to-end test was a big success, and now we’re planning out the next phase of development.

Meanwhile at my other big client, The Global Jukebox, we’re getting ready to roll out a new release to Live. This one has a new backend and a cutover to a new server, to get rid of a bunch of old headaches. Everything is all tested and ready to roll. All that remains now is to switch over the DNS server.

Lastly, my music projects proceed apace. Mary came over and laid down the vocal track for My Ol’ Breakdown Truck a week or so ago, and it came out great. Afterwards we went out for Mexican food. Now I have three songs mostly done, with the vocals, bass and guitar tracked and mixed. All that remains is the fine-tune the drum parts, and add a little keyboards and sax to fill things out. Also, Elixr – 2022 Remaster is vary much almost done; all that remains is one final listening back.

Now that my Thursday band has a name and a gig, the music has been rising to the occasion and getting more intense. Today we had a rehearsal where we really drilled down on some of the finer points of some of our songs, to really master the arrangements and make them our own.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed my Selmer Reference ’54 tenor sax, which I was so in love with, seems to have developed a leak somewhere, so the notes below low D don’t sound clearly and require alot of force to sound at all. Plus one of the mounting posts on the low C keyguard has come loose. So I need to find a new sax repair guy. The guy I’d been using for year – Virgil Scott – was up on Yonkers, only 10 minutes from my house. Sadly, he died of covid during the pandemic. My new guy is great, he’s out in Connecticut up new Massachusetts, almost two hour from here. So I need to find someone local.

For the time being I’ve switched back to playing my Selmer Mark VII, which I had worked on last summer. The low notes are clear and effortless, but best of all, I had the action set up, which it turns out makes a huge difference on tunes like Some Skunk Funk. I’d been struggling with playing that fast and cleanly on my other horn, and now the notes just roll right off. On the downside, I have to get used to this horn’s intonation again. And even worse, I’d been busting my ass to get good on the altissimo range on the tenor, and could get all the way up to the second high D, and play riffs up there. I was developing some real chops. On this horn, the embouchure required is completely different, so I’m back to square one.