Category: Software

Update Update

Been working on a bunch of things. Settling into the long winter and trying to be productive. Starting in or continuing on project that will take a while.

First off, my open mic the other night went pretty well. People told me I sounded good at least, and they like my songs. Before I’d played in a duo with Erik, but this was my first time as a completely solo artist. It’s not easy keeping both hands going and singing while no one is backing you up. Plus there’s always things on the stand the you don’t necessarily think about but you have to adjust to ont he spot: the sound and feel of the piano, the placement of the mic, the lighting. And there’s no sound check or warmup, you just go for it. Anyway I think I did pretty well.

I played two originals, Checker Cab and Get On Back 2 U. I’m trying to do one new song (as far as me performing it live is concerned) per show, and Checker Cab was it this time. On Checker Cab the left hand art in the chorus was a bit off one time thru, and I decided to skip the instrumental section in the middle for the safety of the groove. Still the vocals were strong on the groove was swinging the whole time. Get On Back 2 U went fine, no particular problems. I’m more comfortable with it, and maybe I should have opened with it but, ah too late now. When I debuted GoB2U live it was a bit shaky too, but now it’s solid and can focus on delivering a performance rather than worrying about messing up.

I can’t go to the open mic next month cuz of the kids’ school musical, but for the one after that the plan is to debut my version of Making Miles. Also gonna start looking for other open mics and try and find a rhythm section soon.

It looks like I’m mainly over the hump as far as moving into my new computer goes. It’s a Mac workstation with a great big screen, to replace my older mac workstation with a more moderately sized screen. Of course this means have to update all my software and everything. I really only use this computer for two things. One is software development on the days I work from home, and the other is music production on ProTools. The ProTools in particular took a while to migrate because of driver updates, and having to re-register all my plugins. But that seems to have all worked, and I can see lots and lots of channels in the mixer on the new screen. The last big thing remaining is to migrate my old windows partition to my new machine via VMWare. In fact I even started working on music on the new rig, add click tracks and stretching the chords on Lou’s songs. Soon hope to lay in the rhythms sections.

I’ve also been experimenting with recording video for my book. The idea is to demo folding the models. I’ve been learning more about my camera because I can use to shoot video in HD, so I want to try and use that rather than my miniDV camcorder. I’ve hooked it up to the computer and can see the viewfinder image on my monitor. I’ve also left the safety of fully automatic mode and am learning how to independently control the ISO, F-stop, exposure and focus, and started coming up with setups that work. It’s a bit tricky, because I need to be zoomed in pretty tight by still have a large depth of field. Adding more light helps. The next I’m gonna do is change my setup around so that the camera is looking down over my shoulder. For my first go I had the camera opposite me, but this made it harder to explain clearly because the audience POV was opposite my own. Also have to make sure I’m capturing good audio. I might add an external mic.

So look forward to progress on all of that and more in future updates.

Buzzy Third Music Site Update

I added some new pages to my web site, for my work-in-progress album, whose working title is Buzzy Third. There’s a page for the music and one for the lyrics. Check them out. These will continue to get updated as more songs are completed. While I was at it I made a bunch more updates to the main pages on my music and spew sections, and templatized and added style definitions to lots of second-level pages. There’s still a few things to do, most notably to come up with some album art for the new record, or at least a better placeholder.

Meanwhile, the new year seems to be off to a good start. The weather has been mild and my health has been good. January is always the roughest month of the year, and its too early to say the days are getting longer, but so far so good. We had a major deadline and demo at work earlier this week, and it went really well. All the bosses were impressed. I feel like all my hard work whipping my team in to shape is finally paying off. No random late-breaking bugs or snafus to contend with this time around.

At home, I got a new computer. More on that later. I started working on video for my book. I’ve been spending a good amount of time on music too. Started work on Lou’s EP, and getting back to working out the middle section of my song Black Swan. Been practicing sax and learning songs for the kids’ musical next month. Glad so say that since I got my tenor fixed it’s sounding great. Also been playing piano, concentrating on my originals. I’m doing an open mic tomorrow night a place called the Purple Crayon, in Hastings.

ZMP 2013

With my book done, I’m starting some new projects in the new year. Among them is a long-awaited update and redesign for my web site. I’m starting by templatizing the entire site. This is something I began a couple years back, when I introduced headers and footers as page includes. Now all the content items on the main pages are also php includes, and template driven. You can see the results on the music, art, multimedia, and movies pages. This turned out to be pretty quick and easy, and should it make it much easier to add new content to the site going forward. Of course this is just the beginning. I have a bunch of style updates in mind, and some new features around content presentation. But the next few updates I have in mind are for content. I’m going to add a page for my new work-in-progress record, whose working title is Buzzy Third. There are four songs done, so there’ll be info, lyrics and audio tracks. The other updated in the offing is to the origami site. It’s been a long while since I’ve updated that, and I have tons of new models, as well as new and better photos for older models. Plus now I’ll be able to present content by year as well as by category. Beyond that – back to the Foldinator!

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

It was twenty years ago today – half a lifetime ago – that I quit my job, broke up my band, sold my car, left my hometown, friends and family behind, and moved to New York City to attend grad school and begin my career in “Mulitmedia” as it was known at the time. The great leap into the unknown. It’s been one heck of a ride, at the vanguard of interactive media, software and entertainment, including some great years spent in Silicon Valley. Sometime when I’m in the mood to reminisce, I’ll tell you all about it, particularly the years before the crash. For now, I just want to give a shout out to the ITP class of ’94 and say wow, how the times have changed. What used to be visionary is now just everyday life. My kids take the existence of iPods for granted, and care more about accessorizing them than anything else. They’ll never understand the work and imagination it took to drag the dream into existence.

I Learn to Work the Saxophone

Good news about work. After having worked last weekend, we got a release candidate of our app done by lunchtime Monday. So now we’re in QA and waiting to see if there are any bugs. Meanwhile the release date has been pushed back to mid-July because Abe our QA guy is expecting a baby any day now. Meanwhile, I’m writing unit tests, which is something we’ve always meant to do but never seem to have time for, but our Corporate Overlords have mandated it, so it’s actually fun and cool, and will have lasting payoff in terms of the quality of our code.

So I got to take a summer Friday this week, and dedicated it to catching up on random tasks. High on the list I have to have work done a couple of my horns, and needed to find a sax repair main. I used to repair horns myself, but I don’t have any of the tools or supplies. So I’ve been asking around, and one of the local music stores recommended Virgil Scott in Yonkers. So I went over there and it turns out he was great. I had him check out my alto, and he fixed it on the spot. The main thing was it needed a new cork on the neck, be he also spotted and fixed some minor leaks. Very friendly guy, and we got to talking. He hadn’t seen a Selmer USA. He thought it was basically identical to a Mark VI, although I pointed out a few differences.

Clearly he knows what he’s doing, and he’d even fixed Michael Brecker’s horn. So its great to find a saxophone repairman. Next week in I’m bringing in my tenor, which is a classic sax but in worse shape. It has some serious leaks in the lower stack.

Origami Site Update

I posted an update to my origami site at http://zingman.com/origami. The main page now features larger thumbnails and an update image for the Fox. I added a few new models from 2011 including the Inchworm and the Dual Cube. I still have a bunch more new models to add, including some new tessellations, and while I’m at it take better pics of the Fox, and add the CP for Dual Cube. In the descriptions of the model I’ve added links indicating where diagrams for that model have been published.

‘Tis The Season

Been doing lots of holiday stuff the last couple weeks. A trip to the museum, two family holiday parties, three kid’s performing arts shows, and four work-related parties, town halls and similar functions. Whew.

I took the kids to the AMNH a couple weeks ago, and we had a great time. Spent a long time with the dinosaurs and the frogs, and in the hall of minerals. The Origami Tree is in the south hall this year, since they’re doing renovations in the lower hall on the Central Park side. My elephants were featured in the “folding the museum” display at the base of the tree, and they saved a number of my models from years past, which are in the tree.

I also folded some models – a dragon and a moose – as ornaments for the tree at the kids’ school.

Yesterday was the big family xmas party for Jeannie’s dad’s side of the family. A good time and great to catch up with all for Long Island cousins. Today was a party for her mom’s side. Had to skip that one to get some things done.

Our kids a in this after school theatre program, in which they do singing and dancing and acting. They had two different shows last week, one for the younger kids and one for the bigger ones, and it’s pretty impressive the level of the performance. Later this week there’s some kind of holiday play. Lizzy is an angel and gets to say some lines.

There’s been a lot of end-of year holiday parties, for my immediate team, for the platform group, and for the whole company. Our corporate parties tend to be rather boozy affairs, but I survived alright. I’ve been there long enough that I have friends in all different divisions, so it was good to catch up. Then there was a town hall in which our corporate overlords are telling us out of one side of their mouth how the company had a great year and made tons of money, and out of the other how internet piracy is destroying our business and killing innocent people and must be stopped. Umm, yeah.

All this has been great fun, but it’s really hard to get stuff done. Looking forward to taking a few days off this week and getting caught up.

Any Jobber Got the Sack

The recent death of Steve Jobs has put me in a surprisingly contemplative mood, thinking about how Apple has affected my life and career since 1982 or ’83 when I first programmed on an Apple II. In particular I’ve been thinking about the fall of 1996, when I first arrived in Silicon Valley, just as Mr. Jobs was engineering his prodigal return to Apple. Here’s an article I read last week, an interview from Playboy magazine back in 1985. Might’ve been the Madonna issue. I feel like I read it back in the day, because some parts ring familiar. It’s amazing how on he was about the future of the industry, and also how much everything has changed.

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

The Adventure Continues

This was the first weekend I’ve been home in a month. So here’s a quick post to bring you up to date. After our big vacation in mid July, we spent last weekend camping with Martin’s and Nick’s. It was a great time, and great weather. Just a bit of rain as we were setting up camp, but then it cleared up. We were lucky; they were predicting a major storm. The whole thing was nice and mellow. Did some hikin, swimming’, barbecuein’, storytellin’, and just hangin’ out. Charlie is bright, well tempered and energetic, and getting big fast. Martin is moving on building his new house, so it’s only a matter of time until asks for his guitars back.

When I’ve been home I’ve been crazy busy at work the last two weeks, staying late and going back to work after the kids were in bed. Friday was our big demo. It was a tree browser for related records in our content management system, with all kinds of complex functionality for auto-expanding the tree and including related records, and managing duplicate records, circular dependencies and other kinds of relationships. I was pair programming with a colleague much of that time, and it was an interesting experience trying to build a huge, complex feature set under time pressure. We didn’t always see eye to eye on the approach, but in the end what we came up with was probably better than what either of us would have done on our own, and certainly faster. Olga is clever at using hash tables to speed things up, and good at low level implementation. On the other hand, her communication skills aren’t great, and I had a better understanding of the feature requirements. So I was focused on the architecture, the classes and methods, and how to keep it forward-maintainable, which often gets sacrificed in these situations. A well-written application should read like a good story. I ended up rewriting a substantial portion of here work to put all the business logic in one place so it could be easily read and (if necessary) modified down the line. Anyhow, we made our deadline and the application looked great and performed fast, so it was a big success and things will hopefully get back to normal.

Next up: I need a new lawmower.