Over at my other project as lead software developer on The Global Jukebox, I’m happy to announce our article in the peer reviewed journal Plos One has been published:
The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture
Anna Wood, Patrick Savage, et. al.
Abstract Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. …
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.
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.
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.
It feels like just a few short weeks ago that spring arrived, and now it feels like full-on summertime. It was hot over the weekend, up in the 90’s, and we put in our air conditioners.
We just got back from a road trip to pick Michelle up from college, and Jeannie and I took a mini-vacation along the way. On the way up to Buffalo, we stopped in Ithaca. The motivation was to see Joe Jackson, playing with his band at a theater there in town. The show was great. Joe’s songs are always great and the band was really hot. Joe did a solo spot of four or five songs with him just singing and playing piano. The theater was this really cool old art-deco venue, very ornate, good sound.
The next day we spent pretty much the whole day hiking around lake Cayuga and some waterfalls. Very relaxing, beautiful scenery and a beautiful day for it. Went out to dinner that night at a Mexican place across the street from the place we went the night before. Ithaca is a cute little college town with a downtown district maybe four five blocks long. Our hotel was on the outskirts of town, with a trial to a waterfall right out the door.
Next day we spent to morning at the Corning Museum of Glass. We must have driven past it a hundred times over the years, but the kids were never interested. When I told them we were going to check it out, at first they thought I was joking. In any event, it’s vary cool, with a whole big gallery space, in which the pieces range from pretty cool to totally amazing. Another section is all about glass technology, including things like modern forming and shaping techniques, and applications such as telescope mirrors, space shuttle windows, car windshields and computer touchscreens. A third section is about the history of glass, with artifacts from all over the world, going back to the time of ancient Egypt. There was also an interactive area where you could watch live demos of blowing glass, other sculptural techniques, and breaking glass too. There was even a thing where you could blow your own glass bowl or ornament, but we found out about that too late. Now we’ll have to come back another time.
We arrived in Buffalo in the afternoon and went to visit Lizzy. Unfortunately, on the way there she texted us that she’d just tested positive for covid. I had brought up her bicycle because she wanted to ride it this summer. So we handed it off in her driveway, keeping a safe distance. Her hanging out with us was right out, so that was that. Next day she said she’s feeling better, so that’s good news.
Then we went up to the UB campus to pack a carload of Michelle’s stuff to store at my parent’s house. Next morning we came back to get the rest of her things, then back to my parents for a barbecue. We hit the road home later that afternoon. Now we’re back to three in the house again.
In other news, my blog here has been having repeated outages, and the tech support has been just useless and miserable, so I’m in the process of dropping my web host and moving to a new service provider. You can preview it at:
Right now it’s just a few test posts, and I’m working on customizing the visual theme. Hopefully that won’t take too long, and then I can go ahead and do the migration. So watch this space.
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 thing. 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.
Spring is finally here, woo-hoo! The weather was really nice last Friday and Saturday, and I began the spring cycle of yardwork by raking off all the leaves and sticks and debris from the lawn and flowerbeds and under the hedges and on the edge of the patio. Things look much nicer now, and it good to be spending time outside doing sutf again.
I attended a really fascinating meeting last week for the Global Jukebox. Anna wants to create a Global Jukebox mobile app based around some new Journeys. Journeys are guided multimedia experiences in the Jukebox to tell a story, and feature music, text and graphics, sometimes video, plus a responsive map showing the origins of the songs in journey, linked up into a path. She assembled a team of world-class musicologists and cultural scholars to develop the content, and this was the kick-off. My role on the project is as software engineer, so I mainly sat back and listened. The theme for new journeys is the roots of American pop music, tracing its origins back to various kinds of folk music being sung at the beginning of the era of recorded music, and further back to various diaspora from Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and other places, and how the various cultural threads and musical forms came together and influenced each other over time. It was a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion, and I can hardly wait to see what emerges from it.
Meanwhile in my other consulting gig, the Digital Lab at Consumer Reports is picking up momentum. I’ve become immersed in discussions around internet privacy and consumer’s digital rights, both from and issues and policy point of view, and also at technical level. I’m taking over a demo/prototype app, built by a third party vendor, to help people manage their internet privacy. I’ve gotten over the hump WRT setting up tools and all, and have already fixed a few bugs and deployed the front end app to production. Today we had an onsite meeting to discuss strategy as the project, and larger R&D group, move into a new phase. Consumer Reports is a unique place with their own corporate culture. It’s funny how the place is so close to my house, even though the team is all remote. The campus in Yonkers is pretty cool, with lots of testing facilities for household appliances, electronics, and all sorts of other consumer goods one might buy. They have an amazing audio listening room and a completely silent, soundproof room next door. I must say it was weird being back in an office after all this time. There was a handful of people there, some for the first time like me, and others who hadn’t seen their colleagues in a long time.
I’ve been listening to alot of music lately. I did a deep dive into Frank Zappa, after seeing a documentary about him. Zappa has a ton of albums, many of which I’ve never listened to. Live in New York, from 1978, features the Brecker Brother and David Sanborn as the horn section. Mostly I was surprised in particular about the depth and extent of his orchestral works, which existed as a parallel thread to his rock stuff for his entire career. His last album, The Yellow Shark, a recording of his final concert, is a live orchestral performance of his work, and most excellent, fun and interesting. Fun fact: Jazz from Hell was the only instrumental to receive a parental advisory sticker for inappropriate lyrical content from Tipper Gore’s Parents Against Music group of the 1980’s.
The next deep dive was into Joe Jackson. I’ve been assembling and maintaining a songbook of lead sheets to practice on piano, and I got up the letter J in my practice rotation. I was trying to get the bass line together for Stepping Out, which is not so easy when also singing and playing the right hand. I found a demo version on Spotify, on the deluxe edition of Night and Day, and the bass line is alot clearer and more prominent than the actual record. Way cool. Then I listened to bunch of his early records, which I don’t know too well. His start off very guitar-driven and new wave, sort of halfway between Elvis Costello and The Police.
I’ve been listening to alot of Joe Henderson, Horace Silver and Pharaoh Sanders, as we’ve been exploring new material for the jazz group. We’re also doing African Skies by Michael Brecker, and I found several versions of that. The original by the Brecker Brothers and the classic one from Michael’s solo record Tales from the Hudson. There are also a couple cover versions, which leads me to some new bands I want to check out.
Been waiting for spring to begin, but still hoping to get one more ski trip in. I really want to start spending time outside, biking and skating and working on the yard. I’ve been feeling good so I’m going to go up in weight on my workout in the next few weeks. I’ve also added pull-ups to my routine.
It looks like the pandemic my finally be ending, so I’ve started looking to get out of the house and go see some jazz and other music concerts. Lots of interesting acts coming around the next few months. I also want to see about getting some gigs for my band. I haven’t played a gig since February 28, 2020 (wow, two years ago to the day). I really don’t know where to start. That group broke up and my new group has a different sound, although you can still call it jazz. I suppose I can start by calling up all the places we used to play.
We’re trying to get together a demo to play for the clubs, so we’ve been taping our rehearsals. We’re sounding really good overall, but you always compare everything you do to the best music you’ve ever heard, and there’s room for improvement to really live up to our potential. We need to focus on a handful songs for a few weeks to get them really tight, to have a really killer demo.
I’ve started the process of transitioning my website to a new host. I ran into issues with my current host not being able to host a Unity app, and their customer service was so terrible I decided I want to get rid of them. However, I’m doing it one step at a time, since I want to do some long overdue upgrades to my site’s architecture, deployment and other things. For one thing I want to deploy via git instead of ftp. So for now, I have a placeholder home page at: https://zingmanstudios.com
It’s been a little while since I last posted. Took some time off for the Christmas holidays. Both kids came home the week before Christmas for a whole week, which very nice. Lots of baking and gaming and listening to music and watching movies, and of course visiting with family. Lizzy’s boyfriend Tim came down too and spent a couple days with us. Mary’s came over on Christmas day and we had a great big feast. On boxing day we went up to Buffalo and visited with my parents and Martin for a few days. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, and Martin’s kids are getting big fast. Charlie is thirteen now. Martin and I stayed up late talking, alot about music and software and things, but there’s never enough time to get into everything there is to say. We saw our friends Steve and Scott up there. Haven’t seen Steve in some time, so it was good to catch up. Both have been going thru difficult times. We did not see my friend John due to the the threat of heavy weather, nor Larry and Jackie due to the threat of covid. Nor did we see any of the extended family from Canada. Ah well, we’ll be back in a month, hopefully with our skis.
Over the break I read C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of his planet trilogy, regarded as one of the groundbreaking classics of science fiction. (Earlier in the pandemic I tried to read Jack Vance’s Dying Earth saga, but I had to put it down because, you know, dying Earth and all that.) The planet trilogy is fascinating and very well written, but not what I expected. The first book is about a journey to Mars, in which the protagonist meets some wise aliens, including ones made of energy. The second takes place on Venus, and goes deeper into similar themes. The third book takes a sharp left turn and is set on Earth, in postwar England, and involves sinister research institutes, strange conspiracies, Arthurian legends, the Numinor, reanimated talking heads, and a pet bear, among other things. A surprisingly well executed combination of science, mysticism, philosophy, mythology, action and adventure and even terror. Still mulling it over.
Before the kids came home I wound down and wrapped up the year’s work. The last half of November into the first half of December was super busy. There was a big push of new work for the Global Jukebox, to support a talk Anna gave at a conference. Improved playlist and lots of other stuff.
I’ve also been looking for other consulting and software gigs, with an eye toward getting into web 3D, three.js, and Unity, with the long term goal of developing my own independent games. I’ve been working on my own but there’s alot to learn, so I’d like someone to pay me to get deeper into it while leveraging my existing skill set.
A while back I applied to a place that makes casual card and board games, looking to get into the online gaming space via Steam and Jackbox. It seemed like a perfect gig for me. However, between the time I made first contact and the time they set up the main interview, the job morphed from full stack engineer to Unity dev. The company wanted me to do an all-day Unity coding challenge. Normally I’d tell them to get lost, but this looked like a good opportunity to get up the learning curve faster than I otherwise would. In the end they didn’t want me for the Unity role, but the full stack role is still in the offing.
Meanwhile I’ve been working on my own little game, called Rock-Tac-Toe, so I plan to finish that up, both as a Unity application and as a web/mobile app, so I can compare the pros and cons of each approach.
Another area I’ve been trying to get deeper into is music software. Out of the blue I got a call from these guys from Switzerland. They’re academic researchers in computational musicology, and fans of the Global Jukebox. They have a database of 20,000 classical music compositions as midi files, and some kind of software tool to do statistical analysis on the corpus, and they’re looking to build a web application to publicly showcase their work. They seemed really eager to work together. I submitted a scope of work proposal, but unfortunately they were not clear about their budget, so it came in high. I submitted another, scaled back proposal, and am waiting to hear back.
In music, I finished my fourth Buzzy Tonic studio album. Unlike previous records, this one is all jazz instrumentals. I titled the record Bluezebub [Pandimensional Jazz Tesseract], after the song Bluezebub, the Devil You Don’t Know. It should be on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon any day now. I even got a small batch of CD’s printed up.
Now it’s on to the new rock record. More on that soon. For the moment I’ll remind you that I had three songs in the can before I switched my focus to the Jazz Tesseract, and several more in various stages of writing and recording. I started by dusting off the completed songs, and decided to add some new overdubs to two of them.
One of my goals for 2021 was to increase the amount of weight I lift when I work out. For bench press I went up 15 lbs., and am back up above 200 lbs. for the first time since six years ago, when I suffered a rather severe injury to my left shoulder and pec. For curls and most everything else that uses dumbbells I went up a similar amount, from 100 lbs. to 115, and from 50 lbs. to 90 for the light weight exercises. For 2022 I aim to add another ten pounds to every set.
The global pandemic looks to be entering its third year, with still no end in sight. We keep making and cancelling plans. We were supposed to go out to California last fall, then were thinking of going to Arizona this winter break. Now we’re thinking of going on a ski trip instead, somewhere more local were we can drive instead of fly, and spend most of our time outdoors.
Things have been mellow lately. The kids are out of the house, and my main contract gig ended a little while back, so there’s less to do than usual while I line up a new gig. Last year at this time I was building a patio, but right now there’s no need for any big home improvement projects. We’re kinda in the middle of defragging the house, but that’s slow going. We’ve been thinking, mostly idly, about getting some new furniture. The world is still under a pandemic, so it’s not a great time for any epic travel adventures. We do have a few mini road trips coming up, but I’m hesitant to do anything that involves air travel nowadays.
I’ve bee updating my web site, including my online software projects portfolio (https://zingman.com/portfolio/). So far alot of it has been invisible, behind-the-scenes stuff, but there’s some new content too. More stuff is in the offing, so stay tuned for future updates.
Been working on the Global Jukebox (https://theglobaljukebox.org) too, and in fact we just did a push to live a couple weeks ago. There’s also another site for The Association for Cultural Equity called The Alan Lomax Digital Archive (https://archive.culturalequity.org/). The site is pretty much what the name implies with lots field recordings, films, radio shows, etc. plus a section of curated exhibits. The site is built in Drupal, and most of the work involves styling and skinning, plus a few UI widgets. The workflow is pretty convoluted, since the site is not under source control and there’s no dev instance nor any way to deploy a local version. A large part of the early phase of the project was setting up a pipeline were I could do chunks of work locally, rapidly deploy and test, and roll back if things didn’t look or behave as expected. Now things are pretty much humming along, but there’s gotchas at every turn.
Although the heat of summer is gone and suntanning season is over, the weather has remained quite mild and pleasant into mid-October. We’ve yet to turn on the heat or even take out the air conditioners, but the days are really getting shorter faster these days. I’ve been going for walks in the nearby field alot, and Jeannie and I even got in a good hike last weekend, up Mount Hook in the Palisades. I’ve also been biking about twice a week on average, once on the streets and once in the Nature Study Woods. I still want to get back on my rollerblades a third time before the end of the season. I went up in weights recently in me workout, and added back in tricep curls. I’m still 5 lbs. short of my goal for the year, and hope to go up one more time, but it gets harder when the weather turns cold, so I better do it soon.
In music, I’ve been working on a new song Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). This is the last song on my upcoming Computer Jazz record I’ve been working on since the start of the pandemic. It’s a sort of 60’s spy-jazz meets King Crimson vibe, in 5/4 time with a sort fugue-like riff structure for the first half, a crazy uptempo jam in the middle, and then an elaboration and recapitulation to end it all off. I have the whole arrangement worked out, and have tracked the drums, fender bass, synth bass, and fender rhodes piano, and have sketched midi tracks for the horns and lead synth. Yesterday I broke out my bari sax to attempt to lay down the part, only to realize that I better write it out first and practice it a few times, so that’s next.
I’ve been a bit of a Beatles phase lately, as I tend to do every few years. This time I created and printed out lead sheets for a whole bunch of their songs , as part of my ongoing songbook project. Most of the stuff from the first half of their career is to play on guitar. Turns out they’re mostly pretty easy and really fun to play, and full of little twists and tricks and tight arrangements. If only I knew someone who like to sing harmony. Their later songs are mainly to work up piano, with a focus on maximum psychedelia such as Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus, plus some not-quite-rock Paul songs.
The jazz group is humming along, although I haven’t had any luck getting gigs, and admittedly I haven’t been trying very hard. Also keeping an eye out for the opportunity to form a new rock group, although there’s not much movement there either.
