Ground Control to Major Tom

Here’s another new model, and origami Astronaut. It’s based on a half-remembered box-pleated frog someone showed me once. The base, human or frog, has the limbs in the right place and the box-pleating technique results in limbs that don’t taper, as with a traditional base. From there it was mainly a matter of sculpting. One nice detail is the use of a spread-squash to form the visor. It’s funny, in my focus on simpler models I’ve been going back to alot of old and traditional forms and moves, looking for new ways to use them and finding they can be really expressive. It’s a bit like in my jazz group I’ve been getting away from Coltranesque sheets of sound, and more into a blues-oriented hard bop approach, a la Hank Mobley.

I tried to make an origami Hang Glider too, but had some trouble with the human figure part. Now with the astronaut I have an approach I can use; I just have to have a square suspended from the glider and I can take it from there.

My Back Pages

Here’s a couple more new origami to round out the back half of my book. They’re my Space Shuttle and Flying Wing. The Shuttle came out very nicely, with the color change on the nose and the 3-D shape and proportions. The Flying Wing, like the Rocket Plane was inspired by some of the experimental aircraft I saw out in Ohio this summer. That brings me up to 11 completed models with about five more to go, and I have over that number as works-in-progress.

Back in the Saddle Again

For the last few weeks Left Hook has been rehearsing with Gus on electronic drums while his arm heals. And while individually the drum sounds sound, well, electronic, when he’s playing and the band is goovin’ it sounds just fine. This last week Gus went back to playing a real kit, and man it just sounds so much better. All the time we spent during the hiatus working on parts and dynamics seems to have really paid off.

Meanwhile I’ve been trying to book us more gigs. I’ve visited a half dozen or so local bars and dropped off a CD and got the name of the guy who books bands. Unfortunately these guys tend to be hard to get a hold of, so I’m running down the list calling ‘em back every few days. So far no luck, I figure sooner or later one has to pan out.

Also been getting back to the studio in recent weeks. I have two current work-in-progress originals, Soul on Fire and To Be a Rock. I spent the last couple sessions cleaning up the rhythm section and editing up the vocals to make a complete basic track. Fro SoF I was happy to hear the vocal performance I laid down back in the spring was really killer. For TBaR not so much, so I laid down a new lead vocal over the weekend. This song has some vocal harmonies, layers and counterpoint, with a big build toward the end. I don’t know if I have everything I need for that, cuz toward the end I just sketched in the parts, but I might.

One More Time

And so the endless summer slacking comes to a close. We ended with a nice trip to the Maryland beaches. Nature hikes, water parks, swimming in the ocean, a couple fancy dinners, very nice. Jeannie and I are discovering we all have more fun if we let the kids go off on their own. The traffic was terrible both ways, but we had some good tunes. Jeannie bought some old CDs by the Canadian power trio Triumph, which I hadn’t heard in years, but still stand up quite well.

The kids are finally back to school tomorrow. Google wants to set up another phone meeting, presumably to either tell my goodbye or bring me in for round three. If it goes well I’d like to get back into doing R&D. My hope dark-horse hope is to become their in-house expert on computational origami. Trying to figure out how to pitch that they need one of those.

Endless Space

On same day as the Google interview I had a meeting with my publisher about the new origami book. Long story short, the new concept is a go. A kit book aimed at low to intermediate folders rather than intermediate to advanced. We’re also looking at adding custom paper for the models. I figure this is cool as long as the models work on their own and the paper is just an enhancement, as with John Montroll’s new DC Comics superheroes book.

So I’ve been continuing to make new designs. I’ve perfected two more in the last two days. One I’m calling the Space Pod. It’s based on the frog base and is only twelve steps or so. The other is the Space Probe. It’s a simplification of my Radio Satellite, down from 60 or more steps to maybe 20 or 25. It’s funny cuz it follows the same general pattern, with solar panels and a radar dish and a boom antenna, but with an 8×8 grid instead of 16×16 so the proportions are different, and instead of developing the radar dish from the center, which requires pulling out alot of layers, I use a corner, which in the old version I didn’t know what to do with anyway. This brings me up to ten models, with six more to go from a list of 10 or so ideas I have right now. Hopefully another tomorrow!

Endless Summer Slacking

I just got back from a fun and relaxing camping trip. Perfect weather, lots of jamming on guitars, canoeing, swimming in the lake, cooking of fire, just great. Back home again now, doing all kinds of stuff. Since Labor Day is late this year it feels like we get an extra week of summer. Still one more week until the kids go back to school.

Some happy news! Gus back playing the drums again and the Left Hook is back in full swing. We’ve had a couple rehearsals at my house now, with him on his electronic kit. Good to have the group jamming once more. Going back to the studio and real drums next week. In our hiatus the rest of band spent our time working on arrangements and vocal harmonies, so the level of playing is increasing. We also added five or six new songs to the set. We’re actively working on bookings gigs now. We have a bunch of irons in the fire, and one confirmed date – our triumphant return to the Fisherman’s Net in October. More on that as the time grows near.

I’ve integrated the bench press into my workout. This enabled me to drop some other exercises so the total length of the workout remains the same. I’ve been going up in weight rather conservatively, but I’m up to 200 pounds now, in two sets of eight reps each. I can feel it more in my elbows and my ribs than anywhere else. I’m also up to 8 pullups.

Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago I got a call from Google, trying to recruit me as a software engineer. I passed level one with the recruiter, and it was onto level two, a tech interview over the phone. They sent me a packet with stuff to prepare. Man that company has alot of attitude, alot of hubris, but not very, um, mature. Seem to take it for granted you’ll be absolutely gobsmacked knocked out that they want to talk to you. Selling points include “we have an ice cream truck on the 8th floor of our office!” Then on the topic of how to dress they say “dress however you feel comfortable, but remember hygiene is important.”

They had some advice on what you’d need to know, so I spent a week studying up on all kinds of stuff I haven’t really used much since college: directed and undirected graphs, binary search trees, heaps and stacks and hashes, matrix math, sorting algorithms, big-O notation, and a bunch of more general stuff on Java language and systems architecture. Google must be hiring alot right now because twice that week I came across someone’s post for a Google tech interview cheat sheet. I made my own notes, but they’re so dense it wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me. In the process I came across a good approach for representing the state of a piece of folded paper if ever get back to working on Foldinator.

The day before the camping trip the interview came, and they didn’t ask me about any of that stuff. Instead the topic was serialization/deserialization. The format is they ask you to write a program off the top of your head, and as you go they put in more requirements. I did well, solved the problem and had a good discussion and all. But was I knock-your-socks-off awesome enough for Google? I guess we’ll see; they’re supposed to let me know in a week or so if I advance to round three. It sounds like that’s more of the same, but on site and with five back-to-back sessions in a row.

Web Site Evolution

Like the legendary cobbler with worn out shoes, it seems like I’m never able to find the time to work on my own web site. Indeed zingman.com is now twenty years old, and some pages go back to the beginning. Over time I’ve added various bits of php, css, sql, javascript, and wordpress, but I’ve resisted doing a full-on rebuild in an all-new framework and technology stack for several reasons, including that it’s a large time investment, the technologies keep changing, and it’s not really necessary anyway, at least right now. I am thinking of making everything responsive for mobile devices, but there’s alot of pages in there. So I upgrade things on an as-needed basis, always making things more automated, and growing closer to the vision step-by-step. Meanwhile everything runs extremely light and fast.

Over the spring I managed to complete a fairly major upgrade cycle for styles and page layouts, with everything finally in a stack of hand-built php templates and modules. In the last couple weeks I’ve started another round of work. This one is to put all the image links into popups. Better user experience, less clicking back’n’forth. I used lightbox for this; it’s one of the simplest javascript plugins out there for this purpose, and so far seems to work just fine. Have to do a little tweaking of the styles, but that’s about it. So feel free to click around to different pages and check it out.

Next step is go thru the origami pages and add support for multiple images for each module. This will involve refactoring some of my templates to handle photosets of different lengths, so I want to give it a bit of thought before I plow on ahead. Check back here in a week or so.

Simpler Space

You’re probably wondering, hey John wazzup with your origami? Have you finished the Metallic Lokta Flowerball yet? Well I’ll tell ya. It’s about three quarters done and sitting on my table. I got distracted by a conversation with my publisher and I’m back to folding spaceships and airplanes again. He’s encouraging me to shift the focus to a simple-to-intermediate book, with the intention of having a smash hit that sells alot of copies. I like the sound of selling lots of books, but on the downside I’d have to let go of the more complex ones, some of which are my favorites, and maybe put them in another book down the line or find some other outlet to publish them. On the plus side those models are a real pain to diagram anyway.

In any event I’d need to come up with some simpler models, ideally under 30 steps. First I looked at my UFO, which is about 50 steps and admittedly fairly difficult to fold. I taught it to a fan one late-night folding session at Centerfold and it took about an hour. I came up with a new Flying Saucer that uses traditional 22.5 degree geometry instead of 15 degrees, and has a much simpler way to develop the center dome. It’s takes 10 or 15 minutes to fold and is probably about 20 or 25 steps. Score one!

Then I looked at my Rocket Ship, which is about 55 or 60 steps, including lots of prefolding. I came up with a kick-ass substitute rocket, an evolution of my Retro Rocket, which about 18 steps. I’m calling it Rocket Ship III.

I was on a roll, so just came up with another model I’m calling Rocket Plane. It’s based loosely on a plane I saw at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the experimental hangar. Three for three here. Woo-hoo!

Next I took a look at my Biplane. This is one of faves at the moment, having taught it at two conventions, but at 50 steps it’s probably too complex. In any event it’s hard to make it look good unless you use foil paper or wetfold it. So I came up with a model I’m calling the Monoplane. It’s got alot of the same look and feel, but without the bottom wing, and without the accompanying complexity. I can probably take this idea and make two or three cool planes out of it, maybe even a helicoptor.

Lastly I took a look at my Zeppelin. This is one of my hardest models, and would probably be at the end of the book, close to 100 steps. I did come up with a vastly simplified design that has it own cool look. It’s based on 8ths rather 12ths for the geometry, and has 18 rather than 32 facets in the main part, and has far less prefolding. As an added bonus there’s enough paper at bottom to give the gondola some thrusters, although I haven’t decided if this is the way I want to go. Also I still am working out how to close up the tail nicely; don’t wanna hafta make ‘em wetfold to make the model work. Can it fit in 30 steps? I dunno, but Imma try.

Still a couple others to consider, notably my Radio Satellite. I’ll bet I can make some kind of Space Probe that looks just as cool but not so complex. All in all it’s a really good exercise.