Let\u2019s see … lots of bits and pieces these days.<\/p>\n
I spent the weekend hanging out with Seth and Mark at Seth\u2019s cabin in the Berkshires. Good to get away from the wife and kids for a spell and eat lots of barbecue. We went on a nice hike to a waterfall. You should know that Mark is an amazing musician and leads the band Cracklin\u2019 Foxy out of Saranac Lake, NY. I learned the only music Mark hates more than Happy is anything from the soundtrack to Frozen. Also Mark has grown a mountain man beard. I think it was 20 years ago this weekend Seth invited my out on his dad\u2019s sailboat and we cruised up an down the Hudson.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m over the hump on my Scala class. It\u2019s actually making sense now. I submitted the homework on Huffman encoding and got a perfect score. I\u2019ll admit I googled the problem, but hey, that\u2019s what you do in real life when faced with a programming challenge. Rather than just copy what I found, I took several different solutions and read them and compared them until I understood what they were saying, and then created my own solution that best expressed it to my sensibilities. This week I finished the last lecture, and there\u2019s two more homeworks to go, but the last one is another double, pushing up against OUSA.<\/p>\n
Jeannie is back at work, starting a new job after switching jobs followed by a spectacular flameout a couple months ago. Woo-hoo. Meanwhile the kids are counting the days until the end of school.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been rockin\u2019 my own work of lately. Ever since Olga got sacked it\u2019s been so much easier to concentrate. Today at work I wrote over 200 lines of code! Also I came across a situation (marshalling data parsed out of an xml response) where the Scala approach is better than the way I\u2019ve been doing it in Java all these years. Would have been far less code.<\/p>\n
My train reading these days has been the Conan the Barbarian series by Robert Howard. It turns out these were originally published in Weird Stories magazine in the 1930\u2019s alongside the first C\u2019htuulhu stories, and Howard and H. P. Lovecraft were friends similar to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Conan is perfect train reading. I had to give up Game of Thrones because it got to be so rambling and pointless. The Conan stories OTOH are nice and short, with tight plots, heavy on action and with a supernatural twist. I can usually read a whole novella between my morning and evening commute.<\/p>\n
The Relix are officially defunct. Our drummer Gus finally quit last week, frustrated with auditioning new singers. He\u2019s now trying to start a new group with Mike and me from the Relix and some guys from his other band, which also crashed and burned. We\u2019re getting together later this week. I learned Space Truckin\u2019 tonight in honor of the occasion.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile I\u2019ve written and begun recording two new tunes. One is called Your Dancing Shoes, and it\u2019s a catchy blue-eyed-soul number with a big horn break in the mode of Domino or Sir Duke. I\u2019ve asked Lee, the erstwhile Relix guitarist \u2013 the jazzy one – to lay down a guitar track for me, and he enthusiastically agreed. Now I just have to get the bass part clean enough that I\u2019m satisfied with a take. I\u2019m going for no punch-ins on this one because the there\u2019s not very many gaps in the part, and it\u2019ll just groove better.<\/p>\n
The other song is called To Be a Rock, and I plan on asking Frank, the other \u2013 straight ahead rock \u2013 Relix guitarist to sit on that one, cuz it matches his style. In fact I wrote these two songs with these guys in mind. I hope he agrees because even though I could probably play the part myself, I want to capture his sound, which I have no idea of how to reproduce. This song still needs some development; I feel like it\u2019s missing a part toward the end.<\/p>\n
Since I\u2019ve become a regular member of my Jazz combo I feel like I should learn the tunes. I have an older version of the Real Book (1980\u2019s) than everyone else, and it\u2019s just chock full of errors. I also want to get my chops of for slaloming changes of the bebop and bossa nova numbers. I finally had a chance to practice sax this week. I\u2019d been noticing for some time that it\u2019s been getting harder to pop out those low notes. I went over the horn with a leak light but the low notes are all tight. They ought to be; I just had the horn repadded two years ago. I finally discovered the problem is the octave key. So tomorrow I\u2019m gonna call up Virgil Scott and see when I can get the horn in. For now I\u2019ve fixed it with electrical tape. I noticed it\u2019s the third spot on my horn fixed in such a way.<\/p>\n
Live update \u2013 four firetrucks pulled up to my neighbor\u2019s house a little while ago. They loitered four about an hour and just took off.<\/p>\n
The last topic for tonight is origami. I finished my Dimpled Dodecahedron, wetfolded it and all, and it came out very nicely. Only one step away from the Stellated Dodec, v2. The closing is working out different than the previous model since I can\u2019t remember how I did it before. I still have two weeks before the convention and hopefully I\u2019ll be able to finishe a few more ideas. The big problem now is that my folding style has grown so complex it\u2019s very difficult to fold these models even for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let\u2019s see … lots of bits and pieces these days. I spent the weekend hanging out with Seth and Mark at Seth\u2019s cabin in the Berkshires. Good to get away from the wife and kids for a spell and eat lots of barbecue. We went on a nice hike to a waterfall. You should know … Continue reading “Random Reflections”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,15,16,18,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-origami","category-people","category-software","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}