We’re back home again and busy with work and other things. Seems like everything is happening all at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First it’s finally ski season. A week ago we went skiing again up at Catamount. They have night skiing, which is perfect for us. It starts at 3pm so you don’t have to get up super early to get there, instead we can get all our chores done Saturday morning and then go. When we arrive alot of the day skiers are leaving, so it’s easy to get a good parking spot and the lifts and slope get less and less crowded the longer you stay. You have a few hours of daylight to ski in – now the days are getting longer faster – then you can go in and take a break with a cup of cocoa and come out again for the night session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A week ago the conditions were warm and icy, but we figured we might not get another shot so we went for it. After a while found that Mountain View was a pretty good trail and we stayed on that. We quit after ten runs and met our fried Seth for dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This last weekend it started to snow Saturday morning, just a dusting, but it made us feel hopeful, so we figured we’d go up again and try our luck. At first it was pretty icy, but snow started falling until there was fresh powder everywhere. There was a magical moment where suddenly everything was beautiful and the skis felt great and you could really get a good groove going and the mountain was comin’ ’round. So we stayed out there almost until they closed, a total of eighteen runs. Walter’s Way was the favorite run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was three times skiing this season, tying our record last year. We’re still hoping to do an overnight trip a bit further north in two weeks, with bigger mountains and more snow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In other news, I’ve been working out some new origami ideas since I’ve gotten back from my trip. I’ve never really explored the icosahedron geometry, even though I mentioned it in my talk. It’s much easier than the dodecahedron; you can use a triangle grid in a hexagon sheet. I have two variations I’m working on. One is a dimpled icosahedron. It looks kinda like a soccer ball with a pattern of hexagons and pentagons, but the pentagons are dented in. The other is a stellated icosahedron, where each triangular face of the base shape is replaced with a pyramid. I did a study of this pattern embedded on a dome back in Bogota, and the design approach causes a set of really cool looking sunken star shapes to emerged between the facets. Now I’m expanding the pattern to a full sheet so I can close the bottom and the full solid shape. I have the crease patterns all worked out. Now it’s just a matter of practicing and perfecting the lock, and then finding some suitable sheets of paper for the final models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next, the Global Jukebox project has sprung back to life. Anna made a deal to license a bunch of Alan Lomax’s recordings, and now she has a budget again, which injects lots of new energy. However, I now have a full time day job again, so I can only commit so much time. I brought Martin in as a subcontractor\/partner so we can share the workload. So far it’s going great. It’s fun having a collaborator, and new ideas and all. For onboarding I had him go thru the test script and he spotted alot of minor issues in neglected corners. We upgraded all our processes including document sharing, getting full-stack local dev environments spun up, and using branches and pull requests in git. Now we’re all ramped up and the real meat of the work begins. We have a full year’s roadmap ahead, so more on this as we publish new releases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lastly, I’ve gotten back to the home studio recording project the last few weeks.\u00a0\u00a0I’m tracking the vocals for two songs, In the Purple Circus and A Plague of Frogs.\u00a0\u00a0Both have rather challenging parts that use a large range, with big interval jumps, and have some tricky phrasing too, and need to be delivered with some gusto and drama.\u00a0\u00a0I didn’t really think about how it would be to sing them when I wrote the lyrics and melodies.\u00a0\u00a0So I have to work them up.\u00a0\u00a0Also, right now I’m getting over a cold so my voice is not at its strongest. The high notes are a bit thin and scratchy and low notes note always in tune..\u00a0\u00a0Ah well, it’s good to rehearse.\u00a0\u00a0Each session I get a little surer and more expressive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And … it’s snowing here tonight, and it looks like will be the first real snowfall of the season down here. That means mo’ better snow up away from the coast. If there’s no rain the next few days we’ll probably go back to Catamount again this weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’re back home again and busy with work and other things. Seems like everything is happening all at once. First it’s finally ski season. A week ago we went skiing again up at Catamount. They have night skiing, which is perfect for us. It starts at 3pm so you don’t have to get up super early to get there, … Continue reading “First There is a Mountain”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,14,15,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-music","category-origami","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509","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=5509"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5848,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5509\/revisions\/5848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}