Another season of cold and darkness arrives.\u00a0 Days growing shorter, nights growing colder.\u00a0 Hallowe’en has come and gone, but at least I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving and the holidays.\u00a0 Been trying to make the best of playing outside while there’s time.\u00a0 Sunday was sunny and at least warm-ish, and we got up early since they changed the clocks.\u00a0 I went for a 26 mile bike ride, the longest of the season so far, in two hours even.\u00a0 Still hoping to get a 30 mile ride in this fall.\u00a0 But I think ought to bring something to eat.\u00a0 By the end of the ride I was starting to slow down but noticed I was also getting pretty hungry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last weekend Jeannie and I went for a quick mini-vacation getaway up to the Catskill mountains. We rented a ski lodge cabin condo type place with a fireplace and a hot tub. On Monday we went for a big hike up Mt. Windham. 1700 feet vertical and eight-mile round trip, in about five and a half hours. Peaceful woody trail with fall colors on the trees. Nice view at the top of the Mohawk River valley. Ended up watching PBS travel channel at the end of the night. Lots of shows on the Alps and Italy. Now we want to go back. Also visited Kathleen and the kids, hung out and played a bunch of games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Last Saturday, the night before we left, Spacecats played another gig at the Green Growler. This was our best on yet. The band continues to get tighter and more spontaneous. Good crowd too, everyone enjoyed it. We played sixteen originals and eight covers or standards. Highlights include two new songs from Rick, Underutilized and Where Has the Sun Gone?, as well as Son of the Sun continues to rise to new epic heights. Some of the new covers include Lithium, which has a really interesting quirky chord progression, and our closer Giant Steps played as a samba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now we’re bringing a bunch more new tunes. We’re planning to do a record this winter, and I have three or four partially written songs I’m trying to finish. I brought in the first of these last week. It’s working title is Cream of Confusion, which might or might not be better than it’s original title Downward Thing over Pedal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost a year ago, last Thanksgiving, I needed to clear the dining room table of work-in-progress origami because we needed to use the dining room to have dinner. I brought a bunch of stuff downstairs to my studio, but it turned out I had run out of space to put things away. This lead to a huge project of turning out my closer and desk drawers and all the other storage space and throwing away alot of old useless things and organizing what was left. I ended up getting a set of slide-out shelves to put into my Ikea storage closet so I could inventory and organize all my origami paper. Well I finally got the project done, clearing the way for upgrading my recoding studio and plugging in the DAC for my drum mics so I can finally start recording with them. Woo-hoo!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Been making lots of great progress on the Spellbound songs too, but that’s a whole ‘nuther post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile at work I completed my first major project since joining the experimental engineering group in the springtime. I integrate cars brands knowledge base into AskCR, our AI chatbot for product recommendations and all things Consumer Reports. Along the way I learned the whole technology stack, which, despite so many huge and obvious problems with the whole LLM AI thing, is pretty fascinating. Up next I have several more integrations teed up including car videos and advocacy stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And as for the Global Jukebox, the style refresh is nearing completion and looking really sharp. Along the way I cleaned up and refactored alot of the css and UI code, clarifying and simplifying things. This next release is going to be a big one, and we still have alot to do with new data sets and visualizations. Nick has been working to integrate new taxonomies for languages and people in addition to the current geography ones. He’s out having hip surgery right now, but hopefully he’ll be back in action soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another season of cold and darkness arrives.\u00a0 Days growing shorter, nights growing colder.\u00a0 Hallowe’en has come and gone, but at least I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving and the holidays.\u00a0 Been trying to make the best of playing outside while there’s time.\u00a0 Sunday was sunny and at least warm-ish, and we got up early since they … Continue reading “Turn Turn Turn”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12,14,18,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fitness","category-home-improvement","category-music","category-software","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6609"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6610,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6609\/revisions\/6610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}