Resurfacing

I’m in a post again?

Most online sources define resurfacing firstly as having to do with floors, roads, ice rinks, kitchen counters, and even skin. Only secondarily do they define resurfacing as returning to the surface. But Wiktionary puts that latter one first, and it’s in that sense that I mean it (bravo Wiki!).

It feels as if it’s been a long time since my last post, but in fact it’s been less than a week. It just seems long because it has also been a productive week filled with new things as well as a week of some long hours on a project. Enough hours to have burned me out a bit. Now I have some catching up to do.

But it’s nice to know I can still pull off a coding all-nighter at my age.

Even nicer that I can still become so absorbed in an interesting project. My ennui — or worse, my not infrequent raging antipathy and cynicism — sometimes make me question whether that’s possible anymore. But that Peter Gabriel concert, the beauty of fall in the Midwest, and especially the fun last week, all show me there’s still a warm, even gooey, heartbeat under the time-worn life-hardened crust.

Man, that concert! I’ve pre-ordered the CD set, and I’ll buy the DVD of the movie they’ll make of the concert as soon as it’s available. The new album, i/o, comes out December 1st. I expect Amazon to deliver it that day or the next. No surprises, since Gabriel will have released all the singles by then. The last one, Live and Let Live, is due out on the next full moon (November 27, the Beaver Moon). We heard it at the concert.

A question I’ve had since Gabriel began this dual release business: the “Bright-Side Mix” on the full moon (usually; two exceptions so far) and the “Dark-Side Mix” of the same single on the following new moon. I wondered how they’d handle that on the released album. And answer — pretty obvious really — is that it’s a two-disc (or two-vinyl) release. The CDs I’m getting come with a third disc, a Blu-Ray containing the “In-Side Mix” versions (mixed for Dolby Atmos™®$£¥).

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But that was just over a month ago (still basking in the glow it gave me, though). It’s the last week that I wanted to record. Along with a few notes that insist on not waiting for the next Friday Notes post (which, admittedly, probably won’t be this Friday).

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BentleyMom sent me the funniest picture:

Sound asleep! Like many animals, she loves to take a bit of sun.

As with most short-muzzle dogs, her breathing apparatus isn’t ideal, she could never be a long-distance runner (like Dalmatians or Beagles). I suspect she breathes better with her snout elevated like that. (Or maybe she’s just looking down her nose at the world. A definite possibility.) I’ve seen her do something similar:

I told BentleyMom that photo had to appear in a blog post soon. Too good not to share. The little darling is quite a piece of work. (That’s what she said. No entendre intended.)

I’ve realized something about Bentley. She’s a purebred American Bully, a recent breed. Which means she’s a rather evolved dog, a refined example of the species. Which has evolved over many centuries to love, and be loved by, humans.

And wow, is she really, really good at both. Such a lover as I’ve rarely seen in any dog I respected (some dogs are just too sloppy about it — the very thing cat lovers tease us about). And everyone who meets Bentley just adores her. She’s a pinnacle of evolution.

The pity is she knows it. She’s got her humans totally wrapped around her dew claw. (Which has recovered nicely. Mentioned in this post.)

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Big News: The Texas Rangers won the World Series! For the first time ever. Baseball fans in the Longhorn state are rejoicing.

Well, the Rangers fans are. Texas is big enough for two teams, the other being the Houston Asstros. (That wasn’t a misspelling but a well-earned disapprobation.) And those cheaters guys already won the Big Show twice (in 2017 and 2022). They almost did it again this year. They won against my Minnesota Twins in the Division series (after we managed to defeat the wildcard-holding Blue Jays).

[My Twins have managed to get to win the Division quite often this century: 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2019, 2020, and this year. But they haven’t won the Division series since 1991. I understand the Vikings and some other Minnesota teams are similar: making it to the playoffs regularly, but constantly disappointing fans by never winning.]

But they lost to the Rangers in an exciting seven-game series. Extra exciting because the Asstros lost (yeah, I’m rubbing it in). Which brought the wildcard-holding Texas Rangers all the way to the World Series.

Where it only took them five games to defect the (also wildcard-holding) Arizona Diamondbacks.

[Baseball Trivia: The Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins are the only teams in the American League named after their state rather than their city. And both are former Washington Senators teams (becoming the Twins in 1960 and the Rangers in 1972). I’ve long considered them our sister team.]

An online friend I made through blogging lives in Texas and is a big Rangers fan (big baseball fan in general). We fell out of touch in the last few years as I drifted away from my baseball obsession (to my current general appreciation of the game). I had to contact her about the win, and she sent me a bunch of very cool factoids about the Big Win in the Big Show:

It was exactly 13 years to the day that manager Bruce Bochy took his San Francisco Giants to the World Series and won in game five… against the Texas Rangers. Last week, Bruce Bochy, now managing the Texas Rangers, took them to the World Series and won in game five. My friend added that the only more perfect thing would be if the Rangers had played the Giants. Perfect circularity then.

The Rangers first game of the WS was a shut-out and so was their last game.

The one she loves best: The Rangers were 11-0 in their last away games. Undefeated, people called them the Road Rangers. That eleven-game streak includes: the Rays (2-0), the Orioles (2-0), the Asstros (4-0), and the Diamondbacks (3-0). Check it out: Rays, Orioles, Asstros, Diamondbacks… R.O.A.D. How cool is that?

[President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, and…]

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Well, here we go again. The Halloween sales are behind us now, so it’s Shopping Season leading up to the infamous Black Friday (a name I’ve always found weird). Then, while the turkey and stuffing are still warm, the onslaught of Christmas (which despite rumors of war manages to be a huge commercial success). And coming soon: Valentine’s Day sales!

Paint the above paragraph in a deep rich shade of disdain. It’s always been, to me, the worst aspect of winter. I’d live with temps below -10 for months if it meant no advertising (and no damn robocalls).

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When I’m working at the computer I like to listen to music. The type varies considerably with my mood. The common thread is that it can’t be too distracting from the work. It can use some of my brain bandwidth, but not too much.

Often that means jazz or piano (I’ve long enjoyed George Winston, for example). In the right frame of mind, it can be rock, even pretty aggressive rock (like, say, Joe Satriani, one of my favorite guitar virtuosos). To some extent it depends on how well the work is going. The better the work goes, the more I enjoy energetic music (another example: Blues Traveler).

Because the work was going especially well last week, and because Amazon Music gives me all the music, I’ve been exploring artists I’ve never heard — in some cases never heard of — before.

So, now I’ve become familiar with: Larkin Poe (sometimes referred to as the Allman Brothers little sisters — Rebecca and Megan are, in fact, sisters); Samantha Fish, Ana Popović, and Beth Hart. Blues rockers, one of my favorite genres. Plus, to get away from the “chicks with guitars” theme, Joe Bonamassa and John Scofield. I’d noticed, but never watched, YouTube videos by Fish, Popovic, and Hart (I was a little familiar with Scofield) but had never heard of the Lovell sisters (Larkin Poe) or Bonamassa.

I can recommend them all to rock blues fans. (I assume serious rock blues fans are way ahead of me on these folks.) One thing that stands out about all these artists is their longevity and that they’ve been playing music seriously since their early teens (the age of 15 gets mentioned a lot as starting to play guitar).

Among my favorite things are trying new restaurants and finding new musical artists I like. The former is an ever-on-going thing, but it’s something of a treat to discover new music. Many of the previous sources for that have faded from my life. I don’t listen to the radio anymore (hate commercials too much), and I don’t drive enough to bother paying for satellite radio in the car. There were some cable channels that were good for discovery, but I don’t have cable anymore.

I’ve also discovered something about my musical taste. I’ve written before that I don’t like dinosaurs, most of Stephen Spielberg’s movies, or most zombie stories. I’ve decided to face up to disliking hard rock. Which I tend to conflate with heavy metal (and all derivative forms of metal). I’m just not a fan of the Phil Specter “wall of sound” — I like music with some space in it, in arrangement, in melody, and in rhythm. I like interesting melody, chord progressions, and syncopation.

Hard rock, to me, is like trying to sip from Niagra Falls. And I suspect my congenital hearing issues have much to do with it. I’ve realized that the reason hard rock sounds like noise to me is that my hearing is literally making the combination of heavy cymbals and aggressive guitar into a form of white noise.

So, no wonder I’ve never gotten into bands like Kiss, Metallica, AC/DC, or any of that ilk. I know I’m supposed to at least like Cream and Led Zepplin, but to be honest, listening to them is chore. Like eating my vegetables.

To me, nothing stands out or commends those bands to me, and I’m at a loss to even understand how fans tell one tune from another. It must have to do with the lyrics (which I can never hear). The music doesn’t seem to have much differentiation.

[But then I used to say that about Joe Satriani, and the more I’ve listened to him, the more I can tell the tunes apart. (I think one reason I’ve never pursued music is that I do not learn tunes quickly. It takes me lots of repetitions.) A few of his tunes are now favorites of mine. (Always with Me, Always with You and Flying in a Blue Dream.)]

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I have to confess that I’m insufferably pleased with myself over the project I’ve been working on for over a week. Here’s the end result:

It’s an update of a very simple video, Unfolding a Cube, I did some time ago:

It got a surprising number of views. I only meant it as an illustration of unfolding a cubic shape in N dimensions to its net in N-1 dimensions (so, a 3D cube unfolds into a net of 2D squares). It was a fairly trivial companion to what I considered the main video, Unfolding a Tesseract:

Both were done mostly for my own amusement. It was more about the programming that went into the video than the video itself. I thrive on solving software challenges.

That Tesseract video became — by considerable margin — my most viewed video (almost 90K views). To my surprise, the cube unfolding one became my second-most viewed (25K views). Trivial numbers by YouTube standards, but as my third most-viewed only has 5K (and others far less), big numbers for me.

So, I’ve been wanting to do a better cube unfolding, and as I explored the topic, it turned into a whole rather absorbing thing. (With lots of blues rock musical accompaniment.)

I’m thinking I’ll post a Sideband with the gory technical details, so won’t go into it here (I’m just over my word count limit as it is). Suffice to say it was a great example of the Fred Brooks ethic of being prepared to throw away the first try. And, in this case, the second. It took me three, but, as they say, the third time paid for all. The software allows me to easily specify shapes and move parts of them given fairly simple inputs. Exactly the goal.

There are yet some tweaks I may make, but not only did it turn out as envisioned (not always a given), but it’s mostly done. I have a tendency to abandon projects once the interesting challenges are solved and it’s just work from then on. (I’ve been making an effort lately to go back and finish them.)

It’s nice having something that’s (basically) complete and useful. Details to follow once I recover from this burnout.

Stay musical, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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