sky, Author at Sky's Blog

2022 year-end greeting

19 December, 2022 by sky

What a year!

From frost on rooftops out our windows (San Francisco – frost?) to the vivid red maple blooming in front of our home, we continue to appreciate life and beauty!

Kathryn: I am still leading the Feldenkrais program for adults with severe neuro-motor challenges at Bay Area Ability Now and also co-leading a weekly meditation practice group for Tergar International on Sunday mornings, with my colleague Cristian Lotito—something I’ve done weekly since April 2020, and monthly in person before that. The photo shows me with Cristian and Mingyur Rinpoche, Tergar’s Founding Teacher.

Kathryn: This year I began my studies with Upaya Zen Center in a unique 2-year chaplaincy training program that serves not only individuals, but also communities and the world. It is based in caring about the value of Buddhist principles for living, systems perspectives regarding social change, and intentions to nourish healthy community and society. For years my books and professional work have focused on creating healthy organizations for a healthy world: This brings a new community and new approaches.

I was drawn to the work of Roshi Joan Halifax (photo left) several years ago, and I am delighted to be able to study with her “in person” on zoom. (You can see my small face on the zoom insert above her head.)

My study of the chaplaincy grows out of all my previous work with organizations, leadership, and meditation. To get a sense of what I wish to nourish in the world, enjoy reading my most recent article “How generative mindfulness can contribute to inclusive workplaces”, published in the Humanistic Management Journal last December (read the article). As my co-authors and I wrote, “Humanistic management and mindfulness practices can potentiate one another to foster an inclusive society. By moving beyond a limited instrumental understanding of mindfulness practice to a generative mindfulness that incorporates a recognition of the rich nature of the human mind, awareness of cultural practices, and deeply rooted ethical foundations, managers can create organizational cultures that honor the sacred in every human being.”

Jim/Sky: It’s been mostly-sunny days this week on the ski slopes near Lake Tahoe, and we’re happy that we’re both skiing — at least on the fair-weather days. (Temp 36°F day and 18°F night)

Despite a ski injury last January, Kathryn has continued skiing and loves it — as she has for many years. These photos of us were taken yesterday!

Jim/Sky: Kathryn also got to visit with her sister Susan Amber Gordon on the East Coast, despite our lessened eagerness to travel since the start of the pandemic.

Play It Again

Jim/Sky: In 2022 I started producing my feature-length film Play It Again about “Coming home to music.” I’m personally an extreme example of this. For me the coming back started in 2014, then accelerated to full tilt in 2015-2016 at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I completed a full-time post-graduate year in Technology and Applied Composition. At that time, I had already been thinking about making a film about the experience, but there just wasn’t time to complete the coursework and do a film at the same time. So in February, 2022 I finally started filming. An intermediate full-length cut of the film is completed now (December, 2022) and with the filming of one more scene in January, we will have it all “in the can.”

When I went back to music in 2015 I said that “software had caught up with us” and was finally enabling a new breed of composer and compositional process — with sampled instruments it had become possible to compose and play back in real time at good quality — a new cyclical compositional process much like software development. Well by 2022 it was obvious that iPhone hardware and software were advanced enough that “filming” could be similarly streamlined and available to far more would-be producers. So I became one of those. The film is almost entirely shot on iPhone with wireless sound recording right into the camera as well. Sign up for more film info!

Play It Again — Coming home to music and how it changed my life; filmed in 2022, and scheduled for release in February, 2023.
New audio albums are in the works for Q1:2023 augmenting the existing albums.
Amateur Music Network; I’m on the board of directors of this org that promotes “the love of music” including upcoming workshops and a library of video of many past workshops.
Joined the board of the Ross McKee Foundation, which promotes piano performance.
We had a private showing and panel discussion of The Third Harmony, a film I scored in 2020.
CDs of my albums are available now via special order. Just ask me.

My film will be available in February, 2023, and if you visit the Play It Again web site, you can sign up there for email notification.

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Packet and SFWEM interconnects

28 May, 2021 by sky Leave a Comment

Over the last year (most of 2020), the majority of my radio work has been focused on making my connections between packet radio and SFWEM even more resilient.

SFWEM.NET is the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Net, which is a mesh network that’s being built out by amateur radio operators with the intention of being a communications backup in time of emergency — when phone and data networks may be locally overwhelmed or not functional. Beside that, however, it’s an interesting experiment for amateur radio operators seeking to understand the benefits and limitations of “wi-fi” as a long-distance tool. [Read more…]

I’m Fine

21 March, 2021 by sky 1 Comment

The third film I’ve scored was premiered on April 2nd, 2021. The film is entitled I’m Fine, and was produced by Kip Pearson and directed by Andrea Devaux.

My first two films were Indulgence (Leo Maselli) and The Third Harmony (Michael Nagler).

For those of you not familiar with how a composer creates music for a film, I thought I’d go thru how Kip and I collaborated to put music to this story.

Got the Logitech C920/C922 blues?

18 September, 2020 by sky 4 Comments

photo of blueish tint in logitech C920 camera — This is the C920 camera’s “automatic” color balance before I corrected it. (In zoom.us setup on Mac OS)

We (the team here) have been struggling with the color on Logitech C920 and C922 webcams recently. We’re preparing for a big international conference in November when the cameras will be in around-the-clock use. Initially each camera had a nice color balance, but after a couple of weeks each of them acquired an “underwater” blueish cast, and things that should have appeared white in the picture turned a spooky underwater blue!

Some of the blueness is due to where we have located our webcams — they’re in rooms with good outdoor light, but no direct sunlight, so the ambient lighting is saturated with blue skylight. But, beyond that, the cameras over-emphasized the blue. They were trying to auto-correct, but slewed way too far blue. Instead of compensating for our blue light, they were over-emphasizing it. Today we solved the problem!

Visualizing packet traffic

26 April, 2020 by sky Leave a Comment

Very techie here… For a few months I’ve been operating a packet radio station on a 2-meter radio frequency here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I explored what it would take to make this a full “BBS” (like an online “forum”), and then backed off and let it just hang around n this frequency listening to the other (mostly BBS) stations. A few days ago, I got interested in graphing the data to better understand what stations were using the frequency and when.

Packet radio was very popular 20 to 30 years ago, and has mostly been displaced by other amateur radio digital technology and by the Internet. Yet, it’s still quite reliable and is a good way to pass messages from one place to another when Internet or voice communications are unavailable (i.e. in an emergency). I’ve always been interested in the presentation of data, and it was an interesting challenge to figure out how to chart the data in ways that support inquiry.The result of my experimentation is visible in a chart.

The chart is made by this process:

JNOS (the software that runs the packet radio station) logs all data it hears on the radio;
A Python script analyzes this log file, keeping track of what stations were heard in each hour;
The Python creates javascript data in a form acceptable to Google Charts;
The javascript is transferred to a web server;
PHP code reads the javascript and inserts it in an HTML page;
Google Charts javascript fashions the data into the interactive chart.

A “cron” job carries out this process once each hour to keep the chart data current. Because each data bucket spans a whole hour, there’s no need to update more than once an hour.