Videos
Kawishiwi Falls
While we were up in Ely this past weekend we took a brief hike out to Kawishiwi Falls. I’m a sucker for waterfalls so it doesn’t take much to fill me with awe. I took video with the Canon 5D Mark II to capture the scene and continue to get comfortable with the video capabilities of the camera.
Overall I’m very impressed with the video quality. What you see here is “web video” processed by at least three different conversion processes. The raw video off the camera is incredibly crisp. All these were shot with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS.
I photographed this waterfall in winter during the Wintergreen Photography Dog Sledding trip I took.
TED Video: Hans Rosling Dataset Mindset
The visuals in this talk by Hans Rosling at TED blew me away. Animated displays of 200 years of economic data about the world.
Learning to Make Sausage
A couple of weekends ago we all loaded up into the car and drove up to Grand Marais to spend a wonderful weekend with our friends the Tangen’s. As is often the case when going “up north”, it was really crazy cold. It was the end of May and on our last day it was barely above freezing.
Anyway, the main attraction of the trip was a class that Tammy had signed Kent and I up for at the North House Folk School. North House is a very cool place where you can go and learn hundreds of skills. While we were learning the in’s and out’s of sausage making, another group of people were learning how to build a brick oven.
Back to the sausage. Another friend, Kevin Dotzenrod, makes the most amazing sausage I’ve ever eaten. I’ve got a few feet of it left in the freezer that I’m coveting from everyone else. I really only like lean sausage with a lot of flavor. Tammy thought it would be fun for me to learn how to make it myself and that’s how Kent and I found ourselves elbow deep in meat.
The experience was captured best with video. Since I was running the camera this video is all Kent. I am excited to try my hand at making some of my own sausage just the way I like it.
Kiva Impact
I’ve been a Kiva user for over a year now and have done several micro-loans with it. This is a really cool video that shows the personal side of Kiva and how such micro-loans can really impact peoples lives.
Check out my lender page. I owe a thanks to Aaron Oliver for introducing me to Kiva with a gift, to regift through a loan.
Mir:ror - RFID for the Home
I’ve been wondering when these little RFID gadgets will start to make a presence in the home. Big companies have done pretty amazing things with their supply chains using RFID, but what use will a geeky household be able to make of RFID. There hasn’t been much.
I was interested to see an email this morning from Violet, the makers of the Nabaztag. This company is definitely “out there”. I’ve tried explaining the Nabaztag to visitors and they just look funny when you tell them “it is a WiFi Rabbit”. Then it starts talking and moving its ears and they really wonder. Both Violet and Ambient Devices, makers of the Ambient Orb, are doing some really interesting things bringing the web into the real world.
Mir:ror is Violet’s newest product. This video explains it best.
It’s interesting. In essence the stamps are just RFID tags and they have made a consumer friendly RFID reader (the mirror). I can think of a couple of neat things to do with this, particularly if you keyed it with home automation. For example, take your keys and swipe them on the mirror to turn off all the lights in the house when you leave. I would love that.
It will be interesting to see what kind of applications people think of for RFID in the home. This is a cool first step.
Update: My friend John Riedl just posted about this on his blog as well.
Foreclosure Alley
This is an incredibly depressing video of the reality of home foreclosures in southern California.
Amazed to see the guy who paints lawns green.
Via my friend Raanan’s blog.*
Winnipeg Folk Festival 2008 Kids
We go to the Winnipeg Folk Festival every year (see music from 2008, but kids only go every other year. This was a kids year, and I got this really cute video of them having some fun.
C-Lazy-U Horse Run Video
While we were at C-Lazy-U I did an audio capture of the horse run. I also got a chance to capture it with my Canon HDV-30. In a lot of ways, I actually like the audio only one better.
Iron Chef Minnetonka - Egg
Tammy just hosted/produced the most recent Iron Chef Minnetonka night. This time around was a very special theme. You’ll have to wait 3 months though to see the video from it. In the meantime, enjoy the just released video from the last Iron Chef Minnetonka – Egg edition! Tammy did this video and its great!
Also check out Battle Yogurt…
Don's 70th Birthday Party
This past weekend Tammy and her sisters Corinne, Angie and Michelle threw a surprise birthday party for their Dad, Don Olson.
It was a very nice party and Don was totally surprised. Denny and Corinne made some awesome food and about 70 people were there. My job for the event was to get a video together. We did interview scenes with all the girls and mom, along with a bunch of pictures.
Of course if you get people in front of a camera you get some silly moments. I had enough to remix it back into this outtake video.
Angie put a post on her brand new blog about it. This morning I whipped up a quick video from the birthday party itself!
Driveway Paved
A few days ago the driveway was removed and prepared for a brand new asphalt driveway. I had charged my camera to get a good time-elapsed movie of the asphalt being put in. It’s a pretty cool thing to watch. Okay, the video is a bit long…
Driveway Removal
This past Thursday the contractor got started with our driveway removal. I was watching, and realized it was a great time-lapse opportunity!
Take a Lap in the Lazy River
Have a couple of minutes? Join us on the Summer of Love for a trip around the Lazy River at Mandalay Bay. Mazie’s very first time in a lazy river.
Redwood Highway (US-199)
Join us for a time-lapsed view of the 40 minutes of driving from the Oregon/California border on the US-199 segment of the Redwood Highway as we come into Crescent City, CA. Gorgeous drive with amazing trees. About 3 minutes in we get to the actual Redwood Forest. Buckle up, the time-lapse is 1 frame per second, and it gets a little fast at points.
Greg Merkle: Great Music
This post is a bit of a tease since you can’t (yet) just go out and buy this music. I know Greg Merkle from working at Dow Jones and have been lucky enough for him to share some of his recordings with me. It’s great stuff. He’s starting to do more stuff and getting more online. Check out this video he just posted.
Flashback: MarketWatch in Windows 2000 Launch
There are a few points in the history of BigCharts and MarketWatch that I’m especially proud of. Perhaps one of the most prominent ones, and most public, is the inclusion of the BigCharts BigArchitecture (the name we retroactively gave the COM-infrastructure behind MarketWatch and BigCharts) in the scalability demo at the Windows 2000 launch event. The video is a fun watch.
Prelude
We had been working with Microsoft pretty extensively at this point in part because we were trying to run our stuff on Windows NT 4.0 and it was horrible. We were having immense problems. We decided to throw a “Hail Mary” and upgrade to the unreleased beta of Windows 2000 Server. It worked! Our problems, which I can’t even remember now (anyone?) went away, and our sites stabilized.
Microsoft knew about the success we had had and was looking for the scalability demo for the launch. They called us about 10 days before the launch event to see if we could do it. We sent one of our systems team out that night. When he got there, Kristian Meier called me on my mobile saying “Dude! Do you know what they want me to do?! This is awesome!” We really hadn’t had time to brief him before his flight.
They made images, installed 500 clients, a bunch of servers, some databases and loaded it all up on trucks to drive from Redmond to San Francisco.
Event
Microsoft only gave us two seats on the floor for the event. Chris Tersteeg and I attended. The screen that they had MarketWatch on in the auditorium was immense. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever seen a screen projected bigger. They brought MarketWatch up live during the talk and at one point the page refresh kicked in. The whole screen went blank and Chris and I sat there with our heartbeat stopped waiting for the page to redraw. I don’t think there has ever been a more anxious page view to the site.
There is a funny editorial aside here. The newsroom was of course covering the launch of Windows 2000 and the theme of the coverage was that it was generally a non-event. We had a headline, above the fold that morning, called “Windoze 2000 Launch” and there was a picture of a guy sleeping next to it, if I remember right. Microsoft of course called me with panic since this wouldn’t exactly be the kind of headline you would want on the screen during the launch event. I called our editor to see what we could do. He appropriately suggested that we hope something new happens to take the headline off the site, otherwise, pound sand. Luckily some new news broke!
The demo was awesome in person. Seeing 500 client machines drive huge traffic to your code base was great. After the launch event we called it a day, rented a convertible and drove around the valley for the afternoon. We also made a stop at Fry’s to pick up some toys.
What a great event. Thanks to everyone who made it a reality!
Iron Chef Minnetonka - Yogurt
A couple of years ago we had a fun evening at the Bernard’s house where our friend Dean Eichaker and I did a mock Iron Chef competition. The secret ingredient was tomatoes. I’d like to think I won, but the evening ended in more wine than judging and we all just enjoyed some great food. Tammy has taken this idea and decided to run with it and make it real! In January we had our first professional-mock Iron Chef competition and Dean and I faced off again, over yogurt!
Tammy did this video. It’s fun, but I’ll warn you it is approximately 15 minutes long. So sit back and enjoy!
Check out Iron Chef Egg!
Flashback: BigCharts on CNBC
Flashback to February 4, 1998! Here are a couple of videos that I stumbled upon on my machine recently. These are an extraordinary walk down memory lane for me, back to the early days of starting BigCharts.com.
We were still very early in the development BigCharts. There were only a dozen or so people in the company. I was sitting at my desk talking to our ISP about getting some more bandwidth. At the time we had a single T1 with a now trivial 1.5 Mbps of bandwidth, about what my cable modem at home does, and only used about a quarter of that. In those days I always had a TV with CNBC on in my office and this came on the screen with no warning.
I sat in my chair stunned in silence, and then hung up on the person I was talking to. At the time we served BigCharts off of a single Sparc 20 clone. The site ran with a clunky combination of Perl and CGI work sitting behind a very early version of Apache. With that clip on CNBC an avalanche of people started to come to the site. To be fair, back then that probably meant a couple of thousand. I really don’t know how many it was since we didn’t even have log analytics back then. Small numbers in 1998. I tried to get onto the server via console and it wouldn’t respond. The load average had spiked so high that I couldn’t get enough CPU to even get a prompt. We ended up pulling the ethernet cable to kill the traffic just to get onto the machine.
February 4th was a Wednesday. This was the first week that my friend Chris had joined BigCharts. We immediately got everyone together and I sat on the Sparc and figured out what, if anything, we could do. We realized our load average was up over 100 because we were forking Perl processes everywhere. Remember, this was old CGI stuff, no mod_perl here. So on his third day at work I started handing Chris Perl programs that he translated into C and gave me an executable for. As we replaced each piece the next one fell down, and we repeated the translation process.
After a couple of hours traffic subsided and we had converted enough things to native executables that we were okay. So the next day this video segment aired.
I love this bit. It is so quaint. I love how Bill Griffeth gives us a total pass on the site going down. It’s just taken as a given, when a lot of people go to a website, the server goes down. Few things highlight so starkly for me how the web has matured over the last decade.
Anyway, obviously with a mere 24 hour gap and being a startup with no real money we had the same issue. A ton of people pointed their browsers at us, the server got overloaded and we had a challenging couple of hours. If I remember right we just let the system ride through it on the second day since we’d already optimized as much as we could in that window.
Shortly after this we started a total revamp of our code. The final stage was a migration to Windows and distributing on multiple servers. But right away we started to push a lot of things that we were doing in CGI/Perl down into Javascript functions on the browser. If only the concept of a CDN existed back then that would have helped us a lot too.
Ahh… good times.
PS - Final comment. The “viewer” that sent the note into CNBC was our CEO and Founder, Philip Hotchkiss!