Tammy enjoys doing puzzles. The kids and I have started a tradition of making her a custom Christmas puzzle each year. This year we decided to do one for her “big birthday” and we decided to take a completely new approach.

Here is the final version and I’ll share with you how we got here.

To make this we started with a hand drawn image that Mazie framed out and then her and Tyler filled in. This allowed them to work with pencil and paper and the clear borders for the initial idea. Puzzles are pretty close to 8.5x11 ratio, but not exactly. After scanning I do a stretch on the size to get it just right.

Now that we scanned the original pencil drawing, we needed to recreate the entire image in digital format. We loaded up Procreate and put the original scan on a layer and made it 50% transparent, and then used the iPad Pro with Apple Pencil to trace a copy of the image on a fresh layer above. This made a perfectly clean digital version, and allowed us to clean up the image a bit. There were detail areas that were too small to do with the pencil but by zooming into the canvas on the iPad Pro they were able to get it just right.

After the image was traced we created two layers for coloring. One layer was “under the lines” and is where most of the coloring was done. We had another “over the lines” layer for select sections. We also segmented off the backgrounds and the “50” numbers into their own layer.

One of the super cool features of Procreate is the ability to share a video fo the drawing being created. Here you can see the entire process unfolding, as well as the couple of versions we tried for the “50” colors before we landed on the rainbow. Our creative process took 3-4 weeks and here you get it in 9 minutes.

The project took a while but the finished product worked out great. Plus the kids got to learn how to create digital art and got really adept at working with multiple layers and understanding how to use them to create different effects. Mazie got into the various brushes as well.

The only mistake we made was mine. I forgot that I needed to create a margin on the edge for the printer. We didn’t factor that in, so the finished puzzle lost about ¼” of the image on all sides. On the top we had sky so that was fine, but on the bottom we had this cool seascape and a lot of that got trimmed off. Next time I’ll remember to mark a “safe zone” there so nothing critical is in that area.

It turns out I pace a decent amount. Last week I was on a Zoom call and also took a call on my cell. I muted my audio but left the video on and one of our team grabbed the video loop and made it into this terrific Zoom video background. So brilliant! Only topped by sharing it with several of us who then had it on at the same time. That is a lot of pacing! 😂

A couple weeks back we got to try REM5VR’s newest arena experience, Oddball. it is a VR version of laser tag. The four of us played and got to pair up in different teams. You wear a wireless VR headset that allows you to walk around in the space. You see the other players in VR space relative to where you are. There were some glitches getting the VR headsets all talking and calibrated to start with, but we were quickly playing and having a lot of fun.

It is a little odd to be in a VR space with other people walking around, but we didn’t bump into each other. The VR world allows the arena we were playing in to feel much bigger than the actual space, and there were teleporters and power up spots that would appear in the space.

REM5 told us we were the first customers to go through it, and the person running it was kind enough to capture the video of us playing and send it to me. Here is our 3rd round where Tammy and I got beat pretty handily by the kids.

We joined my sister and her family for the Extreme Sandbox Heavy Metal Drive-Thru tonight. We had a fun time watching all the heavy equipment play. There were a lot of very excited little kids in attendance honking horns. 😊

I had a great time talking about Changing the Enterprise at this week’s DevOps Minneapolis Meetup with Heather Mickman and Bridget Kromhout! My mic wasn’t working in the beginning but gets fixed a little later in the video.

It was a fun opportunity to talk about some of the concepts I’ve thought about with risk management, refactoring costs, how Agile and DevOps come together.

Some friends sent me this video from a European Pro RC Race. It’s the most amazing thing ever! Worth a watch. Check out the speed, the passes and the jumps!

So much more they could be doing!

1. Where is the real-time telemetry for each car? I want to see scaled MPH for each car.
2. I’d love to see the G’s that they are taking on the turns. It seems like a guarantee that these cars are taking turns in a way that no human could actually do.
3. Where is the POV video from each car?! Must have streaming video from each car, imagine the POV shot when the aerial pass happens?

This would be even more fun, and those are just the immediate ideas that come to mind!

If you need to take seven inches of dirt out of a basement floor, it is best to have a cool portable conveyor belt.

You can see this laying on the floor in yesterdays shot of the basement.

My friend Dennys Bisogno is a great photographer and is now doing some video work as well. Here is a video he did for Memorial Day in River Falls, Wisconsin. Touching.

He shot this on his Canon 1D and edited in Final Cut. The clip of the elderly soldier walking down the path at 3:40 is just great.

Memorial Day - River Falls, WI from dennysFilms on Vimeo.

My friends Dennys Bisogno and Layne Kennedy sent a link around to this amazing video of “that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of” by Sean Stiegemeier.

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

He captured that on his Canon 5D Mark II. That is the same camera I shoot with. Seeing something like that come out of kit that is on my shelf is both inspiring and intimidating.

This is a really great video that explains in plain language why Net Neutrality is so vitally important.

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.

The visuals in this talk by Hans Rosling at TED blew me away. Animated displays of 200 years of economic data about the world.

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.

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.

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.

This is an incredibly depressing video of the reality of home foreclosures in southern California.

Amazed to see the guy who paints lawns green.

Crisis in California: foreclosure alley from Remco Bron on Vimeo.

Via my friend Raanan’s blog.*

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.

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.

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…

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!

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.

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.

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. Its great stuff. He’s starting to do more stuff and getting more online. Check out this video he just posted.

BigSpotBrother from Greg Merkle on Vimeo.

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!

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 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!

Oh my. Really. Wow. Absolutely fabulous!

That is the only way to start any post on the 2007 Dow Jones Disco Party that we had this year. This years party was a complete blast. I had given a preview of the Disco Theme in another post and people did not hold back at all in going all out.

Great food. Amazing band, Boogie Wonderland. Disco music. Awesome people! How can you go wrong! Party along with this video!

Every year it gets better and I really cannot imagine how next year could top this one.

It’s been a long time since June when my father-in-law took all the brother-in-laws fishing in Canada.

Time for “Take 2” of my drive to work time elapased video!

I really liked the first take at this, but the camera was mounted very poorly. Think tape combined with a rear-view mirror and you get the idea. It was swinging around and shaking with abandon, which caused a ridiculous video. I was looking at getting a Gorillapod for my trip to Canada in a couple of weeks and it was also the perfect tripod to mount a camera on my dash. This, combined with an overcast day that gave more even light and a closer position to the windshield to eliminate a lot of the grime on the glass made for a significantly better video.

For comparison, here is the first one as well. Try hitting play on both of these at the same time to see the differences.

I’m having some more fun with the time-elapsed feature of my new camera. It has an ability to take the most trivial things and make them at least a little interesting. Check out this video of my morning drive. There is a decent amount of sun glare, and the “mount” wasn’t all that great, but it’s still fun. I think I’ll do it again after I get a Gorillapod that will give me a better mount. Until then…

Also check out the short time-elapsed video of my flight take-off.

When we were on our honeymoon in Denver, Tammy saw this piece of art in a gallery and instantly fell in love with it. The artist did a series of hanging sculptures around car doors from old VW bugs. She then had a variety of dogs in the windows. One in particularly had a blue dog that she really loved. It is in some way a nod to George Rodrigue’s work, however actually affordable for mere mortals like us.

When she saw this piece she knew instantly what she wanted done. Here is Tammy’s friend Liane painting the mural.

Here is the sketch that the mural was painted from. This sketch was scanned, blown-up and then projected onto the wall to provide a guide.

We absolutely love this. We live with all of our art, but this is part of every day.