Videos
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.
Great Music - Greg Merkle
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.
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!
Dow Jones Disco Party 2007
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.
Chipai Fishing Trip Video
It’s been a long time since June when my father-in-law took all the brother-in-laws fishing in Canada.
Watching AllThingsD Gates/Jobs interview. Transcript.
Drive to Work Take 2
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.
Drive to Work
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.
Blue Dog Mural
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.