Almost a year... lots going on!

Wow, just realized I had not posted in almost a full year. Then, reflecting on all that's been going on I realized why I had not stopped to post.


In the last post we visited Buena Vista CO on a long motorcycle trek. We actually were visiting because I was anticipating an interview and perhaps moving to Buena Vista. This was all transpiring time-wise about a week before I was due to commit to a full semester of teaching at Front Range Community College again. Long story short, two days before I had to commit to Front Range I turned down the job offer and we stayed in Longmont and I taught and continued to work freelance web and video projects. August to December was crazy busy with three classes as well as a couple of independent study students.

Christmas was obviously busy and January kicked back off with another full semester of teaching and freelancing. Toward the middle of January Julie and I reconnected with an old friend from when we had lived in Colorado before. Other than a great dinner and reconnecting with friends that dinner resulted in an interview for contract work with a startup with which our friend was working. The contract began on Feb 14 and was for three months and required me to be in the Denver Technical Center (DTC) five days a week when I was not engaged teaching. For those of you not familiar with the Denver area geography that was about an hour to an hour and a half from our home in Longmont.

So for the next three months I was teaching part time, working for a startup full time, and doing what I could for freelance clients.

As the semester ended and the contract with the startup was coming to a close, I was offered a permanent full time job as UI/UX Lead Developer with the startup beginning my last day of teaching for the semester. I accepted. Obviously a relocation made sense. Julie resigned at the consignment boutique she had been working at for over 2 years and began getting us ready to move.

May 26th we left Longmont and moved (this is so trite a statement compared to the grueling weekend it really was, but that may be another post) into a townhouse in Castle Rock. My 1 - 1 1/2 hour commute is now just 15-20 minutes. Love the house... love Castle Rock!

The startup is WaveCloud - a web-based e-book focused business working to bring together several facets of the e-book universe into one single site. It's a very robust and ambitious vision. We launched in beta in early June and following an ambitious release schedule to enhance and expand what WaveCloud offers for readers, authors, as well as agents and publishers.

For now, Julie continues to help get us settled into Castle Rock and is slowly, patiently watching for where she'll be working.

That's the cliff notes for the year. Maybe I can fill in the pieces as well as keep up to date going forward.

Temple Grandin

Occasionally you see a movie, read a book, or hear a story about someone inspiring and hope to meet the person. Then there are the once in a lifetime opportunities you have to not only meet that person, but to get to work with her (or him). Late last year I found out there was a project on which I might be working with my friend Dan (of Vendor Hippo). The project was amazing in and of itself. But then came the part about the "talent" for the video project.

I had never heard of Temple Grandin till that day. About a month ago, as part of preparing the shoot I viewed the Made for HBO movie about her life and was moved to tears by -- well, many things in the movie. Today I got the rare privilege to direct a shoot with Temple explaining the ins and outs of handling sheep. What an amazing morning.

It was awesome to hear her explain the things the movie depicts but related to sheep. Her passion for helping people understand livestock so the handling of the sheep is less stressful on the animals and the humans was evident.

Claire Danes... I'm impressed. What a great job of portraying this special person. You definitely deserved the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Mini-series or Movie Oscar you won for the portrayal of this bigger than life lady.

Those of you who even think you have a tough life and need a leg up to move forward in this life... see the movie!

Teaching, teaching, and more teaching!

There haven't been many posts here on my site/blog in quite some time. That's because I've been busy!

From sheep, sheep, and more sheep to teaching, teaching, and more teaching. I was all poised to teach four courses at Front Range Community College here in Longmont (their Boulder County Campus) when Colorado Mountain College asked me to teach one of the same courses I've taught at FRCC for them online. They had several students who needed the course for their certificate or degree and couldn't find anyone to teach it. That was one week before the course was supposed to start. So I've been pretty busy converting the classroom experience into screen casts, discussion topics, exercises, and assignments that can be completed through a Blackboard interface.

Then, I was excited to meet yesterday with the folks over at Boulder Digital Arts (http://www.boulderdigitalarts.com) about teaching some PHP and MySQL over there. It looks like that will begin just as the FRCC and CMC gigs are winding down for the semester/summer.

Whew! I love it but it's definitely a schedule killer!

Sheep, sheep, and more sheep!

Well, I've been kind of more silent than normal but I have an excuse. I've been traveling weekly shooting (video of) sheep. It all began in late July with a trip to Sacramento followed by trips to Ohio, Iowa, Meeker CO, and Greeley. Below are some photos of the folks we shot interviews with for the American Sheep Industry. The interviews will break up the panel discussion segments during a live television broadcast on the RFD-TV channel in September. It was a very interesting set of shoots and the editing is going great. I learned so much about sheep and what it takes to raise them here in our country... oh and I met some GREAT folks who put food on your table every year.

Great times! Thanks Amy Trinidad from the American Sheep Industry and Dan Borgmann of Vendor Hippo for all the help!

Three Years Ago

Yesterday was a busy day and an important anniversary slipped by. On June 12th 2007 I was summoned to the office of my supervisor to find out I would be part of the sweeping annual layoffs at LifeWay. I'd watched a number of friends go through this experience as it happened about this time every year. There was little anxiety.
Today is the more memorable anniversary. On June 13 on my way to lunch with some of our very best friends it became clear it was time to return to Colorado. The events that followed from June 14 - August 26 when we arrived back in Colorado were unmistakeable. We put our house on the market in early August and had a contract for our asking price within 5 days. Closing wad in two weeks. We loaded up all the stuff and headed to CO.
Three years later were still delighted to be here. Starting your own business during a horrible recession (no doubt fueled by a volitile election season) I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Latest Finished Project

Web commercials, web-mercials as I like to call them, are becoming very popular with the explosion of video on the web. Today, I finished editing one for a local Greek food service. Here's a link: (click on Giggling Greek to view just that video)

Classic Game Meets PHP

So today in class our instructor led us in an activity where we group coded a web version of the classic game Rock, Paper, Scissors. It was a very interesting exercise and very educational to work as a team. I kept up with most of what we did, tweaking it a little on the way, and then massively tweaking it when I got home this evening. So, if you want to take a look go play Rock, Paper, Scissors online (WARNING: It's a little addictive.)

Pro Coders Would Consider This Child's Play

But, I don't care! I'm stoked I actually could do it! And without copying and mimicking someone else's code. For those of you who don't know, I enrolled in a PHP/mySQL course at Front Range Community College this semester. I figured it was time I actually buckled down and learned how to code for real (rather than finding code someone else wrote and using it or modifying it to suit my needs).

Today was our fourth class meeting and we came out with five assignments. I have to say the last one made me a little nervous. Especially when the instructor told us we would really not like him when we got to step 4 and 5 of the fifth assignment. Guess what... I don't hate him at all. (Of course, it's yet to be seen if I did it "wrong")

The fifth assignment was a story problem instructing us to create a PHP script that fictional high school students could use to estimate the time and cost for their jobs mowing lawns around the neighborhood. Here's the text of the problem:

The students use the following method to estimate the time and cost of their jobs for customers:

1. Calculate the total area of the yard in m² (Multiply the length of the yard in meters by the width of the yard in meters)


2. Calculate the total area of the house in m² (Multiply the length of the house in meters by the width of the house in meters)


3. Subtract the total area of the house from the total area of the yard to find the total area of the lawn that must be mowed.


4. Find the total time it will take to mow the lawn knowing that a high schooler can mow 4.3m² of lawn/minute


5. Find the total cost for mowing the lawn. The high schoolers charge $10 per hour to mow the lawn

Given the following dimenstion for a Customer:

• Length of Yard: 62 meters


• Width of Yard: 93 meters


• Length of House: 27 meters


• Width of House: 20 meters

Write a program which uses PHP to output the following (and then a sample text output that should appear on the page).

So, check out my page (P.S. It looks like the output with the correct calculations... YAY!)
And, here's a link to my main page I'll use throughout the semester to link to all my projects/assignments... if anyone cares!

So, here's the crazy thing. I finally understand the addiction of coding. I've had friends for years who were hard core coders. And, though I always appreciated their zeal and passion to just sit and write code... I actually understand and have experienced it myself tonight... whoa! More problems... more code! I'm ready! (I think I'm addicted!) Is there a CWA (Code Writers Anonymous) chapter near me? I may need it!

TurnHere, Citysearch, 1515 Restaurant

One of the fun things Kendall Media Group appears to be branching strongly into is all kinds of video work. We got set up with several of the Internet video services who are contracting with local videographers for web commercial and how-to video shooting. TurnHere contracted us recently to produce, shoot, and edit a web-mercial for Citysearch for a local Denver restaurant which we completed on June 8. It went live this week so I'm very excited!



1515 Restaurant in Denver