When I was little, I read all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, including The Long Winter. That was the winter of 1880-1881 in case you are wondering. Lately my reading tastes lean more towards the Game of Thrones and the coming long winter in that story. Yesterday I arrived back in Minnesota after a chilly week in Atlanta, You will note by the date it is already the 8th of March. I’m writing this simply to document how much snow we’ve had here at Bone Lake this winter! As I pulled onto Indian Point road, I saw this:

Ok, I’d been seeing road signs totally buried in huge snow drifts since I turned North off highway 8, so I wasn’t totally surprised that all the signs were buried. I wondered what our driveway would look like.

During my January travels, I also converted this blog from tubmlr, which had been frustrating me for a while, to Octopress, with which I have been very happy. Nothing like hacker level control of your own blog. But more, than just the switch in tools, the move to Octopress inspired me to make it easier for people to publish small or large works using the Runestone tools.

Yesterday, at the Learning @ Scale conference we demoed this new capability. See [the demo here](<http://runestoneinteractive.org/LearningAtScale). To make it super easy to publish:

• Lecture slides
• Demonstrations
• A Tutorial
• Lab Instructions
• In class exercises
• A short module on your favorite topic not covered elsewhere
• An entire book

I left home on December 27 2013. When I left I had 3 bags packed. One for our trip to Mazatlan to celebrate the new year with our friends the Vermace’s. One for my January term class on the west coast, and finally a bag full of ski gear for the rest and relaxation trip to Breckenridge. Since leaving home I have travelled a bit over 10,000 miles. My means of travel has included several flights, two long train trips on Amtrak, some time in a car, and lots of time on public transportation.

In the last 35 days I’ve had more experiences than many people would have in a lifetime. I say this out of a sense of gratitude, and to remind myself how lucky I am.

The weather report said we had 6 inches of snow overnight. From the moment we walked out the door it was clear that they had underestimated the snowfall by about 8 inches.

We were on the third chair up at 8:30 this morning. The steep parts of the hill were awesome, with powder over my knees, floating through the snow. On the gentle parts of the hill we all formed a single file line in order to get through it all.

By mid-day it was work. The powder had been packed in many places and it was work to get through it. The snow continued heavily throughout the day, and we are supposed to get another 14 inches overnight.

This has been the perfect few days of rest and relaxation to finish off January term. Its even better because we bought the Epic local passes this year, which means we don’t feel like we have to ski full time, but can actually just ski until we are ready to take a break, and then ski again later. Its been great.

My daughter Kaia is getting married next summer. This is not new news, the proposal was made an accepted last June. But planning is in full swing now, and I was kind of excited when secured a visit with Capsule, because capsule provides a service where all the guests at your wedding can download the capsule app and it will automatically upload all the photos to a special page for the wedding.

This company was founded by Cyrus, who set out to solve a simple problem, a problem we’ve been coping with on this course as well. When you travel, how do you share all your digital photos with the buddies you are traveling with. When you have a big party? When you have a wedding, bachelor party, bachelorette party? Capsule has solved this in a nice, elegant way. All the photos uploaded for a particular event, are shared with the participants in the event. Its that easy. No need to bore all of your Facebook followers with every photo from your trip. If you’re an Instagram user, its super easy to add a special hashtag to your photo and it will be automatically imported into Capsule as well as shared on Instagram.

You know those yellow lines on the football field? They are harder to draw than they look. Think for a minute about all of the different field conditions. Natural green turf, artificial turf, mud, snow, cold brown grass. Now think about all of the different colored uniforms the players wear. Now, look closely. The line never covers up any part of a player, or the ball. Notice that? The ball doesn’t have a yellow strip, the ball blocks out the yellow line. The same with players shoes. Today we got to learn about the yellow lines, the blue lines, the down and distance information, and many more cool effects that Sportvision puts on our television screens.

Here’s the group on the “practice Field” They were moving the blue and the yellow line for us as we stood there. You can kind of see them on the big screen on the wall. The rack of equipment behind me is what they need to bring to each game, and the computers on the desk are whats used by the operator during the game. The operator can adjust all sorts of parameters based on field conditions and uniform colors etc. In addition, in the case of a really bad snow storm, they can also project all the yard markers on top of the snow so the people at home have a better view of the field than the players.

Today we moved south, from Fisherman’s wharf down to Menlo Park. But most of the day was spent at Google. This was certainly a day that everyone has been looking forward to for most of the trip.

My interest in Google+ was renewed by a great tech talk by Ed Chi. Who said some very nice things about me in front of my students. They probably think I paid him. We heard about supporting an organization as large as Google from Luther Alum Charles Banta, and about i18n — i(nternationalizatio)n from Luther Alum and former CS faculty member Craig Cornelius. Yes there are 18 letters between the parenthesis! We had a fabulous tour of campus, a stop in the 3D printer lab, time at the gift shop, and of course, lunch at Charlie’s Cafe.

You have probably heard about Google’s famous slides, but they also have fire poles for people that want to quickly get down a floor. And, in case you don’t want to walk between buildings they have these cool Google Bikes all over the place. Guests are encouraged not to ride the bikes, but nobody said anything about posing with one for your picture.

The other talk we heard was from Brian, a member of the self driving car project, who gave us a quick overview of the Google X Chauffeur Project. The technology is interesting, and I have to admit I hadn’t really thought past the cool sensors, and modeling that would be required. But, what is even more interesting are the many social implications of self driving cars.

“Ann is on a roll, we are going to be late.” I texted to Phillip. Indeed she was. Ann Winblad was the first investor in my Company, Net Perceptions, back in 1996. She was an investor, a mentor, and a supporter of us for years. Today she was giving my students a lesson in the new economics and ecosystems of software development. I was taking notes as fast as I could to keep up with the stream of new companies and technologies that were must know things according to Ann.

After the lesson she opened up the floor to questions, and the stories began to flow.

The following is a republication of a post I wrote for Luther College’s “Ideas and Creations” Blog.

Changing the World: Understanding Entrepreneurship, January 2014

I have never been so glad to leave Minnesota as I was on January 6th. The temperature outside was -24 with a windchill that defied all logic. I was headed for Seattle with 11 Luther students to begin my course on “Understanding Entrepreneurship.” I really enjoy traveling with students. Their energy, their enthusiasm, their ability to eat a doughnut burger at the airport before getting on a three hour flight.

Our itinerary for the three-week course includes four days in Seattle, an overnight train ride, six days in San Francisco, four days in Silicon Valley, a continuation of the train ride to Las Angeles where we will conclude the trip.

Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity. We began our day with a visit to PR firm, Schwartz MSL, Bryan Scanlon gave the group a great overview of the players in the PR space and how PR companies work. The tagline for their group may be something like “telling stories that matter.” I like this and it resonates well with a lot of the career advice people are sharing with the students.

In fact Bryan told a great story about his brother that really helped emphasize the message that you have to find a real world outlet for your skills and then use your skills to develop something real, something that you can tell a story about.