Startup Weekend Access Portland – I’m a Mentor

I am pleased to announce that I have been asked to be a mentor for the upcoming Startup Weekend Access Portland event taking place on February 7-9th.

A crash course for those curious about entrepreneurship! You’re invited to attend Startup Weekend Access, a Startup Weekend focused on making entrepreneurship more accessible to everyone. Our mission is to create an environment where anyone can innovate together. We’re focusing on accessibility to provide better access for people with disabilities and fluid collaboration amongst every participant. An appropriate accessible environment with the necessary auxiliary aids support services will be provided!

Startup Weekend’s a 54-hour event where aspiring entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, product managers, and entrepreneurs of all abilities come together to share startup ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups. Essentially, it’s a crash course in entrepreneurship that lets you experience what it’s really like to build and launch a startup.

Whether you have an idea for a new mobile app that will make your life easier or just want to learn more about entrepreneurship, we encourage you to attend.

Why? The statistics are clear, people with disabilities are not only less likely to be employed, but also less likely to pursue entrepreneurship. We hope that Startup Weekend Access will ignite your entrepreneurial spark!

Register now >

Random User Generator: Like Lorem Ipsum, but for people

What is RandomUser?

RandomUser is an API that provides you with a randomly generated user. These users can be used as placeholders in web mockups, and will save you time from creating your own placeholder information.

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Ten Years Ago Today

It was this day in 2003 when Danielle passed away at the age of seven. She was born with a low grade astrocytoma brain tumor. Dani was an amazing little girl. Dani never talked or walked but, was the most loving little girl you would have ever known. She was full of kisses, knew where all of the sweets were in the cupboards, was adored by her classmates in elementary school, was Alyssa’s buddy and so much more. Oh, and she absolutely loved those frozen mini-pancakes.

Dani Elgort

Dani would have turned seventeen this month. The last ten years have flown by and, not a day goes by when Gayle or I don’t think about Dani. Many of my memories were shared on my old blog. I want to thank all of you for your support over the years and especially those of you who were there ten years ago when Dani was ailing.

Today we remember Dani.

Damien Katz: What a difference a few months make

I miss Couchbase terribly, but I’m also glad to be done and start a new chapter in my career. The thing I miss most are the great people there, super bright hard working folks who amazed me on a daily basis. Which, ironically, was the thing that made it easy to leave. Seeing the different teams taking the ball and running with it without me leading the charge. Things at Couchbase grew and matured so fast I started to realize I couldn’t keep up without spending way more time working. I was no longer the catalyst that moved things forward, I was becoming the bottleneck preventing engineers from maturing and leaders from rising.

…

And now what’s next? Well, beginning in January 2014 I’ll be starting at salesforce.com and working closely with Pat Helland on a project that eventually will underpin huge amounts of their site infrastructure, improving performance, reliability and predictability, while reducing production costs dramatically.

Best of luck Damien. I remember sitting in Orlando talking with you and Julian Robichaux about CouchDb back in 2005/2006. You can do anything.

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Having Fun With Photobricks for iOS and OS X

Just a few minutes ago I discovered the Photobricks app for OS X and iOS which creates LEGO™ mosaics from photographs.

Photobricks is a completely free, ridiculously easy-to-use mosaic creation software specialized to work with LEGO® bricks. With Photobricks, you can make beautiful mosaics from your favorite images with the push of a button. For those of us who like to have more control, you can further customize the mosaic by cropping and changing the colors of individual bricks. You can then view what types of bricks you’ll need to build your mosaic and, when you’re finished with your masterpiece, you can share it in a variety of ways with others thanks to the built-in publishing options. Excited? You can start using Photobricks right now by visiting the Download page. Not convinced yet? You can check out Photobricks for Mac or Photobricks for iPhone, iPod touch to learn more about Photobricks.

Here is a mosaic of the mighty Domino Designer which will be our next LEGO™ project:

Photobricks screenshot of DominoOnce your mosaic is complete you can generate a list of the plate bricks that you need to build it:

Plate list for Photobricks

What a great app! This puts a whole new spin on LEGO™ obsession.