THE OMNI SHOW

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5
Jan. 3, 2018, 6 a.m.
Mark Boszko, Video Producer

Mark got hooked on video and special effects at the age of five when he saw a TV show about the effects behind The Empire Strikes Back.

Show Notes:

After creating videos for vast government bureaucracies and The History Channel, Mark moved to Seattle to come work at Omni — which, from his point of view, is a video production company that happens to create some companion software to go along with the movies.

Mark also hosts The Optical podcast, which you should listen to. And — most critically — Mark is this show’s intrepid producer.

You can find Mark @bobtiki on Twitter. You may, if you meet him in person, call him Bob. It’s fine.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Transcript:

Brent Simmons: You're listening to The Omni Show. Get to know the people and stories behind The Omni Group's award-winning productivity apps for Mac and iOS. Music!

I got that from my wife who watches that British baking show. She's like “bake!”

Mark Boszko: Oh. Okay.

Brent: So, like “music!”

Mark: I was wondering where that came from.

Brent: Yeah. I don't know. Thought I'd try it. I haven't actually seen the show. I'm your host, Brent Simmons. In the studio with me today is Mark Boszko. Say hello, Mark.

Mark: Hello, Mark.

Brent: Very nicely done. You work at Omni as a Video Producer.

Mark: That's right.

Brent: That's cool, and it reminds me right away that I'm so glad this is an audio-only podcast and not video, because I have a voice for print and the face for not even print. You don't want a picture. A face for audio, yeah.

Mark: Then, you'd have to get out of your pajamas.

Brent: Yeah. Right, right. Oh, my God. Anyway, so as video producer, we have a lot of what? Marketing stuff, tutorials, screencasts. What all do you make?

Mark: Yeah, it kind of runs the gamut through all of that stuff. Our design team is pretty small to begin with and marketing is a pretty small part of that. Video is pretty much just me and whoever I can grab occasionally to help me out, or appear on camera. That sort of thing, so there's a lot that I cover, all of that stuff. You know, doing tutorials and doing the little marketing videos that we do when a new video comes out — a new piece of software comes out with, you know, here's the new features and here's some people using it, here's what it can do for you, kind of stuff.

Brent: Cool. I liked your slip of the tongue about a new video coming out because to you it's a new video.

Mark: That's right.

Brent: Software just kind of a [inaudible 00:02:07]. It's just a ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: ... excuse for a new video. That's pretty cool.

Mark: Yeah. We have done in the past, these customer story videos where we've done a three or five-minute kind of mini-documentary about people who are using our software in interesting ways. We haven't done one recently, but I would love to do more.

Brent: Well, can people hit you up on Twitter for that?

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Brent: Okay, and you are @bobtiki.

Mark: That's right, or I'm on our Slack channel as well.

Brent: Sure. Well, I'll make sure that all that's in the show notes, so you know how to find Mark. His name's not Bob, it's Mark.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. If you're using ...

Brent: It's not Marktiki, it's Bobtiki. Why is it Bobtiki?

Mark: Actually, it was the computer science class that I took in high school. We were doing BASIC on like some old Unix Vax system or something. Anyway, one day the teacher just completely forgot my name and called me Bob.

Brent: Why not?

Mark: And for some reason it stuck. I still have friends from high school that call me Bob and now they've like introduced me to other people as Bob, so there's this like whole split in my friend groups. Like, one whole group of people just calls me Bob and like, I don't know why. It just happened.

Brent: I think I've accidentally done it and you didn't even notice.

Mark: No.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: I'll answer to either.

Brent: Yeah. You'd like to do more customer stories, that's a cool thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: In the show notes I'll link to some of these videos because some of them are just... I love them. They're so fun. I especially enjoy during our weekly company meeting when you have a video to show off.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: It usually has people like rolling in the floors. It's really a lot of fun.

Mark: We did a fun set last year that was all videos for OmniPlan, but just kind of the basics of how project planning works and we did a little animated series with a kind of like a James Bond villain type, trying to take over the world.

Brent: That's right, yeah.

Mark: Maybe not going quite well, but you know, it kind of showed you how to recover from things going wrong in your project and ...

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: ... reset your timeline.

Brent: That's why all the real Bond villains lost, because they didn't have OmniPlan.

Mark: That's right.

Brent: Right?

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Yeah. They would have been able to adapt. Dummies. Tell us about your setup, the software and equipment. I'm sure there are other video nerds out in the listening audience ...

Mark: Oh, sure.

Brent: ... who'd love to know what do you big time, professional video dude, ...

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: ... what do you got? What do you run?

Mark: Well, in my previous work, I was using the older version of Final Cut for a long time. Moved to the newer versions, and it just didn't quite fit with how my workflow worked. I don't think there's anything wrong with the software itself, it just, it was a very different, new way of working, so we've mostly switched over Premiere and it has good integration with After Effects, and Audition for doing audio stuff, like we're recording in right now. Mostly the Adobe suite of stuff is what we use day-to-day.

Brent: Do you have favorite brands of equipments like for Microsoft or ...? I'm sorry, for [crosstalk 00:05:33] not Microsoft. Clearly not Microsoft.

Mark: I mean, for like just video recording stuff?

Brent: Yeah. Like are there ... I mean, I know nothing about this world, so I'm like, is there this is the great camera or this is the ...

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Brent: ... the great microphone or ...

Mark: We ...

Brent: [crosstalk 00:05:50] kind of thing.

Mark: ... wanted to adopt 4K pretty early. Even though we're not delivering in 4K, we wanted to like, you know, this will give us more feature-proof-ness for some of the stuff that we're doing and will give us more options in post where you can, even if you're delivering in high def and not 4K, you can kind of zoom in and pan around the frame and use different parts of it. We got one of the Canon C-series cameras that does 4K and ...

Brent: Oh, cool.

Mark: ... I really like those. We had one of the regular DSLRs before and those are great for photography. I find them a little clumsy to use for video just because it's — you have to dig into the menus a lot more instead of having like a physical button on the device that does ...

Brent: Oh, okay.

Mark: ... the thing you need to do right now.

Brent: Right, yeah.

Mark: Like white balancing and stuff, it can be a little more difficult than it needs to be on the DSLR, so, try to get something that's actually more video focused.

Brent: That makes sense.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: That's cool. How do you do animation? I've seen some of these movies have animation and this just boggles my mind entirely. I'm as close to a pure text guy as any computer nerd.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: I know text and databases and that's about it. How do you draw these images and make ...? I mean, is it like the old days, you go frame by frame or ...?

Mark: Well... no, we're not doing like really hand drawn animation here.

Brent: Sure.

Mark: Most of what we're doing is stuff in After Effects where it's... you have an asset or multiple assets that somebody drew — sometimes me, sometimes one of our other designers — and then you can essentially keyframe its position over time, so you can make it move.

Brent: It's moved somehow?

Mark: Yeah, it will take care of the ... Well, it's called tweening, which is short for "in-between" frames. All the frames that are in-between each keyframe, so it's on the upper left corner here, and the lower right corner here and then it figures out, okay, well it's 20 frames between here and there and we'll ...

Brent: Okay.

Mark: ... just fill in the intermediate stuff.

Brent: You can give it a rate and maybe a curve and ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: ... just various kind of properties [crosstalk 00:08:13].

Mark: Yeah, exactly. You can have that kind of ease in, ease out kind of curve.

Brent: Oh, okay.

Mark: Parenting stuff to other elements so they move together and, you know ...

Brent: You make a like a little machine, sort of.

Mark: Yeah, or the little humans that we did, you know, you parent the arm to the body at the shoulders, so the it moves in a way that looks something like an actual human [would].

Brent: Yeah, I was awfully impressed by the animations. I remember around the time I'd say, "How'd you do that?" Your answer was, "Oh, we just animated them."

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Okay.

Mark: It's a pretty big subject, so it's hard to explain it in two minutes, but ...

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Yeah. That gives me some ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: ... some idea. It just works, it's just more software. It's just drawing. Yeah, it's doable.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Okay. I'll never make a movie, but ... Before you came to Omni ...

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: ... you were into movies, special effects and everything, from a very young age.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Brent: You mentioned, when we were talking earlier, about a particular TV show that got you into special effects.

Mark: Oh, yeah. When I was like five years old, there was a TV special called SP FX: The Empire Strikes Back and it was all hosted by Mark Hamill. Of course, it had little bits of behind-the-scenes from The Empire Strikes Back, but it also had just kind of like a general history of visual effects and special effects. From the very beginning, the early Méliès, you know, A Trip to the Moon kind of stuff.

Brent: Is that the one where the rocket ship hits the moon in the eyeball?

Mark: Yes.

Brent: Yeah, I like that. Yeah.

Mark: Then, even included like how blue screen works and there was some kids making their own eight-millimeter movies and there was some of those interspersed throughout the show. It was just like, this really cool thing that was... I think kind of the first time I realized, oh, people actually make this. This is a thing you can do.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, ever since then I've just kind of been obsessed with the whole visual effects and special effects thing.

Brent: Turns out Empire Strikes Back was not a documentary.

Mark: No.

Brent: They didn't just have some camcorders and set them up and shoot.

Mark: No. Yeah, I ... Like, especially when they go behind the scenes and it's like, you know, when Darth Vader is force-throwing all of these things at Luke Skywalker. They cut to behind the scenes and it's like stage hands throwing these big, foam things ...

Brent: Right, of course.

Mark: ... at Mark Hamill.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: It's like, "oh, that's how it's done!"

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative). At some point you grew up enough to go to college and sound like that was fairly boring, so let's skip ahead to the NIH. You worked at the National Institutes of Health ...

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: ... as a video guy ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: ... for six years, because vast government bureaucracies need video.

Mark: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's PR pushes like "don't let your baby sleep on its stomach so to reduce the rate of SIDS" and stuff like that, but you know ...

Brent: Anything about cats? Don't let cats sleep on your babies?

Mark: No.

Brent: I've heard that.

Mark: I do know someone, that's one of their deathly fears, is a cat suffocating them in their sleep. Thankfully, no. It doesn't seem too much of a public health hazard. We would do stuff that the public would see, like that, or stuff that a researcher needed, to have videos of his mice to take to some sort of presentation that he was doing, and it kind of ran the gamut of that kind of stuff.

Brent: Not videos for his mice, not like that.

Mark: No. Not usually.

Brent: What was that? Scrooged? Trying to remember. The Bill Murray movie where that was the next frontier was to do shows for animals.

Mark: Oh, that's right.

Brent: Yeah. That's not what you were doing?

Mark: No, no, no.

Brent: That's pretty cool. This was already digital video by this time, was it or [crosstalk 00:12:13]?

Mark: Yeah. It was like something I had played with in college. It was like a Radius VideoVision System. That was one of the early ways of digitizing video into a computer, and they happened to have that, and that's how I got in over there. I think, eventually, we switched to a Media 100 System, which was ...

Brent: Okay.

Mark: ... an early Avid competitor.

Brent: Avid, I've heard of, yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Okay.

Mark: You would get a Power Mac 9600 and jam three or four processing cards into it so it would have enough power to deal with all this video stuff.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah, I'm imagining then compared to today. It was probably fairly tedious to ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. We had one gigabyte drives.

Brent: Oh, my goodness.

Mark: It was ...

Brent: Wow. That's like a single frame practically of 4K. Geeze. Well, maybe not that bad. After the NIH, you moved on to building video systems for clients.

Mark: Yeah, I was working for a local Mac reseller for a couple of years and ...

Brent: Back when we had those things.

Mark: Yeah. I think maybe they still exist. It was Mac Business Solutions in ...

Brent: Okay.

Mark: ... Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Brent: Gaithersburg.

Mark: Yeah, that was basically building systems for his clients, you know, building out a few different edit suites and little video systems. People editing their own stuff.

Brent: That's pretty cool.

Mark: That was a fun time, yeah.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: I got to go to Boston for Apple training on Final Cut Server, ...

Brent: Oh.

Mark: ... which was a thing that existed for maybe two years.

Brent: Like, some kind of collaboration server thing?

Mark: Yeah. You were supposed to... so you could load all your video onto the server and it would process and give you low-res proxies to work with, and you could build little playlists and things on the server for, you know, like producers can piece things together and then send it to the editor. It was an interesting system that I think they kind of bought from someone else, and then... it didn't go over so well.

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: I'm not sure what happened to it.

Brent: Yeah. Not every acquisition works out in the end.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: From there you went on to doing freelancing and this is where things get fun, I think.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: You're working on stuff like History Channel and ...

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: What all else?

Mark: I worked for a bunch of production companies around DC. There's a lot of non-fiction production there, so yeah, we did a lot of work for History Channel, A&E, Discovery, National Geographic — their headquarters are in DC.

Brent: Okay.

Mark: Yeah, there was a lot of bouncing around to different work there, but it was always interesting work.

Brent: I love that stuff. I love the, especially the well-done actual good historical documentaries and so on.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: I also have a major soft spot for all of that stupid Ancient Aliens stuff. I just ... man.

Mark: I'm sure I worked on one or two of those kind of things.

Brent: They're so great.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: The narrator's voice, you know, there's that one voice.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: It's just like it's perfect. Every sentence is, you know, "researchers suggest it might have been," and you know.

Mark: Yeah. It's got a very ...

Brent: So, sure, yeah.

Mark: ... some really hard couching of ...

Brent: Yeah, of everything.

Mark: ... what might or might not be true.

Brent: There's that one guy with the hair that I absolutely love. I forget his name.

Mark: The meme guy?

Brent: Yeah.

Mark: I'm pretty sure I worked on one show that had him in it. I can't remember which one it was, but... interesting dude. Yeah.

Brent: Eventually you were an extra in one of these.

Mark: Oh, yeah. We were working on Digging for the Truth, that ran on the History Channel for two or three years I think. I went down to North Carolina to just go for a vacation with the family, but during that time they were also shooting some re-creations for the Roanoke Colony. "What happened to them? Where did they go?"

Brent: "Well, researchers suggest it could have been ancient aliens."

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Well, not really ancient I suppose, but ...

Mark: I got one afternoon to go down there and sit in, and be part of a recreation where they're kind of showing the camp where everybody was, and I was like, you know, "man stirring pot."

Brent: Nice. You were one of the missing colonists.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Brent: Fictionally, at least.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: Oh, that's great. There's kind of a sad story. We won't tell the man's name. Let's call him famous star from the 80's.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: ... but who you got to work with, which was cool and he was super nice, but...

Mark: Well, I can say the name of the actor, but I will redact everything else to protect the innocent. Yeah, MacGyver, Richard Dean Anderson, he was going to be hosting the show. Something about gadgets. Something very apropos to MacGyver kind of stuff, and we shot, I think it was three days or four days with him on green screen. We were compositing him into this virtual set and he was going to host this whole show about these amazing gadgets through the years. I think we had gotten like three quarters of the way done with all of that stuff. Spent all this time and money on getting all the stuff composited and someone at the network, I won't say which network ...

Brent: Alright.

Mark: ... was like, "oh, I think, you know, maybe this character, he's too old and we want to get our younger viewers into it." So we ripped him completely out of this show and he got replaced by giant virtual numbers counting down these gadgets instead of ...

Brent: That's so wrong.

Mark: He didn't even get to narrate it, you know, just as audio.

Brent: Oh, geeze. When you have Richard Dean Anderson, you just count your lucky stars ...

Mark: I know.

Brent: ... I think, stick with it.

Mark: I was very sad.

Brent: Aw, no kidding.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Stupid network.

Mark: I only got to say "hi" over Skype once, but he was a very nice fellow.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah, no doubt, I'm sure.

Mark: Yeah. It was very rare for me to interact with anybody like that because I was always holed away in the edit suite and ...

Brent: Sure.

Mark: ... not out on location with ...

Brent: Right.

Mark: ... all these fabulous stars.

Brent: Yes, for we are nerds. We are the people in the back room.

Mark: That's right.

Brent: I like to point out that if you watch Star Wars, and you're a nerd, what character are you actually in the movie? The answer to that question is, you're the guy who wrote the targeting computer that Luke switches off.

Mark: Yep.

Brent: That's your character.

Mark: Yep.

Brent: After a while, enough of this. You're out one night, NSCoderNightDC.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: Maybe, you know, you've had enough of the freelance life or Ancient Astronauts.

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brent: You're talking to your friend Jose, then what happens?

Mark: Yeah, actually Jose Vasquez and I were, well... I will say he's the founder, but I'm definitely one of the oldest members of NSCoderNightDC. We were good friends, and he pointed out, "Oh, Omni has this job listing for a video producer." I was like, I don't know if I want to live in Seattle. I would have to move. I kind of like being freelance to some degree because it's nice to work on different projects all the time, but also, it would be nice to be paid on a regular basis, so... maybe that would be interesting.

Brent: Healthcare is kind of nice, too.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Brent: Yeah, so is the food.

Mark: Yeah, so I applied and they eventually flew me out here for some interviews. I really love the people that I ended up working with, so it's yeah, turned out to be a great thing.

Brent: How long you been here?

Mark: A little over four years now.

Brent: Four years, alright. It's been just over three for me.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Yeah. Okay. That is cool.

Mark: Yes, it's gone by in a blink. Yeah.

Brent: Yeah, yeah. No doubt. When you're not here in the office doing amazing work for Omni, you are doing a podcast called The Optical.

Mark: Yeah. It's been on a little of a hiatus for a while, but I will get back to it. It's basically revisiting the history of visual effects and film technology. Originally, how I got into it was I had, over the years, kind of ... There's a magazine called Cinefex, which was all about that behind-the-scenes visual effects and special effects.

Brent: Cinema effects, yeah, okay.

Mark: Yeah, and makeups and weird creature puppets and all that kind of stuff. I had, over the years, finally gotten all of the back issues, even trying to look on eBay for some really rare ones ...

Brent: Oh, wow.

Mark: ... that were out of print. I was like, you know, it would be just a cool personal project to finally go back and read through all of them, because there's some articles here and there that I'd skipped because well, I hadn't seen that movie yet, so I don't want to read the ...

Brent: Oh right, sure.

Mark: ... article and spoil it for myself.

Brent: Right.

Mark: I thought I'd do that and then, well okay, why not make this a little bit bigger thing and turn it in to a podcast? Actually, like talked to some of the folks at Cinefex, and they were pretty supportive of it as well. They would let me give away a subscription of the magazine in every podcast and that kind of thing.

Brent: Yeah. No, it's cool.

Mark: Yeah, it's been really fun.

Brent: You've had some big names. Douglas Trumbull.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Brent: Who else?

Mark: Harrison Ellenshaw and Howie Weed, which might not be common household names, but they're pretty amazing characters in the visual effects realm. Yeah, so it's been fun, just to talk to those guys and hear straight from them how things went down. How they got into the business and ...

Brent: Yeah, that's great.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: This stuff should get documented, after all.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Thanks for doing some of that work. That's cool.

Mark: I mean, I think... I feel like I'm in a pretty big pool as far as people who cover that kind of stuff. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's already documented and you've get the bonus features on DVDs ...

Brent: Oh, sure. Right.

Mark: ... and that covers a lot. But I try to tease out some of the less-told stories and people who aren't quite as in the public eye as some of the folks at ILM often are and ...

Brent: Oh, sure. Right.

Mark: ... that kind of thing.

Brent: Yeah, that makes sense.

Mark: Yeah, it was like, for instance, talking to Douglas Trumbull, I mean, he worked on 2001 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture and all this crazy stuff, but he also did his own film. I think it's called Mind Storm. [It's actually Brainstorm. —Ed.]

Brent: Alright.

Mark: I'm having a little brain freeze right now.

Brent: We'll find it and put it in the show notes along with a link to The Optical.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Listeners, you can go listen to all the back episodes of The Optical. You won't be disappointed.

Mark: Thank you.

Brent: Bobtiki. "Tiki."

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Where'd this Tiki thing come from? Now, I've been to your basement, Kilauea Cove. Did I pronounce that right?

Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Brent: Which is, it's a tiki bar with like a working, actual volcano. Not a real volcano, people.

Mark: Pretty close.

Brent: Pretty close, anyway. How'd you get into this and how does your volcano work?

Mark: It's hard to say. I'd actually been thinking about that recently. "How did I get into this in the first place?" I think I had a couple of friends at the same time who were a little bit into it that I was talking to, and there was also this ... One of the first little web video series, they were doing little, short episodes of. It was kind of like a little comedy sketch with these characters that they had made, and then, at the end, they would have a recipe for a cocktail, That was called a Tiki Bar TV.

Brent: Tiki Bar TV.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Okay.

Mark: I'm sure. I think it's at tikibar.tv and all the episodes are still up, but ...

Brent: Oh, cool.

Mark: I mean, it was just kind of goofy and then people were just having fun in their spare time building this, but it kind of got me intrigued. Just like, oh, maybe I should actually learne more about, you know, what is this tiki thing and ...?

Brent: Turns out rum drinks are good.

Mark: Well, yes. Also, that.

Brent: That helps.

Mark: ... but just diving into the history of it is kind of fascinating. You look at Disneyland and the way they build themed attractions ...

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: ... and that kind of immersive experience. Well, it's the same thing, but in a restaurant. It's just kind of this escapism. You're on a ...

Brent: Oh, sure.

Mark: ... a quiet island and just having a great time with ...

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: ... with the outside world cut out for a couple of hours. Eventually I went to visit my folks who live in Florida, but we kind of turned it into a larger vacation and went around to Ft. Lauderdale and The Keys and my parents that live near Tampa. In Ft. Lauderdale there's this amazing place called the Mai-Kai that's still, been there since... I think it's the early 60's [Since 1956. —Ed.], that's still this giant restaurant that's built around this kind of themed experience.

Brent: Cool.

Mark: They have like a whole floor show with different native dances from these islands and [crosstalk 00:26:24] ...

Brent: Oh, wow. It's good they're going all out.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Yeah. Right.

Mark: Yeah, it's a crazy place and it's still there and still going, so you know ...

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: ... go visit sometime.

Brent: Yeah, that sounds like fun.

Mark: It's amazing that this place still exists.

Brent: Your basement was featured in Critiki.

Mark: Yeah.

Brent: Which is a website about tiki bars?

Mark: Yeah. Humuhumu, she runs that and a couple other tiki-related websites and she's big into the history of it, but Critiki in specific is trying to catalog and celebrate all of these tiki bars that have existed over time, whether they're actually still open now or whether it's a historical site, but putting information about it and photos. If it's a current place then people can rate it.

Brent: Oh, that's cool.

Mark: Like, is it really tiki, or is it just like a beach bar that has weird pink drinks...

Brent: Yeah, faux tiki.

Mark: ...that only calls itself a tiki bar? Yeah. In the news section, she featured the volcano in my basement at one point.

Brent: Well, that — I think the nerd section of our audience may be curious, how does your volcano work?

Mark: Well, it's all Raspberry Pi based.

Brent: Of course, it is.

Mark: Yeah. So, got that and a bunch of LEDs from Adafruit that are lighting up the shelves with the tiki mugs and, you know.

Brent: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mark: There's a volcano on the top shelf that's got a little smoke generator inside it and there's sound that goes along with it and everything. Kind of a whole little, mini, Disney, themed experience.

Brent: Right. [crosstalk 00:28:16].

Mark: I'm still working on it. There's more things I want to add with ... I want to do kind of like they do at Trader Sam's, and I got like a tiny, little projector so you can kind of like front-project lava or something flowing down the face of the mug or ...

Brent: Awesome.

Mark: ... things like that. I haven't gotten to that yet.

Brent: Alright, yeah.

Mark: Maybe next year.

Brent: Maybe, yeah, for the next party. That's cool. Well, thank you, Mark. I would ask how people can find you on the web because the script says to ask that right now, but we've already covered that.

Mark: Yep.

Brent: You're @bobtiki ...

Mark: That's right.

Brent: ... on Twitter.

Mark: Yep.

Brent: I'd also like to thank our intrepid producer, Bobtiki. Say hello, Bobtiki.

Mark: [off mic] Hello, Bobtiki.

Brent: Especially, I want to thank you for listening. Thank you. Music!