Hello everyone! It was great to be able to share Cedar Ridge’s worship center with Holli’s studio. This year I cloned myself to record video from the balcony, run sound, and dance in two numbers. What more will next year hold?!

I’ve also upped my video hosting game. Well, maybe. Hopefully the following video streams well no matter your internet speed (there are multiple resolutions at multiple bitrates, just like YouTube!). As always, if you want the highest-quality original file, the link is at the end.

Once again – a phenomenal job by everyone, and a blessing to be able to share such truth through music and dance. Thanks for letting me be a part of sharing this (and for putting up with some of my “interesting” editing choices during the Guy’s Team).

The top-quality in the stream is 5mbps; the original video is 15mbps and clocks in at over 13GB. But if you’d like it for archival purposes, help yourself:

Direct download (13.24GB): 2026HolliRecital.mp4

Here is the 2025 Holli Powell Dance Recital. I first want to apologize – I was almost heartbroken as I watched the footage – some combination of Samsung camera software update and heads that kept walking in front of the camera between songs conspired to break its aperture setting, and some of the songs – particularly those with dazzling bright costumes – are almost completely washed out. I tried as best I could to recover / adjust some of the highlights, but there’s only so much I could do. At least you can still see the movements once you pick out your child. I’m very sorry for that, but I am still happy to share what I do have.

Once again – everyone did a fantastic job (except, maybe that one lifeguard that bludgeoned a victim back to life…), and I’m proud to be a dance father and participant in this company that gives glory to God and brings smiles to so many faces. See you all again next year!

• Direct file download (9gb)

(Note – of course now that everything’s all done, I see that my post-processing cut off some of the names in the Dancer’s Prayer! I’ll get that fixed, but am busy the rest of the day, so it might be a day or two before that gets re-uploaded here – I figured I’d not make all y’all wait any longer)

Congratulations to the kids, parents and volunteers that helped put on a phenomenal Christmas program at Trinity this year! You all did such a great job, and the music was so good (of course, replaying it over and over while editing this last week has certainly enforced its position of being permanently stuck in my head!)

I’m always wanting to tweak some things (hence the “v4”), but I wanted to get out what I have before Christmas, so you all can re-watch it or share it with family members who might have missed it.

Links to the unlisted YouTube as well as a direct download may be found at the following page – use the password received from Jean or your friend / family member (if you need a hint, it’s Grandma’s favorite catch-phrase!)

https://flessnerfam.com/back-to-the-manger-media

It’s finally here! With two cameras and some new software, I had a lot of fun editing the recital with some fun effects and good angles. As always – everyone did such a great job, and it was a pleasure to watch all the dancers perform (sometimes about 5-20 times as I edited portions!).

With Taylor Swift, the Friends theme, and of course all the Disney songs, there’s no way this wouldn’t be immediately content-blocked on YouTube or Facebook, so I’m not even going to try. I may play around with some newfangled streaming formats, but for now, we’ll stick with what’s worked in the past: two versions that hopefully work for most people. You need fairly decent bandwidth to stream either. Alternatively, you can download the files directly and watch on your computer, phone, or smart tv via something like Plex.

• 1080p High bitrate version (15GB)
• 1080p Low bitrate version (3.3GB)

Everybody has bad experiences in healthcare. Though I haven’t (yet, thankfully) dealt with the nightmare of facing bankruptcy or being denied urgent treatment, I do have my own stories of clear breaks in the healthcare ecosystem. This category is my attempt to share some of them on an increasingly-sparsely-populated family blog.

Today’s story culminates with the following message I sent to some fellow HL7 nerds:

Who’s at fault when a health system doesn’t properly update your address, doesn’t tell you you have a balance when you check in for subsequent visits, doesn’t show anything about said balance in the billing area of MyChart, and then sends you to collections when the bills they’ve sent to a 5-year-out-of-date address go unpaid?

Read on to find out how it happened, why it’s extra-infuriating to a nerd like myself, and what you can do to prevent it from happening to you!

Hello dancers, family, and friends! I’ll start by reiterating how much of a blast I had watching everyone dance and have fun, as well as putting together this version of the video. It took a little while, but I hope the end result is worth it.

Once again, YouTube has blocked our recital video; obnoxiously after leaving it up for two days, so I thought everything was okay. This time practically every dance is affected, so the only way to watch will be on this page (or to download the file yourself).

In any case – the same caveats as before – I have two versions here, and you need fairly decent bandwidth to stream either. Alternatively, you can download the files directly and watch on your computer, phone, or smart tv via something like Plex.

• 1080p High bitrate version (15GB) (available by request)
• 1080p Low bitrate version (5GB)

Since I spent the time adding chapters in YouTube, I took a stab and re-creating them here. It’s quick-n-dirty, but it seems to work (at least on my machine – hah! the common developer’s defense)

While YouTube tries to figure out whether or not I’m a criminal for uploading a kids’ dance recital using commercial music, here is one attempt to share it with others!

Update! I finally have a version on YouTube that isn’t blocked; it has some songs muted, but if you struggle to play the versions on this post, go check out https://youtu.be/5V6oaZ8jnT0

Note – this is not like YouTube; if your internet isn’t fast enough, it just won’t work (i.e. don’t try to do this on mobile). The regular quality version is 6GB for a 2-hour show which translates to about 7mbps internet required to watch this. If you have troubles or just want to download either version, use one of the following links:

• Files are no longer available here, but feel free to message me on Facebook (or comment on this post), and I can still get them to you!

(One more caveat / apology – someone bumped the camera before act 2 while I was on-stage; I’m so sorry for the couple of dancers who got cut off!)

Three of my kids and I (yes, I, too) were in a dance recital this last Saturday. With my fancy new Galaxy S22Ultra, I recorded the whole thing in 4k on a tripod and told a few people that I was planning on sharing it on the studio’s Facebook page. Unfortunately that’s seeming less and less possible.

Last year, after livestreaming the recital when it was at a smaller theater, I learned that Facebook is aggressive and will just mute your stream if it detects any copyrighted material. I’ve shared several things to YouTube, though, and only received demonitization strikes (as if I’m actually making any money on these things), so I figured that’d be a better route this year.

After several hours of editing and encoding the 2 hour recital, I was ready to upload to YouTube. a 45-gig source file was no trouble for my municipal fiber connection, and it uploaded in just a few minutes. But then the strikes started rolling in.

First the typical “demonitization” strikes. Oh, no! The 10-20 views this video will ever see won’t earn me any fractions of pennies. But then I was notified that the video would be blocked in some countries. After checking, I discovered that no Russians could see the recital, which seems to be a restriction I can live with. But then came the heavy hammer. 7 of the strikes caused the entire video to be blocked throughout all of YouTube.

70 different copyright holders are fine with a kids’ dance recital being on YouTube and just extracting the pennies in ad revenue it’ll produce. 7 want to break kids (and this daddy’s) hearts. Look, I get that artists and publishers are entitled to compensation for their work. But being able to share home video of a dance recital with your friends shouldn’t require a team of lawyers, fancy audio manipulation, or complicated manual work-arounds.

In the meantime, I have the original file (and some lighter-weight encodes as I produce them) available at https://flessnerfam.com/danceRecital/ Additionally, it seems like YouTube will let me just mute the “offending” portions, but each one requires re-processing the video… which takes several hours. So maybe in a week, it’ll be available…. with 7 randomly scattered silences.

(P.S. I also wanted to share the original Bobby Fischer skit, but good luck ever finding SNL clips on YouTube that aren’t immediately taken down for similar reasons. I guess they figure their DVD sales…or these days Peacock Premium subscriptions…actually draw more revenue than the millions of views some of these sketches would pull on YouTube…. well, they didn’t get any revenue from me)