Archive for the ‘ Uncategorized ’ Category

It’s 2019 and so much has changed in both my professional and personal life in terms of what I am doing, working on, enjoying, etc. This site feels so dated as to be comical, lack of updates, crufty old CSS and JS libs under this template I made for this thing 8 years ago in 2008. My bio is out of date, my publications, services and community sections are way out of date, and my portfolio hasn’t been updated since 2013! I feel its probably time to archive this and start fresh and modern. One thing I am definitely going to do is bump up the default point size in all my CSS to accommodate the slow downward spiral of my faltering eye-sight! Anybody remember pixel-fonts?

Until the archive and refresh happens, how about a quick update on some basics on my professional life from the past 7 tears as a start? Probably a good place as any to start.

A quick aside – you may be able to tell from going back through old entries on my site/blog – all the way back to the oldest entry from July of 2001 (when I started making entries in a custom system I developed that had a Flash front end) – I used to focus just primarily on tech related to my work and Macromedia/Adobe Flash related tech (which was a huge focus for me – thanks Flash – you paid the bills!) – along with a healthy dose of my personal and professional projects for self-promotion and to help push my career forward and garner work. It’s been nearly 10 years since I updated this site with any real regularity. In that time, I’ve changed, my family and friends have changed, my kids are teenagers, social media has changed, world politics have changed, tech is always changing, the universe is in a constant state of entropy – its the law! All this change, so I think I’ll be switching gears and changing the diversity of my content too. I don’t have the same desire or need for the same level of self promotion now, and I’d rather share more of my broad interests and hobbies. Sounds like a plan – but lets get the employment stuff out of the way to make room for the fun stuff.

Back to 2013, I was with PointRoll (great fun place, cool people) for a few years, PointRoll, sadly, was acquired by Sizmek in November of 2015. I watched a lot of great people get laid off – which was terrible – I stayed on through June of 2016 – which was “REDACTED“. I had been planning on taking some time off, but that was short lived, as a slew of exciting opportunities literally fell into my lap. A couple would have involved insane commutes, or me moving across the country to California or Washington, but I wasn’t ready at the time to uproot my kids and family, for a variety of reasons.

Luckily something perfect came along in my own backyard – an offer to join Scala Inc. a big player in the digital signage space (not the JAVA language variant) located not far from me in Malvern, PA. Scala has an interesting history/timeline – and some of it is documented. They’ve been around for over 30 years, and many of the core developers, including several still with us, came from various teams at Commodore (Amiga OS and others) since the old Commodore headquarters were nearby in West Chester (and where QVC now operates) and the original incarnations of some of Scala’s offerings were for the Amiga platform.

I joined in September of 2016, right as they were being acquired by Stratacache (which has turned out wonderfully) and as a former colleague of mine was taking over as COO of Scala. I jumped at the opportunity and dove in headfirst. I’ve been cranking away there for a little over two and a half years now and I am really enjoying it – time is flying by very quickly. I get to use all my past expertise and experience in interactive software development, design, art, immersive experiences, product development and programming on all kinds of interesting projects. Plus I get to do it all with some of the most awesome people and teams all over the world (including former colleagues and friends we have recruited to also come onboard) under the ever-expanding Stratacache umbrella. In fact I’m heading to Las Vegas tomorrow to help man the Stratacache booth at DSE 2019 – we have a ton going on there. I’ll be speaking in our Emerging Tech Theater and demonstrating some really cool collaborative VR projects we have been working at Scala and Stratacache – including some work I have been heading up in partnership with NVIDIA where we are leveraging their Holodeck Technology for some amazing photorealistic collaborative design in VR. If you are in Vegas stop by!

That is probably enough for now. So much has changed in my personal life too – but that will have to wait for another time and a site wide refresh. 🙂

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Wow – it’s already well into 2016. To say I have been a busy for the past 3 years is an understatement. I’ll keep this entry short and sweet. I expect to archive this aging iteration of the site at some point in the first half of 2016 and move on to the next. So many changes in my life, technology, etc., that have occurred during the past 3 years. I would like the site to reflect as much of those changes as possible. I’ve got a lot of work to do!

This was probably around the 6th or 7th major iteration of the site to go live since I registered the domain back in the late 90’s (back when you registered domains by faxing a form to InterNIC). I hope to make the next iteration a bit more interesting – stay tuned!

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After nearly nine years of freelance and working as an independent software developer, tomorrow I start a new chapter in my career. I am joining the Digital Innovation team at Pointroll as a Senior Creative Technologist. pointroll_logo I am super excited about the job, the team I’ll be working with, the new challenges and projects I’ll face, and all the changes to my life that taking this position will entail.

I want to thank all of my fantastic friends and clients who over the years have provided some incredible opportunities and projects to work on. I wouldn’t have been able to support my wife and children for so long and so well, had I not been lucky enough to have such wonderful clients to collaborate with on so many cool projects – thank you all for a such a fantastic streak!

I plan on a follow up post once I settle in, describing more about what I’ll be doing – hang tight 🙂

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The event site for Flash Camp Philadelphia, November 7, 2009 is now live – check it out:

http://flashcamp.pfpaug.org/

Keep an eye on the site and on our twitter account: @flashcampphilly for more news and updates!

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This site is available for historical purposes, but is no longer actively updated.
Please visit https://rmhall.org/ in Q1 of 2023 for all the latest and greatest!

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