Archive for the ‘ Personal ’ 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 My bio is out of date, my publications, services and community sections are way out of date, and my portfolio hasn’t been updated since 2013!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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Today on 08/08/08 I decided to throw the switch on a new version of my personal site. If the DNS changes have begun to propagate and you are reading this right now you are seeing the new site. This will mark the 4th major version of my site over the years since it was originally launched in 1997.

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I wanted to announce the birth of my second child, this time a daughter – Delaney Ann Hall was born on April 27th at 6:38am. She weighed 8lbs 14oz and was 21.5 inches long. She is amazing and joins her big brother Owen, who will be two in just a few weeks on May 14th. We are all doing great, just very tired at the moment.

I have put together a special page with a bunch of links to photos on my wife Melissa’s Flickr account, as well as a bunch of videos I uploaded to my Viddler account which can be found here:

http://delaney.impossibilities.com/

I am still a bit exhausted from the week and meant to get this up sooner but just havent had the energy or the time. I’ll put up some additional detail here soon as well.

Thanks to all my twitter friends and family who have written thanks and congratulations. If you haven’t heard back from me yet, I will get back to you as soon as I can.

I am taking off the next couple weeks from work and new projects to spend with my new daughter and the rest of my family, so I wont be able to respond to emails and other inquiries as fast as I normally do, so please allow a little extra time for replies.

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I am extremely happy and proud to announce that my first child – Owen Martell Hall was born Sunday May 14th, 2006 at 4:40pm – a perfect Mothers day gift. He weighed in at 8 pounds, 5 ounces and 21 inches long. My wife Melissa and I couldn’t be happier. I’ll have some more photos and videos for friends and family shortly, but right now we are all exhausted as Melissa went into labor around 10pm Saturday night, so it has been quite a long 24 hours. I am now going to try and sleep a little as tomorrow is actually our 2 year wedding anniversary – quite a week indeed! Apologies in advance if I don’t respond to emails and work related items as rapidly as normal for the next few weeks as I get to know my new best friend.

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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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