Cutting the Cable and Strengthening the Dollar
A piece of art by Matthew Anderson using 53's Paper and Pencil
Things will only get more impressive from here, people!

Ditching BlackBerry, Taking Mobile Further

14 February 2015

Wow. My last tech entry was more than a year ago. And what a year it was!

It's official. I've finally moved on from BlackBerry and I couldn't be happier with my new iPhone 6 Plus. The iOS ecosystem, plus the advent of Microsoft's free Office apps and slick OneDrive and DropBox integration, has made me more mobile and more productive than ever. I can't even take BlackBerry's notions of being a "power user" device seriously anymore. But I wish John Chen well. I'm still a stockholder waiting for a better opportunity to dump it.

Ditching Cable, Taking Mobile Further

12 January 2014

A few weeks before I took off for my fall break in Russia I did something rather bold. I cut the cable. Yep. I ditched Comcast in favor of Apple TV, a TV antenna and a desire to refocus on priorities like reading, writing and my dusty guitar. Plus, having that extra $120/month in my bank will certainly help when U2 - likely - start up a new tour this year.

Several weeks later, I have no regrets. I don't miss cable TV. I don't miss Investigation Discovery rehashing the same handful of murder cases from one TV series to the next. Heads up, ID, this is America and there've gotta be loads of disgusting murders to investigate. I don't miss Ancient Aliens. I don't miss Fox News' Saturday morning business block and their ceaseless regurgitation of the same conservative v. liberal talking points.

I have enjoyed changing it up and revisiting network news, plus discovering Sky News via Apple TV. Thanks to Sky News, I found out about Sylvester Stallone's art exhibit at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. And so the ball begins to roll in a fresh direction with new ideas.

And, thanks to the iPad mini with Retina Display, I'm looking to ditch my MacBook Pro sooner than later. The conversion to 64-bit processing was, in my estimation, a serious game changer. The power the iPad now holds is impressive and I'm doing more on my iPad mini than on my laptop. The laptop's almost four years old and, unlike the typical Dell, it's still going strong.

Right now it's a matter of finding a way around the Adobe behemoth in order to avoid renewing my Creative Cloud license and effectively paying for a lot of stuff I don't need thanks to their one-size-fits-all monthly licensing in perpetuity. There are options yet to be explored; iLife has potential, but it's not quite ready to replace what Adobe has to offer.

Excel? Word? They're toast. I'm delighted with the iWork suite on the iPad.

Final Draft? Got the app. But I still need to put brain to keyboard and get those screenplays written and shared with the world.

And I'm also hooked on 53's Paper app and Pencil stylus. Talk about a mix of old-school sensibilities and the latest in technology; they've nailed it and I'm now a struggling artist to boot. I was never great at drawing, but Paper and Pencil make me want to try again. There are some moments from Russia I'd like to capture on Paper, moments where cameras weren't allowed, like in Lenin's mausoleum.

I'm still sporting my BlackBerry Z10 and I'm still committed to never again buying another BlackBerry device. The latest CEO, John Chen, has his work cut out for him and I'm pleased to see my lame duck BBRY stock start to creep back up. But they've got a long way to go before they restore credibility. I'm still sore over the gibberish Lazaridis and Balsillie spouted off and then Heins went off the rails and proved he had no real vision for BlackBerry's future. Chen very well might have what it takes. But winning me back should be considered one of the great challenges that lies ahead.

Mattopia: Rebuilt from the Ground Up

21 July 2013

It all started because of back pain. Well, actually, it started long before then. Remodeling Mattopia, making it responsive for mobile devices and getting rid of all those Flash elements had been on the list for a while. It bumped up on the priorities list after I took the plunge and purchased an iPad Mini and fully appreciated what Mattopia was not and what it could be.

So, a few weeks ago when the chiropractor officially described me as "injured" and advised me to take it easy over the weekend, that's when work got underway totally redoing the infrastructure of Mattopia.

There's still some cleanup and fine tuning to be done. Right now the site is tablet friendly, but there's more work needed for smaller screens. And there are some odd IE issues (hardly a surprise) as well as some additional mods needed for Firefox.

But what has happened? Every one of the almost 1,200 pages has been touched.

All layouts are now on the grid system. Almost all of the tables are gone. This was a nice opportunity for cleaning up some of the dust from the last major retooling 3 years ago. There were around 60 photo galleries (showcasing something on the order of 2,000 images) updated to the Galleria script, with a somewhat satisfactory amount of responsiveness, using only five queries to find and replace old PHP code with the needed new code set. There were approximately 40 videos converted from FLV to MP4.

Flash animation is still used on the site, but there's now a simple degradation to a static image on devices that don't support Flash.

The backgrounds on wide screens have been overhauled (and are now driven by media queries), with a couple sections still in need of an upgrade.

Overall, Mattopia is in the best shape ever. It was a very speedy project crammed into the spare bits of time. But there's no need to spend a lot of time enjoying the change; there's now even more opportunity to take it to the next level.

Stay tuned, true believers.