Synacor Desk Swag

While cleaning things I happen to cross a pile of papers and sticky notes containing random phrases and interesting comments from coworkers at a previous job I used to work. I felt the need to get these digitized and memorialized as soon as the wave of nostalgia hit.

As an initial prerequisite to reading/seeing this data: I was called “Sparky”, a name provided to me by David Molik shortly after I was employed. The reasoning was simple: There’s just too many “Matts” in an office building of 300 professionals to verbally discern me from the rest, so a moniker was appropriate. It stuck for a decade, and was much better than my previous moniker “Crash.”

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Death Education

Sex Education. Everyone who went through secondary school remembers this. Parents remember the permission slips and kids remember teachers telling their students to “grow up” with the cringey displays of how the miracle of life happens.

There isn’t much taught about Death Education.

A random video came across my eyeballs on facebook that helps make this one of the most exciting topics to learn about, complete with the “miracle of death.” The clip is from the FX Network show “Dying for Sex“, Season 1, Episode 8.

I thought that if I were to teach about death this is the way it should be done.

Props for whomever wrote the dialogue for this scene. It’s lightweight, enthusiastic, and direct; exactly how knowledge should be passed along.

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My Magic Number

I have a magic number.

It’s been a number that I invented as part of an experience with a scientific calculator when I was in the 8th grade (circa 1994-1995). The calculator I possessed had the ability to convert between different number bases, specifically between decimal, binary, octal, and hexadecimal. Being the child I was I saw potential with using the calculators hexadecimal alphabet and writing letters and numbers together.

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