mattmorris.org

I’ve used Twitter for years. I’ve found interesting links and things to read. I’ve met great people, including other iOS developers. Twitter helped me find work when I shifted from full-time employment to independent contracting. It even helped me find good people to work with when I needed icon design.

Late last year, I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. We’d just moved to a new city, started new jobs, bought a new house, had a new baby. Then the baby needed open-heart surgery and we spent a month in the hospital. Oh, and we had to deal with a health insurance company that has fought us every step of the way. I won’t say which one of those last two was more stressfull.

During this time, I began to understand how much time and attention I gave to Twitter. Even if I just wanted to keep up with all the Apple developer news, it was exhausting. Not to mention all the simultaneous conversations, the “um actuallys”, the shouting and unkindness. Even though I was simply a bystander in 99% of it, it began to feel like a heavy weight around my shoulders. And I needed this energy to focus on my family’s situation.

So, I haven’t posted to Twitter since late last year. I stopped reading my timeline. Then I took Tweetbot off my phone. It feels like there were a thousand voices in my head, and now they’ve vanished. It feels… peaceful. I have regained a little focus and a little sanity.

I’m going to dust of my RSS reader and consume news that way. I still want to post microblog-style updates, but I think I’ll just do them on this website. It’s likely that no one will read them, and that’s okay.

If you @-mention me on Twitter, I’ll see it eventually and will reply. Take care and be well.

I’m starting to see spam arrive at the unique email address I used at Patreon. Their customer information was compromised last year when they put a debug version of their website on the open Internet.

I attended a middle school that housed all of 7th and 8th grade within a single open classroom. It was a large, cavernous room that held almost two dozen classes only separated by a 4ft high wall. Hundreds of students were within earshot of each other. In the picture above, take a look at the ceiling lights and you can get a sense of how far back it goes.

As far as I can tell, these open classrooms1 started taking off in the 70s and were dying off by the early 90s. I wonder what choices led to this design. Was it based on some educational theory or was it just cost effective? Either way, why did it go out of fashion? Were there lessons learned that can be applied to today’s debate about open office plans?

Thanks to Dr. Hugh Harvey for his generous assistance in getting this printed. Read more about it on his blog.

When your child undergoes a serious surgery or is seriously ill, stress comes at you from all directions. Will she be able to lead a normal live? Will anything go wrong during the surgery? Will my insurance company pay for all of this?

But what if the only hospital that can help you is several hours away? Imagine having to unexpectedly feed and house a family of five for such a long period of time. Hotel and restaurant expenses add up quickly. Sometimes families are faced with a choice: endure financial hardship, or split up the family for months at a time.

The Ronald McDonald House is a charity whose mission is to provide some relief in this situation. If your child is hospitalized away from your home town, they will provide you with a room, two comfortable beds, and two or more meals each day. This is a tremendous relief for families dealing with a whirlwind of stress, worry, and pain.

We were fortunate that there is a Ronald McDonald House in Charleston, where we have now stayed for a total of two months. It’s a warm and welcoming place, a home-away from home where we can take a break from the hospital bedside, take a break from the stress, and find a little peace.

If you have any end-of-year giving left to do, please consider donating to the Ronald McDonald House. I’m not sure that we could have survived the past few months without them.

Sebastian will be discharged soon. He’s recovering well from the surgery, and we’re looking forward to having the entire family under one roof again. It’s been very difficult, but it’s almost over.

The doctors say that we’ll have to be very careful during the winter flu season. Most kids can weather RSV or a common virus with no problem. But we’re told that Sebastian has limited “pulmonary reserve” and any winter illness might send him back to the hospital. So, they’ve advised us to take him out in public as little as possible, and he absolutely cannot attend daycare.

In light of all this, I’ve decided to take a year off from consulting to keep my son at home. After his next open-heart surgery, we should be able to treat him like a normal kid, but for now we have to be a little careful.

I’ve been doing more consulting recently and have therefore been thrust into various Slack teams. While collaborating with my colleagues, I have learned one thing: GIFs are the lingua franca of technical communication.

I know I’m a little late to the party with respect to the GIF movement, but I thought I’d share the workflow that I cooked up this afternoon.

On iOS, I grabbed GIFwrapped and started building a small GIF collection. GIFWrapped lets you search for GIFs and then lets you save them to your Dropbox under /Apps/GIFWrapped. Nifty.

On OS X, I wanted to be able to use that same collection Dropbox and share links in Slack and on Twitter. To get the raw file URLs from Dropbox, you have to put them in Dropbox/Public. So, I moved the GIF files into in Dropbox/Public/Gifs and created a symlink to it inside Dropbox/Apps/GIFwrapped. (Luckily GIFwrapped recursively searches its folder for GIF files)

Next, I needed a way to quickly search for a gif and grab the Dropbox URL. I made this quick Automator workflow that does the following.

1. Prompts for a search string.
2. Does a Spotlight search inside the Gifs folder.
3. Displays a list of GIFs matching the search.
4. Copies the Dropbox URL to the pasteboard after you’ve chosen.
5. Displays a notification so that you know the URL is ready.

I bound the workflow to a keyboard shortcut and now I can deploy GIFs at a moment’s notice. If you’d like to give it a try, grab the automator workflow and give it a try. You’ll just need to modify the dropbox_url in the AppleScript and make sure that the various paths are correct for your system.