Shaine Mata Blog

Boy do I have a story for you about my day. Now that it's almost over, I feel safe having a laugh over the comedy of it. Normally, I drink a couple of glasses of wine each night for its therapeutic properties. I think tonight I shall drink to celebrate the day's close. Let's start off with the setting. I am newly unemployed. That's bad. But, fortunately, I have skills and clients have been calling me to fix their technology. That's good. In fact, I had some subcontract work to do today. The job was quite simple, install a printer. Then one of the partners in the business had some issues with remote access for a technical support guy trying to fix their software, so he has me try to figure out what the problem is. I know very little about the network and nothing about the software, because I'm a sub who does overflow work. That's bad. But, because I don't freak out easy, we figure something out and determine that there is some network trouble somewh

I have mentioned ad nauseam that I am a big fan of  +Smartsheet  and use it to track all of my daily tasks and projects. I have discovered the power of adding a budget column to my tasks sheet. Stuff that relates to me, personally, has one big sheet that gets subdivided into sections and subsections for every aspect of being Shaine Lee Mata. Currently, it's a list with over 900 items. I agree with you that I have way too many items listed. I imagine that one could either give up on ever getting around to 900 items, or truly put everything into making a dent in the list. Yet, it seems that I am perpetually removing items that are done and adding some back. There are items that never seem to come off the list. They do eventually, but it seems like they never do. I wondered why some items were lingering more than others. Obviously, it's because I never got around to doing them; but, what was holding me back. So, I went down the list and asked myself what was stopping me from d

A few weeks ago, I read an article about Slack, a marvelous business tool that is useful for team communications and project information gathering. Slack has been a hit among knowledge workers, particularly people who manage online services. I signed up for the free trial and was blown away. However, despite my deep respect for the product, I'm going to have to walk away from it. The issue is not with Slack itself. I think Slack is the victim of the "network effect" to some extent, or the reverse of it, rather. I don't have a network on Slack. Therefore, it is a really cool way to organize project information and data streams. However, I already have invested into  +Evernote  and  +Smartsheet . While I do not have networks on those products either, they are rather powerful without the network. And so, I find that the ability to create streams of information rather than a giant pile of...email is a great idea. Slack makes sense in so many ways. I have written in

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I have some problems with Bitcoin that cause me some concern for its long-term usage. These concerns are not about the immediate viability of the cryptocurrency. For now, I think Bitcoin is the right innovation for the modern world. However, there are some shortcomings that concern me. Lost Bitcoins If you lose your wallet information, let's say your dog ate the paper on which you wrote your keys, or maybe he ate your hard drive, then you have no way of accessing that lost Bitcoin, nor anybody else for that matter. This means that they are stuck on the ledger forever, never to be traded again. With a few million Bitcoin in circulation, this doesn't sound like a big deal, a few Bitcoin here and there. However, over time, these lost Bitcoins can add up, reducing the overall availability of Bitcoin for use. Things seem to be working more or less OK for the moment, but, if the ultimate goal is to get all 8 Billion people on Earth using Bitcoin for commerce, there already are

Reading through the IRS Guidance on Bitcoin , it states that the IRS considers Bitcoin as personal property. So, if you, for example, buy a car for $1000 and sell it for $3000 after some minor repairs, the value added is considered income by the IRS and is taxable. Similarly, if you buy Bitcoin at $320 and sell it for $340, you pay taxes on the $20 profit. This is very similar to stocks, with the exception that you buy whole units of stocks, generally. You can take a loss or make a capital gain. The way you track this is by keeping records of how much you paid for the stock and for how much you sold it, typically using a FIFO (First In, First Out) basis. With stocks, you sell whole units as well. Tracking your stocks only gets ornery when you buy a stock on a recurring basis. With stocks, you also add transaction fees and commissions into your cost. With Bitcoin, accounting is pretty much the same, except that the arithmetic gets complicated because we do not deal with whole units

I've paid a price for consolidating my retirement accounts. I had a traditional IRA to which I sporadically contributed since age 20. It wasn't a lot of money, but it was something. In addition, having worked for the State of Texas, I had 401k and 401a accounts which were out of my control as a non-state employee. I decided to roll them together into one account at a local Edward Jones office. So, I've slowly been turning my rolled over money into stock positions. The funny thing is that we have been expecting a market correction. So, I decided to slowly put my money into positions rather than all at once. Of course, as soon as most of my money is alloted, the market takes a crap. I have positions in BBL , BP , DEM , GLD , HCN , HSBC , KO , RIG , and T  in the IRA. I bought most of that in the past couple months as the market was reaching its peaks. Sensing that a market correction is imminent, I added GLD to my portfolio so that I don't freak out so much. It has in

Lately, I have been dedicating a little bit of spare time towards learning about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and others. On the surface, there isn't much difference between these newer coins and good old-fashioned Linden dollars from  +Second Life . Once you read into the currencies more, however, there are some significant differences, which don't seem of much use at the moment. I first got interested when I heard that Circle.com had opened up to the public. Signing up was much easier than opening a bank account, that's for certain. Rather than dive in with guns blazing, I decided to get started with just $20. My mistake was attempting to use my debit card to deposit. My first try was flat out declined. My second attempt a few days later contemplated depositing, but ultimately rejected the deposit. On my third try, I used a bank draft instead. That seemed to work just fine. Customer service at Circle was a little lame. They just give you gene

I just wrote a blog post on  +RGV Life  about riding to McAllen on the bus . I am a willing bus rider. I enjoy driving a car on occasion; but, most of the time, I don't really like driving. Even so, I think there is a place for having multiple modes of transportation available to you. I'm not a hipster or save the planet type of guy. I am more inclined towards using the right tool for the job. If, for example, you need to go buy a six pack of beer at the convenience store, you don't need to drive your car or truck over there when you could just jump on a scooter and pppppppppp your way over there, and back. If you want to visit somebody across town, you could ride your motorcycle over and back. Unless you are expecting to have a passenger, you don't need a four-wheeled vehicle. To drive the point home, you use a bike, moped, motorcycle, or car depending on your particular needs. Using a car for everything seems to me like overuse of a single asset. You can reduce

I believe that habits will ultimately make Apple Pay not so revolutionary as it is being made out. They are essentially repackaging what has already been done; but, beyond that, the reason it won't be ubiquitous is low tech in nature, human nature, rather. +Google Wallet  already does most of what Apple Pay proposes. The technology is different, given that mobile carriers did not want to allow access to a phone's secure element. Yada yada. In any case, my problem with Google Wallet, specifically tap to pay, has been that it doesn't work everywhere. I'll come back to this. It is great that Apple has partnerships with 200K merchants and Target. The problem for Apple, however, is that I don't use Apple products, nor plan to use them anytime soon. Having merchant partnerships isn't compelling enough reason for me to buy an iPhone 6. There are millions of people like me who really don't care to enter the Apple ecosphere. Given the reluctance of millions to

+Google Chrome  announced the first Android Apps ported to Chromebooks today. Personally, I am a big fan of  +Evernote . Over the years, it has proven itself a great service where I can manage information. Naturally, when I read that Evernote is one of the first apps ported, I was excited. I don't know if this is a big "however". In the past, I have not used the web version of Evernote because of the number of notes that I have in it, around 4,000. My Evernote database is somewhere north of 2 GB. This is not very much data, considering that I have hundreds of GBs of data in other products, especially  +Google Drive . Back to my point, using the browser version is slow given the volume of HTML necessary to render my account. The slowness is understandable. At one time, I experimented with single file Wikis that ran in an html file. They worked OK up to a point. As the HTML file grew larger, browsers struggled. I have a demo Evernote account that I use for workshops, w

If your father had a heart attack before reaching retirement age, and suffered prolonged effects afterward, what would you do to better your chances of living to the current life expectancy? This is something that concerns me. My father is no longer with us. He left us before he could retire based on age. Going over all kinds of information in medical journals and online resources dedicated to health, three things stand out as making some difference in helping one avoid a nasty turn in cardiovascular health. These relate to activity, taking aspirin every day, and drinking wine daily. Walking and Activity Apparently, living a sedentary life is bad for you. Most of what I've read says that you need at least 30 minutes of activity per day. There are also suggestions that 10K steps per day should be your goal. In case you are not sure which to do, or want to do both, it's much easier if you get a  +Fitbit . This way you can track your progress wither way. But, I've als

My two youngest played outside with colored chalk earlier in the Summer. They drew some figures. It seemed appropriate to save it in photos.  They start school tomorrow, so I don't know if they will have any more sidewalk art this year. Io's Flower Magnus Ladybug Butterfly

Mission to set up Wi-Fi hotspots for students - The Monitor: Local News

Wireless Nerd: Community / Municipal Networks and Classroom Exten... : An article got published in our local paper with a few lines I was quoted on regarding citywide wireless access. " Misison to Set...

Writing down your tasks, projects, and goals into checklists, enumeration, is very important for helping you make the best of your time. If you have read David Allen's book, Getting Things Done, he states clearly that it is important to dump all of your pending tasks and other inputs into a trusted system, which you can later use to organize your productive time. There is more to writing down your tasks than he explains. Allen states that the main reason for writing down everything is so that you can achieve a "mind like water". The explanation is thus: In karate, there is an image that's used to define the position of perfect readiness: "mind like water." Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreact or underreact. When you write things down, according to Allen, it allows your mind to let go of all the m

Evernote is by far one of the greatest tools available for personal information management. The strengths of Evernote can also result in some drawbacks when it comes to recalling information. There are some remedies that one must use to prevent information getting lost. It is once you get past a few thousand notes that it becomes evident that you need to refine your note taking and indexing. Let us start off by defining note taking. In the context of Evernote, note taking refers to typing a note, taking a photograph, recording video, recording audio, uploading a file, or using the handwriting feature. Evernote's versatility in receiving notes is what makes the application such a great personal asset. However, there are some trouble spots that could arise in recalling notes if you do not invest time in organizing each note. The result is that each search pulls up too many results, the wrong results, or none of the results you need. It is necessary to have ways to refine results

I recently started working at Frontera Consulting, LLC . The founders, and by extension the company, have had a lot of experience in creating and managing large networks and wireless deployments, ranging from setting up ISPs, to municipal Wi-Fi, and even Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint links. This is the type of job that is a perfect fit for me. I love the magic of receiving boxes of hardware and cable that will eventually become a communication network. There is always a sense of adventure that comes from going out in the field to install the equipment after you have set it up and run tests on it. To the average user, it's just Wi-Fi; big deal. Almost everybody has a Wi-Fi router at home. Of course, they're not setting up backhauls, VLANS, and fiber links to get better reception while sitting on the toilet. I feel gratification knowing that the end product just works. It is satisfying to know how much work goes into setting up a system that "just works". Ev

I had to reset my Nexus 7 tablet today because I had set up file encryption This is the same tablet that I sent in to Asus for repair because it just up and died. It has been working more or less OK since I got it back, with the exception that it can't see 5 GHz channels. Back to the point of this post, I set up encryption on the tablet and did not bother to write down the encryption password anywhere. I cycled through my usual keys in different variations without any luck. This is what I call outsmarting myself. Apparently I was so clever at protecting my data that not even I could figure out how to get at it. So, I reset my tablet and have been adding apps back to the Nexus again. The silver lining to all this is that I have discovered that there are new apps by Microsoft and Google that I want to try. It appears that maybe even the Blogger app is updated, although I am probably misremembering. Despite this mishap, I think I shall reencrypt the tablet and write down the passwo

I am finally in a position to use Google Wallet for making payments. But, I don't know if I can use Google Wallet tap and pay from my Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi only) without a network connection. The Help article on the subject is not clear on the matter. It states that you need a network connection once per day for tap and pay. It does not explicitly say that you need a connection to make payment at the point of sale; it implies that you merely need to sync once per day or to unlock via PIN. I asked a friend of mine who has used Google Wallet to tap and pay; but, he has always had mobile service when he has done it. I called Google Wallet support; it took the guy a while to search for an answer while I was on hold. He seemed to think that I do need a network connection. Forums and other articles seem split on the question. Why Ask Now? For many reasons, I was not able to make use of the service since it launched. I ordered the Google Wallet card as soon as I was able to access the f

Once upon a time, I would buy the newspaper and read it. Upon recently purchasing a Kindle , and already having a BN Nook, I have come to realize that I do not consume news as I once did. Upon buying a Kindle from the pawn shop, I thought perhaps I would get a newspaper subscription; but, I decided to buy a single issue instead. It has been two weeks; and I have not finished reading through that issue. In that time, I have read books via the text-to-speech feature; but, I have barely touched the news. My only other distraction, besides books, is my daily Instapaper that pulls from various sources. At most, it includes the weekly local paper . To be fair, it is not only my news consumption that has diminished. My email also receives less and less attention, in addition to my social media presence. I do check in on occasion, posting the odd item here and there. But, it becomes more of a binge activity as of late. When I do get online, lately, it becomes more deliberate and spe

Tonight, I wanted to cast Game of Thrones to the TV. We had spent time watching Dr Who, which ran into the broadcast time. I went to grab my Nexus 7 tablet to launch HBO Go. Except, that my tablet would not go. I tried holding down the power button. And then I Googled how to reset holding down the power and volume down buttons. There are other steps involved which involve charging for different time periods. I don't have time tonight. I'll try to resurrect my Nexus tomorrow. If that doesn't work, I suppose there shall be a phone call to make and warranty work to initiate. It's such a bummer, partially because I missed the big fight on Game of Thrones. But, it's also a bummer because I really rely on my tablet to get me through the day. I only recently purchased a Kindle Touch at a pawn shop, which is surprisingly useful. Before going to bed, I have made some adjustments to my IFTTT recipes to send certain updates to Instapaper, which I can update. The rest can

Our household finally adopted a Kindle. As I am an Amazon Prime subscriber, and I already do so much business with Amazon, it made sense to invite a Kindle into our home. When it came time for my family to decide whether to go the route of Kindle or Nook, we decided to go with the Nook. Our family frequents the local Barnes and Noble stores, so there was that congruent experience possible between retail store and eBook reader. I haven't jumped on board the Kindle bandwagon all the way. Rather than a recent model, I stopped by the pawn shop and picked up a Kindle Touch for a little less than $40. This model is similar to the Nook Simple Touch in that there is a power button, a home button, and a touch screen. I like that about the Nook. The current base model Kindle has those stupid little buttons on the edges that I would most likely snap off some day. The biggest draw to the Kindle, for me, is that it is much easier for getting work documents in it through the Amazon Cloud Dri

The idea of three screens is not my original idea. International man of Technology PR,  +Alan Weinkrantz  introduced me to the idea through his blog, 3screens.net where he originally meant broadcast television, your desktop, and your mobile phone. The concept began with Alan's subscription to AT&T's U-Verse, which was pretty new at the time. Back to the point, you had 3 screens to enjoy media. Alan's tastes in media have evolved to where he watches less broadcast television and more internet broadcasts. His three screens these days likely involve his laptop, iPad, and iPhone. I think for many of us, the experience is similar. What We Do Not everybody does this. For some of us who are compulsive Internet users, we can be watching TV with a laptop, tablet, or phone handy to check up on actor profiles, obscure references in the script, or for some backstory. We may be twittering our reactions to the latest Game of Thrones episode as it's playing. We might be watc

What typically happens when I set out to write a blog post, lately, is that I have ideas and a rough outline of what I want to write. I sit down and start typing away at the keyboard. I get through a good chunk of the body and then ...that's it.  The end product is not ready for publishing; but, I don't quite want to spend time editing either. So, the piece gets saved into drafts, and stays there.  I have given thought to why this is. Part of it is that I am stealing away time to write a blog post. I have other things that need doing; but, there is also writing that needs to be done. However, the time spent on writing is often is short spurts and then back to doing what I was doing. The solution to this is that I should schedule time specifically for blogging. This way my mind is completely focused on accomplishing the task rather than being elsewhere.  Another issue is that the post as written turns out different than imagined. While writing, my thoughts change as d

I had an opportunity to connect the Microsoft vision with Windows 8, RT, and Mobile. Tonight, I went out shopping for tires for my wife's van. So naturally, I wound up at Best Buy to check out what's new on the retail tech market. I had a chance to play with a touchscreen Windows 8 all-in-one computer. In recent days, I have heard good reports on Windows 8.1 for mobile, especially Cortana, the new personal assistant. And, of course, I've had clients purchase the Microsoft Surface tablet. All of these together gave me the "aha!" moment I get from time to time. Before jumping into the blog post, allow me to preface that I am a big Google fan. I love the way Google does many things, even the ones that freak other people out. When I recommend to clients that they should switch to Google Apps, it's often because of the low cost and ease of use. The biggest hurdle I have is when people are steeped in Microsoft experience. I cannot, for the life of me, convince peo

For the past few months, I've been heeding the advice of the medical community in that I have been drinking a glass or two of wine every evening, . . . well, it's mostly two glasses and occasionally one. Back to the story, the other night I indulged in an extra glass of wine, number three. Boy, was that a mistake. Although I was feeling pretty good in the evening, the next day was ass-draggy. Normally, I would go past the limit on a Friday or Saturday evening, when I know that I can sleep in the next day. I suppose I never suffered the consequences having slept them off. So, the lesson here, kids, is that you should stop at one or two glasses of wine if you have to go to work the next day. That is, if you have a rather strict schedule and are up past your ideal bedtime. It's possible that you have the liver of an alcoholic, and you wouldn't even feel buzzed after two glasses of wine. If this is the case, are you really drinking for the health benefit? After the se

Google announced that their Sheets and Docs apps within Google Drive will now be standalone apps on Android . Furthermore, they will work very well in offline mode. This is great news for me as using Google Drive has been unsatisfying when I am without mobile service, which is often at work. By making the web apps modular and usable offline, they make it easier for people like me to start creating things without hunting for a signal. I have used Quickoffice on occasion, as the app does work in offline mode. However, those files are apparently in a different format as Google Docs and Google Sheets. Technically, Quickoffice can do the same things; but, the results are not the same. I have introduced a competitor to Sheets recently, Smartsheet . However, Smartsheet suffers the same shortcomings that Google Drive previously had, which is the required Internet access. I don't think I'll abandon Smartsheet. Despite their limitation, it is much better suited to tracking work. I wo

Many reviews on wearable technology often sound disappointed that the devices do not do more. We have grown up with publications (comics) that use watches and other small devices capable of live audio and video conferencing from anywhere in the world. We expect standalone devices that are almost magical in their ability to handle heavy computing and communications on their own, at least until the bad guy finds one and smashes it with his heel. I propose a different mindset. After all, long ago, computing was mostly a client-server technology. You had a VAX or UNIX server somewhere that allowed you to log in and use some cycles to check email, run programs, or manage files. The computing was all done from a central computer. Your terminal was simply there to make your work viewable. Then, with the rise in desktop PCs, we gave each user the ability to do their own computing on their own machine anytime they needed. Then we networked the machines, and added servers. For productive work

Io goes outside to blow bubbles and watch them fly away. She is a long ways from when she was younger and had little breath control. She used to fail at bubbles because she would blow too hard through the wand. All she could manage was to drip bubble solution all over the floor. It is fascinating to watch children grow through different phases. Io is our last child of three. The next time we see such things will be through grandchildren, I disagree that children grow up too fast, not when you pay attention to them.