Today I had the honor of being Scobleized. Given my measly two posts and the plain vanilla look of this blog, Robert has been most generous to point his readers in my direction. Thank you. I’ve just joined this party, and I feel welcome already.

First, I should apologize for the lack of personal information available on this site. I will fix that. I’m glad Robert was able to dig up a press release to introduce me — but it’s a shame that it is more than 6 years old.

So who is Mason Hale?

I am Chief Technologist at frog design, a highly-regarded design firm that has been consistently churning out great products and customer experiences for some 34 years now. I founded and manage frog’s digital technology consulting practice. We design, prototype and build websites and software for clients including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, General Electric, and T-Mobile. We specialize in creating rich, intuitive user interfaces using technologies such as Flash, Dynamic HTML, ASP.NET/C#, and Java.

However, this site is my personal site, and the views expressed here are my own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer. In addition, because the work we do is highly-confidential — I am generally not at liberty to to discuss the projects or clients I might be working with at any given time. So don’t expect this to be the “inside frog” blog.

That said, I am very lucky to work with some really smart, creative people on challenging, thought-provoking projects. That is bound to influence my thinking, and by extension this blog.

I am a husband and father of three — two boys, one girl. I live in Austin, Texas — and love it here. My undergraduate degree is in film production (radio-television-film) from the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a classmate of Robert Rodriguez and Matthew McConaughey. I went to high school in Fort Worth. Before that I moved around a bit, with stops in Breckenridge, Colorado; Casper, Wyoming; and Houston.

Some of you may remember me from my early involvement with Userland Frontier — the predecessor of today’s Manila and Radio Userland products. With Dave Winer, I spearheaded the development of the Frontier CGI Framework — a popular toolkit (at the time) for creating web-based applications on Mac OS web servers. I learned an amazing amount during that period of my life, and I’m very grateful to Dave and the rest of the early-Frontier community for that.

Today, I am in the final throes of completing my master’s degree in engineering management. I’ve completed all the coursework and am working on my thesis now. You can be sure I’ll be floating some of my ideas here.

That’s a brief, but more current and well-rounded introduction. I look forward to connecting with old friends and making new ones. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.