This past week the language got hot between Chicago and Los Angeles, the American cities vying to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Once a decision is made between the two, that city will be competing against cities around the world to be the host. A decision will be coming in April on the US entry.

Various elements of the plans for the Olympics have already been released. Most of the Olympic village will be on the South Side of the city, and will feature a “temporary” stadium as the main venue for the games. Temporary means it will be torn down after the 2 week event. Other elements will remain, namely the residences that will become housing afterwards. Other existing venues in the city will be used for the games, including Grant Park as a main party spot and Millennium Park for medal awards.

The notion of temporary structures is not new to the Second City. Most all of the buildings and landscape of the 1893 Columbian Exposition were designed to be temporary and are gone, with the exception of the rebuild building now housing the Museum of Science and Industry. Temporary structures is not unique to us, as the stadium from the 1996 Summer Olympics became Turner Field in Atlanta.

I hope this is not completely a case of history repeating itself. Granted, Chicago is a city that believes it has to continually improve and in some cases reinvent itself, which is part of the reason I live here! I only hope that in the planning of changes to the city, consideration is made to develop some structures that, long after 2016, are blatant, lasting symbols that the world came to Chicago to compete. The spirit of the Olympics would build leading up to the event, but those symbols would make it last a lot longer.

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If you are "ferrously challenged" like I am, which means you can't iron a garment to save your life, you probably use dry cleaners to get your shirts and other clothes nice and crisp. Over time, you probably accumulate many wire hangers. So what do you do with them? Allow me to make a suggestion – return them to your dry cleaners.

Recently I brought back a whole stack of hangers to the cleaners. After pulling them out of my garment bag, the owner thanked me profusely, telling me that the cost of hangers has been on the rise. So as a result, I am keeping their costs down, which will hopefully relate in keeping my costs down.

There’s also the question of recycling hangers that are used for clothing. When I take a garment off a dry cleaning hanger I do not reuse it, as I prefer to use a more stable hanger. Thus the hangers I return are, as far as I am concerned, clean.

Is that the case for all hangers? Am I thinking about this too much?

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If you own a domain name, you should know who manages it. This includes who you should be paying when it is time to renew it. Where some may think this is obvious, there are businesses out there who want you to be confused and they will use various online and offline tactics to do so.

If you register a domain name with company X, you can continue to renew your domain name through company X or transfer it to any other company. In some cases, you may have your domain name registered through a reseller, who then has it registered with an accredited domain name company. Dunkirk Systems is a reseller of domain names, and works with accredited domain name companies to handle hundreds of domain names for its clients, but I digress.

As domain name registration is a business, and there is money in registrations, companies will tempt you to transfer your domain name to them, and they will offer add-on services or low pricing to do so. That is called legitimate business. You may have received spam emails from "companies" who want to manage your domain name that you have never heard of, and probably have typos in the emails. That is not legitimate business.

However spam is not the only way companies may try to get your domain name business. One such company is called Domain Registry of America, and they use both the emails and letters that look like bills to try to get you to pay them – usually higher fees than you are paying now – to get you to transfer your domain name. Yes, it looks like a bill, and if you look at the small print, it says that you are transferring your domain name to them. The large print, however, does not say this. I get these letters every so often, and they go right in the shredder.

Once again, consumer beware! Know and trust who you are working with, and you will be fine.

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As I am writing this post, my printer is hard at work cranking out nametags for the Breakfast Network Club. The BNC is a networking organization in Chicago that has morphed from meetings in the morning (thus the name) to holding specialized meetings by industry and discipline. I have been involved with the group for about a year and through it have made many networking connections.

I saw an opportunity to help with providing nametags as the group, like many of the entrepreneurs who attend the meetings, runs a tight ship. Each nametag features the BNC logo at the top and "nametag powered by Dunkirk Systems @ dunkirk.biz" at the bottom, with my logo in the place of my company name. The cost of the nametags is minimal – a box of mailing labels and the ink to print on them.

Is my phone ringing off the hook as a result? No. But that is not why I am doing it. My goal for sponsoring the nametags is name recognition in the Chicago market and goodwill from giving a little bit back to a worthy group. The president of the BNC, David Carman, also makes a point to introduce me when I am at a meeting and thanks me for making the nametags. But if the phone does ring from someone who saw my name on the nametag they wore back to the office after a meeting, all the better.

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(this is another post in the Domain Names category, where I am collecting thoughts for a larger body of work, one piece at a time. Please check out the entire category and your comments are always welcome!)

Many people complain about how many email addresses they or their friends have, and the difficulty with managing them. If you own your own domain name, you can have all the email addresses you want and only check mail in one place. By adding aliases to a mailbox, this can be easily achieved.

Allow me to make a few definitions. An email mailbox is an email address you configure in an email client program (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird) to send and receive email. Think of a mailbox in the real world. This is sometimes referred to as your account or address, but for the sake of this discussion I will use mailbox (which is also my personal preference). An alias is a valid email address that simply redirects email to a mailbox – with the same domain name or to another domain (e.g. Gmail or Yahoo!). An email administrator can create either mailboxes or aliases for your domain.

There are many reasons for having aliases to forward email to a mailbox. I consider the main reason is organization, where you can create specialized email addresses for different purposes. For purchases online you could have "shop@" or "ebay@" and for your eCommerce store on your Web site you could have "orders@" or "shipping@." Aliases also help you prepare for growth. An alias can also send mail to more than one mailbox, so "us@" can forward to "craig@" and "lana@." Aliases can be reassigned to other mailboxes, allowing for growth in your organization when mail to "inquiries@" should go to the new customer experience manager.

Aliases allow you to create "throwaway" email addresses. If someone or something asks for your email address, and you are leery in giving it, you can give an alias, and if you start receiving spam, you can delete the alias. I used to have aliases such as "june06@" and "jan07@" which by their names would indicate where and when the source of the spam came from.

But with every good there sometimes comes a bad. Some hosting companies do not allow aliases to forward to certain domain names. I have also experienced a large Internet provider blocking email to their domain from a client’s personal domain name as they considered all of their mail spam. Where that came from I don't know, but one thing we did not get was a notice of the blocking. As we had the aliases in place, once we found the problem we were able to route emails to another mailbox.

Aliases are a useful tool for managing email. Use them as needed, document that you have them, and monitor their effectiveness.

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