For years I’d often say, “I want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.” This came to be as I’d get into a situation where all I was doing was complaining about it. By removing myself from the chaos in the middle of things to think – perhaps taking a walk along a lake – hopefully I could come back with a way to make a situation better all around. If it takes me to be directly involved and it could to be beneficial to me as well, then I will commit to it.

Over time, however, I have revised that statement to the following, “I want to be part of the solution if I can.”

There’s a few differences from the initial statement above. First, I am removing the declaration there is a problem. Am I in denial here? Not necessarily. In that original statement I (emphasis: me) am saying there is a problem. The fact of the matter is that I (emphasis: me, again) may be the only person who thinks there is a problem!

This has come from experiences where I get involved in something, providing a fresh point-of-view on it and perceive an issue or problem. Note there may well be a problem, but if the consensus of the overall group or community that I have recently joined doesn’t see it that way, or simply thinks things are just fine, then trying to highlight an issue or trying to help solve one may be futile.

Learning the Best Way – The Hard Way

A recent example highlights this. I answered a call to volunteer for an organization I was already a member of to help in live-streaming their meetings. They have already been doing this for a while, but needed more people to help. The idea of this sounded fun and I signed up. The training on live-streaming was in real-time – I and another person observed someone who had set this process up execute on it, all the while following some brief instructions. It was a good thing I brought a notebook as I took several pages of notes above and beyond the instructions. Armed with what was provided and what I wrote, I was ready to take on this task by myself. Or so I thought.

When it came for my first solo live-stream, I followed the instructions to the letter, weaving in my own notes, and thought all was well. When I went to test to see if it was actually streaming (something from my own notes) I found it wasn’t. Panic washed over me as I am sitting here thinking all is working while people are trying to connect to a live-stream that isn’t there! I tried troubleshooting the process, challenging as I didn’t know all I didn’t know, and found that a required field wasn’t filled in, and when I filled it in, the stream started. Twenty minutes into the meeting, but started nonetheless.

Following this screw-up I sent an email to those involved and apologized, then offered to help improve the instructions. I got a response back saying this wasn’t necessary. However I felt it was – as someone who trains people regularly to manage their own Web sites, I felt this enhanced documentation, complete with photos and screenshots, was essential.

Despite the lack of response to my offer, when it was my next opportunity to volunteer, I was ready to further document this process. I started with a new document, bringing in the existing instructions and enhanced them with my notes. I then printed this and brought it with me so I could write in pen the remaining pieces. I also took pictures and captured screenshots along the way.

The only issue was the live-stream didn’t work again. It was a different problem from before, and I troubleshooted it the best I could, but I never got it working. I was furious, but needed to focus. As the video camera was recording the meeting, I knew that would be the Plan B and I would upload the video files later. I double-checked the camera to ensure it was still recording then went outside to get some fresh air, and perhaps to let out a scream or two. When I came back in I checked the camera and it had stopped recording. What? There was plenty of room to record, what could have happened? I resumed the recording, but a key piece of the meeting was never captured. I stewed in boiling water in my mind thru the rest of the meeting, then afterwards I resigned from this volunteer opportunity.

Why did I quit? I saw a need for more documentation, not to mention troubleshooting tips. But nobody else did. Plus I couldn’t put myself through another live-stream failure. Those in charge of this effort, however, felt things were fine. I even heard from the organization’s volunteer coordinator that live-stream issues happen all of the time, yet clearly nobody felt a need for improvement earlier. Where I wanted to be part of the solution, I felt it was a situation I didn’t want to be a part of, and as well I didn’t feel my participation was welcome either.

Unfortunately there have been other situations over the years where I have been in where there was a similar disconnect. I was not trying to impose “my way” rather wanted to make it better for myself, and what I later found out for others too. On the flip side, I have been involved in the past – and currently – in roles where I was able to be part of the solution. And with that I will end this as I need to work on one of those very volunteer roles.

Deconstructing Being Part of the Solution If You Can

Our time is precious, and if time spent contributes to a greater good then it is an overall ideal situation. However we are not mere robots doing a task – we have our ideas and past experiences, and many times we see a way to make a situation better, all the while making a win-win situation. However not everyone is open to that, and in those cases we need to determine if it’s the best use of our precious time, no matter how noble the cause is.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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This week I watched a lot of video, and you can to with the links below among the few things I actually read.

Networking Back Where I Left Off – The last in-person networking events I went to were in mid-March of 2020. There 2 in one day and the first of them was the grand re-opening of UrbanHub, a co-working space in nearby Green Bay. This week they announce their grand re-re-opening (?) in a few weeks with this throwback video and you can sign-up here for this free event in this cool space.

Product Owner Prep – Next week I am excited to take a course to prepare me to be a Certified Scrum Product Owner. What’s that you say? It’s a vital role as part of using the Scrum framework for getting things done. Last year I took a course to be a Certified ScrumMaster and was intrigued by the Product Owner role, as it sets what will be done. The course I am taking is remote, and will be taught by Scrum veteran Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software. For the course this week I watched prep videos which are not only informative but of high quality. I can’t link to them outside of the course Web site, but expect to hear more from me on what I learn this coming week.

Improved Accessibility Checker – This week Siteimprove released an updated Web site Accessibility Checker Chrome browser plug in. This can be used by anyone to check the Accessibility of a Web site, and ideally you would use it on your own. For many, it’s like drinking from the proverbial fire hose with the amount of detail given. For those of us who work in the Web, it’s also a reminder of what we really need to do on-going to achieve Web sites as Accessible as possible.

May The Fourth Be Cute – This past Tuesday was May the Fourth, also known as Star Wars Day. There was no shortage of memes and jokes about it, and by far my favorite is this video mashup of light sabers and oral health.

Elevated Throwing – Defenestrate is a fancy word for throwing something out the window, which was new to me.

Groundbreaking Throwing – I discovered Pitch, a 2016 1-season TV series about the fictional story of the first female pro baseball player. It says the show was produced with “cooperation” from Major League Baseball, however it’s more like it is a co-star. I liked the story line a lot, and was sad to see – now 5 years later – that it didn’t continue beyond 10 episodes.

Ciao Calibri – Microsoft is looking to replace Calibri, the default font used by its Office software suite, with a new one. This story features the designer of the font, which rumor has it was made to use less ink. There’s a link in the story that shows the possible replacement fonts, to give you a glance into what you could be looking at a lot in the future.

Get Right on the Mac – I forget that the default settings in MacOS, the operating for Apple computers, doesn’t recognize right-clicking with a trackpad, and you need to make a setting change to do so.

Crazy Drafting Memories – This past weekend was the NFL Draft, where college football players are selected by pro teams. For me, it’s the start of the football season as I don’t really follow college ball, and I start familiarizing myself with who was signed. As I got alerts to the signings and saw a picture of the first player drafted by my New England Patriots, Alabama quarterback Mac Jones, holding a #1 jersey, I had a flashback to someone else with a similar jersey about 15 years earlier, none other than Ozzy Osbourne as you can see in this video.

Why was he there? Since the Kraft family bought the team in the early 1990’s, for every home game the Pats would come on to the field to Ozzy’s song Crazy Train. Years later when Ozzy’s wife Sharon was at Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the team reached out to him and told him of the tradition, to which he said he didn’t believe them. After the team created a video montage showing it, he was thrilled, and they later invited him to perform the song live for the season kickoff game in 2005. I was at that game and it was insane – the top of a helmet opened like a clam shell and there was Ozzy, all smiles and clearly having fun. I took a video of this but it’s so bad as I was as excited as he was.

Hopefully Not a New Trend – Now that it’s warmer for my kiddos to go to local playgrounds, I am there too. Walking around one of them I found what is pictured above, an upside down picnic table. Really? Why? How long was it there? Was I the first to see it? After snapping this photo I flipped it over to its more optimal position. I hope not to see more of these going forward.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who are Moms, Grandmoms, Godmoms, Auntmoms, Cousinmoms and any other similar roles!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Basking in the glow of being complemented with “... thank you for your warm approach you gave on the chat, it was indeed a great pleasure assisting you today...” from the Amazon customer support live chat person I interacted with this week (guessing most don’t go so well), I share with you what else the week that was for me.

From Social Certifiable to Certified – Where many of you reading this would likely concur I am certifiable, I crossed the chasm to certified... in social media that is. I completed the HubSpot Social Media Marketing certification course and became Social Media Certified. The course itself was very well done and engaging. Even though my own personal use of social media has decreased significantly, it’s not that I don’t believe in it at all. This is a great course for anyone who is using social now for their own business, as it provides great structure and tactics.

Social Flashback – Back in the day when I was much more involved in social media, I was all over the original post my friend James Whatley re-shared this week about the human element in social media. It was also nice to re-read my comments on it too.

Why My Snow Blower is Gassed and Ready – Last week we got more snow here in Dairyland, but it was unlike what I had ever seen before. It resembled those small styrofoam balls that stick to whatever Ikea furniture you are trying to assemble. In talking with a friend, there’s a name for this kind of snow – graupel.

Get a Bonus to Pay for Snow Blower Gas – Where I got no “bonus” when I moved to where I live now, there are cities across the US who will pay you to move there. Why? Some places need more residents, so they are paying people who are remote workers to live there, and will pay more if you get a job locally. The Web site Make My Move lists such locales. For example, you can get upwards to US$15,000 to move to Vermont. That money will come in handy buying gas to clear the snow as well as all the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream you can eat at the factory there.

Not Breezing Through the Windy City – Only 11 Intersections in Chicago Have Accessible Pedestrian Signals but I know many more have red light traffic violation cameras.

Glad This Is Here – I am a fan of Adam J. Kurtz’s work. 1 Page At A Time is a great creative journal with amazing prompts. Things Are What You Make Of Them is a great compilation of motivational stories and quotes. So when I heard his latest work, You Are Here (For Now): A Guide to Finding Your Way, is available for pre-order, I jumped on it. His simple yet elegant art coupled with quirky yet thought-provoking narratives are a nice departure from the everyday rat race.

My First Clubhouse – This past week my friend Eric Patel invited me to co-host a “chat” on Resuscitating Underperforming Friendships on the relatively new audio-only social media platform Clubhouse. If you’re not familiar with it, anyone can do a “chat” or talk (or whatever they call it) and people can listen and be brought up to the stage to participate. Not sure how many people were listening, but at a minimum it was good practice at public presentation. This was also the first real time I used the app, and the jury’s still out as to how this will mix in with the few podcasts in my queue I don’t have time to listen to.

Because It Needs to be Repeated – Many have heard actor/producer/media mogul Tyler Perry’s award acceptance speech from last weekend’s Oscars awards. If you haven’t, or even have, it’s worth watching again and every once in a while.

A Database That Hopefully Won’t Be Needed Much Longer – I came across the Canceled People database where people who have been canceled in business, politics and popular culture are stored and can be queried. It’s sad something like this even exists, let alone the data that is populating it.

You Get a QR Code, and You Get a QR Code – You’ve seen the square bar codes called QR codes just about everywhere these days. They have been around for a long time, and about a decade ago there was a big push to use them, but they never took off. Why? Because Steve Jobs wouldn’t build-in a QR code reader on the iPhone. As there is one there now, you see them much more often. If you have ever had the inkling to create one, check out QRCode Monkey where you can create one or more for free. They have other paid options for tracking snaps, etc., but for free you can do a lot.

A QR code fun fact is that the code doesn’t always have to go to a Web site. You can even embed a message in one!

A Class Action Out, A Check In – In the same week I heard about this anti-trust class-action lawsuit against BlueCross BlueShield I got a check in the mail for another class-action lawsuit over text messages sent without the recipient’s opt-in. It comes as no surprise I spent the US$2.50 all at once.

This is My Kind of Camping!

Still Sticking – As my new co-working space is in a downtown area, I have been getting out at lunch for walks and noticing things I hadn’t before. One such is this advertisement pictured above for Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum painted on the side of a bar. Clearly it’s been there for a while, and it was nice to capture this sign from a time where such painting was prevalent.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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On this day in 1939, Ted Williams hit his very first home run. Or as I and my fellow Red Sox fans call it, one down, 520 to go. Not bad for a 2-decade career that was interrupted by war and no pliability studios near Fenway Park as they are today. More closer to the twenty-first century were a few this that hit it over the Green Monster for me.

Started Locally, Acting Globally – This past Thursday was Earth Day, an annual recognition of the planet and environment that, unbeknownst to me, started here in Wisconsin. One of the original organizers, William Cherkasky, is actually from the city I now live in.

Not Worth the Servers It Runs On – Starbucks periodically has “games” – Web sites where you can play each time you make a purchase. Without fail, each of them tends to be a less than stellar experience. Their latest one, Starbucks Earth Month Game, sadly took that track record to an extreme. Of course playing is not required, and I have endured one of these for the last time.

FeedBetter? – FeedBurner started as a start-up in Chicago in 2004 where you could run your blog’s RSS feed thru their service and get analytics and add advertising to it, among other features. After Google bought it three years later, slowly many of those features were discontinued and its user interface remained frozen in Web 2.0 time. Out of the blye this past week Google announced it was going to move FeedBurner to a “more stable, modern infrastructure” (whatever that means) and kill off its email subscription feature.

The very blog you are reading still uses FeedBurner for RSS feeds, after moving email subscriptions to Mailchimp several years ago. Why Google isn’t killing FeedBurner altogether is somewhat of a surprise, as it killed off Google Reader, an RSS feed aggregator, over a decade ago. I think it’s time to finally move the feed out from under FeedBurner.

Another Look on Voting – U.S. Senate bill S1, also known as the For The People Act, has been presented to create federal reforms to voting. Among them is a mandate for paper ballots. Where many will not have a concern or worry about this, it could present an Accessibility barrier to those with disabilities. In defense of this, the National Coalition for Accessible Voting has presented this statement on S1.

What could help those with disabilities? Purely digital voting. Many do not know that some US States are already voting electronically. Where it may take some time to adjust the paradigms of the masses to voting online, a paper ballot mandate won’t help with the research and testing needed to make digital voting more of a widespread reality.

Yes Kidding – I recently discovered tasty goat’s milk cheeses made by a local dairy LaClare Creamery. A trip to their facility last week was a treat, complete with a café to taste their great cheeses, baby goats you can pet and even full-sized goats you can pet when they are not climbing the above-pictured, several-storied wooden silo. Shopping local also helps the earth, right?

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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Have you ever done something repeatedly and it gets to the point that you do it without putting too much thought into it? This was the thinking I had when I picked up a copy of the book A Simple Explanation of the Mass at the end of a Mass I attended at my Catholic church.

As someone who embraces the term “practicing Catholic,” I certainly don’t pretend to be a religious scholar. That being said, I went through traditional religious education (aka CCD) as a youth, and I should already know everything in this book, right?

As I read through this short yet encompassing book, I had a few takeaways.

Reminded of the Smaller Details – From the origins of some prayers to some of the things the priest says in the course of the Mass that the congregation may not hear, there were several reminders or refreshers on some of the things that are important in a Mass but can be easily overlooked.

More than a Commentary – The subtitle of this book, by Catholic priest Fr. Eamon Tobin, is “A Step-by-Step Commentary on Each Part of the Mass and The Seasons of the Liturgical Year.” Where there is some opinion throughout the book, I say this is more of an explanation and guide to the Catholic Mass. Sports books I have read and shared takeaways from here at The Hot Iron tend to be more commentary than this work.

A Good Explanation and Guide – I was pleased with the format and flow of the book, first walking through the elements of the Mass from beginning to end, then the liturgical calendar for the Catholic Church. Where I of course learned all of this over my many years, I don’t recall it in such a well-structured format.

Whether you’re a Christmas and Easter Catholic or someone who is there every Sunday – or someplace in between as I am – you will find A Simple Explanation of the Mass a good read and refresher of what you, like me, may be taking for granted. As I pass along all books I read, I am going to drop this off in a new Little Free Library that is in my neighborhood. Perhaps this will shed some enlightenment on someone as it did for me.

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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