Several years ago I “got into” writing. Granted, I was blogging here at The Hot Iron for over a decade at that point. Even with a body of work – some of it even beyond the world of business and technology – I never considered myself a “writer” per se. Visiting the Lit Fest in Chicago and taking it all in for the first time, a mere few blocks from my then home, was the boost I needed. Where I haven’t published yet beyond this Web site, I have expanded on what I write here, and have in various stages pieces in need of time to finish and submit for possible publishing.

That is if you don’t count some short stories I have submitted recently. And the emphasis here is on short – as in 53 words short. On and off for the last year I have submitted entries for the monthly 53-Word Short Story contest by Press 53, a fiction and poetry publishing house in North Carolina. I discovered this when looking for writing contests for one of my kids, who at one point was interested in such contests then later wasn’t. However I got bitten by this serial unique challenge.

For August’s contest, the writing prompt was to write about “Sunday.” That’s it, that’s all they give you, and it is up to your creativity – and brevity – to craft something unique and prize-winning. As you can tell by the title of this post I did not win, and as a result my prose will not be published in one of their journals.

But as words must be free, I share “Any Given” with you here:

"While awaiting our lobsters to brighten, we slurped steamers – simmered in Harpoon IPA, from the same Portsmouth dock as the crustaceans. Aptly accompanying our ocean harvest was corn on-the-cob, homemade potato salad and more of said IPA.

Ten o’clock may seem early for such a feast, but there’s only three hours till kick-off."

The preceding is a true story, as annually we would have a lobster bake during one week’s tailgating before a New England Patriots home game back in the day.

If you’re so inclined you can read the winning entry here, learn about this month’s contest and how you too can compete with me for the fame and glory of a very, very short story.

Deconstructing Short Story Writing

Writing can take many forms. What I originally saw as business and technology writing was in reality story writing, and upon that realization it opened and expanded my mind to what else I could write. But I will save an in-depth deconstruction for another time – just get out there and write!

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

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Announcements • Diversions • Strategize • (4) Comments • Permalink

Pondering why my kids need to check-in to a class they are virtually in when they have a Webcam pointing at them seems like a waste of time on a day like today. I remember 9/11/2001 like it was yesterday. As I recounted over a decade ago I might have seen one of the ill-fated planes that morning. However I never wrote that on 9/10/2001 I was where I am right now – in Wisconsin – and flew back to Logan Airport in Boston that night. Needless to say the experience at Logan the next time I was there was quite different.

A Brand Evolves – Congrats to my very good friend Alex Ryan on the rebranding of her consultancy, Evolve Solutions Group! The new logo and brand approach fit very well with the work she and her team do. They created a cool announcement video that was trending on LinkedIn. Check out their Web site and if you’re looking for creative, effective business solutions, I can’t recommend them enough.

What’s In A Brand? – Another recent rebrand announcement came from Name.com, the best domain name registrar out there, as far as I am concerned. Their rebrand was done to also highlight their other services, like hosting, Web sites, SSL certificates and email. I have been a customer of Name.com for well over a decade and they provide great support, great pricing, and best of all a Web site that is by far the most superior for easily managing your domain names in the marketplace – trust me on this!

Fired Up – Planned obsolescence is a term that is often applied to technology, where “built-in” to the tech is the need to replace it as it can’t be further upgraded. Wouldn’t it be nice to know about it though? When we got a new TV our Amazon Fire TV stick started acting up, where video would cache, timeout and lose lip sync. I thought it may be the monitor’s interference with the WiFi but that wasn’t it. After looking on Amazon I discovered the model we had was actually 2 versions old. Upon getting a new one, all is working better than before.

My (New Rugged) Charge(r) – Speaking of older tech, it has been years since Mophie made the Juice Pack Powerstation Pro. This rugged (water and drop proof) battery, made of metal and encased in bright orange rubber, was perfect for accidental drops, a weekend at Riot Fest, and fully charged it could fully charge 2 devices. They stopped making it much to my dismay. After futile attempts to find one on close out, and an on-and-off quest for another model, I came upon MyCharge and their Adventure series. So far so good, and though I won’t have a Riot Fest this year to break it in, there’ll be other opportunities for it to show its true mettle.

Suitable For Framing – You can buy a stock photo of my hand! I’ll spare the story about the search rabbit hole I went down, but I found this photo from the launch of the Trump board game in 1989. At the left you see a hand holding a WNEK-FM microphone, and that’s me. Why I was there is chronicled here or you can watch a news clip of me and the microphone in action at that event event.

Your Own Scrum Gallery Too – Now you can decorate your space and learn about Scrum and Agile at the same time. Incrementor is offering free Agile posters and Scrum Alliance has a PDF of a Scrum Framework poster you can print out and hang prominently.

Tricking Browsers – Next to outright bigoted hatred and Hitler, Web browser cache is something I loathe equally. If you don’t know what browser cache is, this article explains it well. Warning I am going to get a little techy here… as this week I learned an straightforward, easy to code for Web programmers to help mitigate caching issues from a very smart engineer. By adding a querystring to the URL of an embedded file, such as CSS or JavaScript, the browser will think this is a new file and load it automatically. The querystring can be anything, such setting to something like the date of the change to the file.

Laughing and Crying – A couple of things I read this week gave me a chuckle and made me think too much as well. This article by Dr. Vincent Filak, a world-reknown Journalism professor and author, talks about back to college numbers. This article shared to be my world-reknown architectural publisher Kevin Carmody on eerily sad and dangerous things found during structural inspections.

The Music Of My Life – Sad news came this week that Khalis Bayyan, co founder of Kool and the Gang, has died. The word “sad” I don’t think has ever been equated with this great band from the 70’s and 80’s. And what better way to celebrate his life and contributions that with their hit from the 80’s, Celebrate.

This past weekend I went back to church, as inside of the church, for the first time in forever, or so it seems. Where all of the usual were in place, seeing the sign pictured above was frankly odd to me. Even more strange was saying prayers aloud with a mask on. So not to end this so sadly, I have embedded the Celebrate video below.

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

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What I Learned • (2) Comments • Permalink

My lists of learnings is a little shorter this week, and it was due to a different kind of learning – what some are calling “virtual school” or what I call it with many more words and also has some words that my family is hoping I stop saying so much, especially when it comes to attempts at my kids to have a positive classroom experience at home.

5-115-1 – I was on vacation last week with my family, and thinking I was going to have some extended times to read I brought 5 books. Of those I only cracked open one of them, reading just 115 pages. To make matters worse, I picked up another book at a yard sale where we stopped in to look at a kayak for sale. I also learned a little more about kayaks too.

The Trees Are Nervous Again – First there was the rush on toilet paper. Then as I learned last week there is a rush on beer cans. Now there’s a rush on computer printers as families need them for their kids to do their schoolwork at home. This doesn’t surprise me as I have known many people over the years who didn’t have a printer. Where I last lived in Chicago I think only one other family in our block had one, and I was often asked by neighbors to print files for them.

The Emperor’s New Pajamas – Should you sleep naked? The experts seem to think so.

Money Ball – Fenway Sports Management, the entity that owns the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool Football Club among other sports-related assets, is offering a free online program for people to learn the business of sports. You can sign up for FSM University here. I don’t know if there is a limit on it or if they admit everyone, but in some cases you may be able to earn internship credit. As a Sox and New England sports fan I am intrigued by this.

Define Lifetime – This week I learned of yet another class-action lawsuit, but one that actually makes a lot of sense to me personally. The suit is against satellite radio firm SiriusXM and limitations it puts on its “lifetime” subscription plan. If you have this plan that they no longer offer, you were limited to the number of times you could transfer it to a new radio, such as when you get a new car or if the one you have breaks. Granted you had to pay to transfer each time, but there was a cap they never told people about. I know well about this as I have a lifetime subscription and I have only one more transfer left, and I had to haggle with SiriusXM the last time I went to transfer it as I was also unaware of this limit.

Coming In For A Landing – Do you know what a landing page is? I am sure at least one person reading this is shrugging their shoulders! A landing page is a Web page for a specific purpose, typically lead generation or sales. Rob Hope this week released his book Landing Page Hot Tips. Hope for years has published a Web site and newsletter called One Page Love that is dedicated to landing pages and 1-page Web sites. If you have either of these, or want to learn why you should, you need to get this eBook.

Sign O’ The Modern Times – Several years ago I heard a new design was created for the what is formally called the “International Symbol of Access” or commonly referred to as the handicapped symbol. The familiar blue square with a stick figure sitting upright was redesigned showing the person leaning forward to symbolize motion and mobility. This article talks about the redesign of the logo. However, I have never seen the new symbol in use until just this week, where I noticed it painted on a parking space at a local retail center.

This week I will close with this video of Jerry Lewis singing You’ll Never Walk Alone by Rodgers and Hammerstein. To say this was a staple for me every Labor Day weekend growing up is an understatement. If you don’t know about this song and its meaning with the holiday weekend, contact me. If I get queries about it I may write something about it.

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

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What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink

Writing about oneself is tough for some people, including myself. Where someone may be comfortable writing on any other topic, when it gets personal it can become a challenge. Think about it –you are staring at a blank sheet of paper or screen and wanting to put something down that has never been written before. But once started, it becomes less of a burden.

This is the idea behind List Your Self. It is a journal with prompts that ask you to tell the story of you by listing things about you. Examples of list include “list all the names you’ve been called, endearing and not so” and “list all the things you’d like to say to your mother.” There’s a wide variety of lists under categories like “growing up,” “men and women,” and “greater truths.”

As I went through the book, which I finished recently, I took away a lot from it and its exercises.

It made me think – Where listing my favorite foods as a child poured from my brain like a waterfall, other topics took some mental gymnastics to answer. Whether I forgot about it or tried to put it out of my mind I don’t know, but I did fill out something for each and every page and list prompt.

Some lists were easier than others – Even if what I was going to put down on a list was top of mind, there were times that it was hard to write. I chalk it up to what I said in the opening, as some of these things are being put down in a tangible form for the first time. Nothing salacious or illegal though… as far as you know.

It took a while – I started the book back in 2016 and just finished it now midway through 2020. Where I tried to do one page a day, there were periods – like when I moved – that I had the book packed away and then unearthed it and started back into it. I had a similar experience with the exercises in 1 Page At A Time. Near the end I really just wanted to finish it and did several pages a day.

If you’d like to start chronicling your life, or simply give yourself a daily challenge of a different kind, I highly recommend List Your Self. This book was given to me as a gift, and as it’s full of personal stories of myself I am clearly not passing it along to anyone else! What I am going to do is pass along another journal to another friend, one of a similar genre but more about telling my life as a father… namely as I have another book very similar to it and started back when I first became a father but never came close to finishing it. Needless to say I have restarted this other journal and am taking it one page at a time.

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

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Book Take-Aways • (0) Comments • Permalink

For last week’s What I Learned, I was so late in getting it out that I didn’t even include my typical (attempt at a) witty opening and closing. Yet it was one of my most read one of this series! Despite this, why did I decide to open and close this week’s as I have since March?

The Power of Music – My friend Floyd Webb is a film producer and director, and his latest work is a short film about the African thumb piano. I had never heard of this instrument before, and was impressed by the amazing sounds such a device can make. Watch this film on Vimeo to see this instrument in action and how one doctor in Chicago is using it as part of holistic healing.

Hawkeyes Down – In the seemingly never-ending saga of cancellations due to the pandemic, The University of Iowa announced it is cutting its swimming and diving program after the 2020-21 season. Iowa’s program is unique as it has been in existence for over 100 years, is where the butterfly stroke was born, and has a state-of-the-art facility that is only a decade old. Where swimming doesn’t bring into a school the money like a football program does, and with cancellations of said football, swim is sadly part of the colleterial damage.

Keep Business Movin’ – Something that is continuing this year, albeit virtually, is Startup Wisconsin, a week of programs and sessions on business and technology, and not just for those involved in start-up businesses. The dates of the event in the Green Bay / Appleton area is November 18 thru 20. If you are interested in participating please fill out this form whether as a speaker, organizer or volunteer.

The Mind Wanders – I decided to add meditation back into the mix of my morning routine, as I haven’t done it in a while. Where I have used apps before, a while back I started subscribing to the Meditation Minis podcast. I decided to start with the oldest in my queue… which went back to December of last year. I guess my mindfulness deficit has been longer than I had thought.

Fox On The Rise – Something that has not been covered much at all lately is the development in southeast Wisconsin on the Foxconn Corporation campus. The company, known for making Apple’s iPhones, was planning to open a large monitor manufacturing facility in Mount Pleasant, not far from where riots have broken out this week in Kenosha. The development was slow and – surprise – politicized – and then we heard nothing most of this year. An article in Bloomberg this week talked about it in – surprise – the context of the presidential election.

So Where Do You See Yourself In 5 Years? – This article on interview questions and answers for anyone applying to be a Scrum Master was an interesting read. Even if you’re not looking for another job, familiarizing yourself with these will be helpful in your internal role, especially if your organization is not 100% agile.

Weird (Al) User Experience – I still get amazed, not to mention frustrated, when I have a hard time navigating a Web site. One item I see often, and implemented poorly often, is the accordion. No, not the instrument, but the ability where you can show a list of titles and by clicking on it or an accompanying icon, the page “expands” and shows content. Thus the analogy to the accordion, which expands while it is played. This article did a great deep-dive on the design style of accordions. Two takeaways I had from it is you must keep your accordion usage consistent within your site, and you should have a design guide for your site to show how they should be used.

No Can Do – When local beer tap rooms were forced to shut down in the spring, they started canning their tasty products and offered them in local stores and even in “beer drive-thru” events. Just when you think there’s a good thing going, there’s now a nationwide shortage of beer cans. I just hope people don’t rush out and buy up beer as they did toilet paper.

As school starts for my kids next week, for me, Summer is gone, though I hardly can say I wasted every day, and I hope you didn’t either.

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

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What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink