For most people, where we are today is not where we were just a few years ago. For most, it is a state of mind, and a mind processing things we could have never anticipated. For some, they are physically in a different place, moving as a result of lockdowns and other personal reasons.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard – or said myself – that life is a journey, I would be on the beach right now and not gazing out at snow outside my window, but I digress. For as repetitive as it sounds, at least I need to keep hearing it, especially as a reminder when things are not going well or just outright suck.

In my mind, one of the best to say this is Adam J. Kurtz. He is the creative mind behind 1 Page At a Time and Things Are What You Make Them. Both are books to get you to think and the former is chock full of creative prompts. I am a big fan of AdamJK (for short), and when it was announced last year I pre-ordered his latest book, You Are Here *For Now.

You Are Here *For Now is a collection of short essays, quotes and art. Where at first glance it can be thought of as a self-help guide, I see it more of notes from a friend who is trying to help you go through the same crap as you are. As I have insightful family and friends that I am always taking away advice from, I have takeaways from this book too.

Pause – This is something this short-fused, 100% Italian-American needs to a lot more of. Maybe that pause is a deep breath or a walk along Lake Michigan (a favorite of mine when I lived in Chicago) or whatever works for you. A pause gives you time to think, get your heart rate down a little, and be more prepared for what you now have to deal with.

Hard But Not Impossible – Life is hard, sure, but not always impossible. In a world where waiting 30 seconds for food to heat in the microwave seems like an eternity, we need to adjust our thinking to better approach the hard work needed. The quotes and pictures in this book are a nice departure from simply a text narrative trying to motivate us.

It Won’t Last – Yes, Virginia, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and what we’re going through right now will come to an end. Granted what’s next could even be worse, or it could be better. We’ll never know until we get there.

You Are Here *For Now is a pocket-sized book and one where you can easily rip out the pages and hang them up or give them to others. As a fan of AdamJK’s work, it should come as no surprise that I recommend you to pick up a copy of this book. Because I pre-ordered the book, I got this “Find Your Way” stationary kit, pictured below. Click on the picture or this link to see the photo of the kit full-sized. I wish when I was in college I had an eraser that was inscribed with, “I literally don’t know what I am doing!”

As I give away all books I read, including this one, I have earmarked it for Matt, a long-time reader and commenter here at The Hot Iron. I will send it to him as soon as he contacts me and tells me the best address to send it to.

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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

Once again, my daughter is selling Girl Scout cookies. And once again, you my dear reader can have the unique opportunity to support her and the girls in her troop in their learning and developing in scouting, all the while enjoying these tasty cookies!

Whether you go down the traditional path with Thin Mints, Caramel deLites, Shortbreads, Peanut Butter Sandwiches and Peanut Butter Patties, or try the newer varieties including Caramel Chocolate Chip, Lemonades, Toast-Yays and Adventurefuls, you can’t go wrong! Some of these are even gluten free and vegan. All can be shipped directly to the comfort of your own home, wherever you are.

Even if you don’t want cookies but want to support her troop, you can buy “Cookie Shares” where boxes of cookies are donated to worthy causes.

To buy, simply click on the bug red button below:

If you don’t see the button or if the link doesn’t work, click here to Buy Girl Scout Cookies Now!

My daughter thanks you in advance for the dozens of boxes of cookies you will be buying! The proceeds of the sales that go to her Girl Scouts troop will help subsidize the activities and badges they are earning throughout the school year as well as Girl Scouts summer camps, which have all pretty much opened back up to normal.

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

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Announcements • Thrive • (0) Comments • Permalink

With no apologies to The Righteous Brothers, I may have lost that learning feelin’, I want to bring it back but I am conflicted as to how I want to bring it back.

Throughout the lockdowns, people around the world were doing new and different things, and one of them was online learning. Some of it was forced, namely when schools closed their doors and moved to virtual. Then there were people like myself, who purposely sought out online learning. Where this was a global movement of sorts, it didn’t start out that way for me, as I would like to share before I go on.

At First, Forced Into It

My first online course was not by choice. I was signed up to take Certified ScrumMaster training in mid-April, 2020 in person. The course was a 2-day program offered at a hotel outside of Milwaukee, and I was planning to stay the night there to get the most out of it.

Without needing to completely restate that painful time, I was later informed the class was going to be offered online instead. Really? How? You couldn’t take any Scrum classes online up to that point, as they were highly engaging with whiteboards and Post-it notes all over the walls. To compound things the company that offered the course wouldn’t allow me to postpone it and said I (ok, my employer) would lose the registration fee if I didn’t show up virtually. As I wrote about shortly after I took the course and passed the exam to be a Certified ScrumMaster I ended up having a great instructor, great classmates and it turned out to be a great overall experience.

So The Graduations Hang On The Wall

After that first class, it felt like everywhere I turned there were online courses being offered – both at work and from learning platforms for free or reduced prices. Some of these platforms offered free weekends, who couldn’t pass that up? As it was alluring I took many courses online, certainly many more than I had in the past.

At the conclusion of most classes, you could download a certificate of completion in PDF format. Where I knew many people who simply ignored them, I collected them like Happy Gilmore did large checks and printed them out, hanging them inside the cabinet doors of my work desk. As the doors only held 6 certs, I would replace older ones with newer ones, keeping the “major” ones up all the time and replacing them all at the end of the year. The picture above is of the certs I just took down that I earned in 2021.

Is The Feelin’ As Intense Now?

Now we are a month into 2022 as I write this, entering year 3 of restrictions that vary depending on where you are in the world. As I worked from home years before it was, um, trendy, my situation is different, coupled with where I live in Northeast Wisconsin. In short, I am out more than shut-in, have more options and with that normalcy I am not seeking out other things to keep me occupied. Towards the end of 2021 I didn’t end up taking many online courses.

When I took down the above-pictured certs, I started thinking more about learning in general, part of which was the catalyst for me writing what you are reading right now. To try to get some of that learning feelin’ back, I recently took a couple of courses offered on LinkedIn Learning. One was on having a more positive workweek, the other on NFTs. As you may guess, I have the certificates from these hanging on the inside of my desk cabinet doors.

Planning To Bring Back The Feelin’

Even with the few nuggets I learned from those 2 most recent courses I tool, they were not really fulfilling to me. Why? I pondered this and realized there was nothing really driving me to take them. I scrolled through the list of courses on LinkedIn Learning and said, hey, this may be interesting. Early on, motivations like maintaining a shrunken amygdala drove me to take courses. Now I need more than them being a simple prop to occupy my time.

So I am working on a plan. The elements of the plan will include what I “need” to learn and what I “want” to learn.

For what I need, it will include video presentations and books on Scrum, as I need to complete education hours in order to maintain my certification. There is also the software and services I will be using in my work to either get ahead on or for just-in-time training.

For what I want, a few are obvious, but I need to put more time into what else I will take. I want to learn more about livestreaming in general, and specifically around the software and hardware needed to take the basics I know to the next level. I also want to learn more about soccer. As a relatively astute swim Dad, I am lacking in soccer, a sport one of my kiddos has switched to and is doing amazingly well at. However I don’t always see where there’s an offsides on the field, and don’t know a lot of the rules and strategy on the sport. Beyond these 2, I am not sure if I want to take on a new hobby or interest, and am open to suggestions from anyone out there in the peanut gallery.

Deconstructing That Learning Feelin’

We should always be learning ... something, whether in formal courses or from real-life experiences. For the former, there’s an investment required, and with any investment it must be done wisely. Even with different motivations and time schedules, I am excited on bringing back that learning feelin’ and want to make sure I approach it with a purpose-driven plan I have the ability to complete. Do you agree?

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

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Business • Strategize • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink

Though not asked for or about by anyone...

IT Didn’t Last Long – Early in December people in the technology industry briefly lost their minds over an article in the Wall Street Journal titled It’s Time To Get Rid Of The IT Department. The premise was that with all of the online services out there, commonly referred to by us technical people as micro-services architecture, you didn’t need a department overseeing all of the chaos of random people creating free or paid accounts and having no idea how everything links together. As you can guess by that previous sentence, us techies took a deep breath, had a laugh, then went back to helping those people who keep setting up those accounts.

Speaking of Lasting Too Long – It still baffles me that people register domain names with Network Solutions. They were the first domain name registrar, and their Web interface really hasn’t changed all that much over the decades. They charge more than others and make it difficult to make changes to domain name settings or DNS. If you want a better solution, go to Name.com.

The Lawyers Year-End Bonuses – A couple of class-action lawsuits came across my view, One was for TikTok and data privacy, the other for Zoom and third-party access. For the TikTok class action, if you are/were a resident of Illinois at the time you could get six-times the money back, however much that is anyway.

With regards to these, I did file for TikTok but not Zoom. The former is a highly toxic service owned by the Chinese Communist Party, and the latter is a service that helped maintain my sanity during the lockdowns, and nobody ever hacked into any calls I was on. Even though there’s a fixed amount of money involved, on principal I did what I did.

Badger Bitedown – The University of Wisconsin-Madison was one of several colleges whose football players were wearing special mouth guards this past season to measure the impact of head injuries. If you have ever seen or heard anything about CTE and its causes, this study hopefully yields information on the impact of sports on head injuries and their impact on the lives of those who got such injuries. People are not going to stop playing sports that can cause these injuries anytime soon, so anything that can help along the way is a good thing.

Fresh Take-Off – Over the years I have mentioned a local radio show Fresh Take and its host Josh Dukelow on the pages of this blog. It has been a unique show, airing topics and guests you won’t hear elsewhere and in a fashion the hosts aptly calls “getting you think, not telling you what to think.” Now Josh is leaving the area, and his show will be signing off on January 21. I wish him the best on his next chapter in his life journey, and am wondering who and what will replace his air slot.

Reason 8,237,912 To Not Ship With FedEx – Many people don’t realize that FedEx uses contractors to deliver packages. So if someone in a FedEx truck with a FedEx uniform comes to your front door, they may not actually be an employee of FedEx. That is, if the FedEx truck is in an accident and never comes to your door, as what happened in the middle of the Christmas package rush. Fortunately there are some good people in the world, they are just not wearing a FedEx uniform.

Shattering Santa Stereotypes – Santa Claus isn’t necessarily always an old fat man with a white beard wearing a red suit and having the trappings as told by numerous tales. Sometimes it’s a younger, svelte, redhead woman donning a black coat and single-handedly fulfilling the role of Sant Nick and then some, not to mention cooking the roast beast. And for this, saying I am eternally grateful doesn’t begin to cover how I feel.

Heaven Closes Before Christmas? – Sad news for the local soccer community hit before the holidays that a local indoor soccer facility Soccer Heaven was closing for good after decades in business. Where the name “heaven” may have been a stretch for this facility, it is where my kiddo really came into being a soccer player and loving the sport. Now we’ll drive about a half-hour further away to play over the winter, but have plenty of memories and victories on the fake grass formerly one exit away.

Don’t Ski So Close To Me – A “lost” video by the band The Police came out over the holidays. It was a video for their classic hit “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” but filmed at a Canadian ski area. Apparently a concert the trio were supposed to be in was canceled, so they had some time on their hands. For fans of the band like me, it was the right amount of silliness going into the holidays.

Another Way to Watch and Be Warm – Not to be outdone by yule log videos out there on the Internet and broadcast by TV stations on Christmas eve, the Italian American Podcast came out with Yule Pot a pot of tomato sauce simmering on the stove while Christmas songs by Italian-Americans play. And yes, I said sauce, not gravy.

Rise... – After displaying a similar looking sign with the word HOPE in the center of my city, a new one has taken its place, RISE, as shown above. My hopes is we will rise up and return to what we were prior to all of this chaos in the world, and even be a better place to live and thrive.

... And Scene – With this What I Learned, I have decided to retire this (somewhat) weekly posting, again. Where I have enjoyed writing it and keep observing things – perhaps more than I normally would – it’s time has come. I am hoping to write more, lengthier posts on single topics, as I have been doing in recent years. Thanks for all of the feedback and reading by you. As this was the “second coming” of the series, could there be a third?

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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 • (1) Comments • Permalink

I guess if a month goes by without any posts here at The Hot Iron, then that next post should have some significance to it. It just so happens that today, December 30, marks the anniversary of this humble blog going live. And December 30, 2021 marks 15 years since that first Hello World post.

Thank you to all who are reading this now, and to those who have read what I have written here over the years. Where I don’t often hear from readers, stats say people are reading, so I don’t feel like I am talking to myself. I sometimes equate this to my days in college radio when I would do a great show and ask for requests, yet the phone would never ring. However when I would run into people on campus or out on the street, they would tell me they listen, and even mention songs I played so I knew they were sincere. Of course the balance of sharing information and my ego are heavily in play when I write.

What will this 15th year of blogging have in store? We’ll see.

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

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Announcements • Blogging • (2) Comments • Permalink