My creative outlet continues! Blue Shampoo, the improv comedy troupe in Chicago that I am proud ot be a member of, presents our next show, Dial "I" for Improv!

Dial "I" for Improv is a mix of long and short form improv - entertaining games and scenes attacking the murder mystery genre! See brilliant detective work! Thrill to chilling contact with the living dead! This fully improvised murder mystery is packed with laughs, intrigue, and weird strangeness and strange weirdness of a most supernatural mysterious nature of mystery! Gather your courage all who dare and join the fun! You just might end up a victim...of comedy!

Our show is every Thursday in July - 5, 12, 19 and 26, at the Gorilla Tango Theater, 1919 N. Milwaukee in Chicago - right off the Western Blue Line stop. Show time is at 8 pm and tickets are only $10. The theatre is BYOB, and you will not be alone if you do! You can buy tickets online, or call the theatre at 773-598-4549.

Diversions • (0) Comments • Permalink

So you picked the perfect domain name for yourself or your business and you’re ready to apply it to your new Web site. That’s it, right? Wrong. People often don’t think about email addresses for their business or themselves ahead of time, and a little forethought will help in managing your business and the image it presents.

First of all, if you have a domain name, use it for your email – don’t use an address of your Internet provider. By doing so you have the right side of the at-sign in place, but what about the left-side, the email name? First recall that there is a difference between an email mailbox and an alias, and think about which is which after you come up with the names.

There are two types of email names – people and roles, and in this post I will talk about people. You will want a naming standard for how people’s names will be structured. In thinking of how names will be used, take in mind the current size of the business, anticipated size about a year from now, multiple people with the same name and how formal you want to be.

If it’s just you and you want to be personal, then using just first name is fine. So if your name is Mike, then using “mike” as the email address is fine. But what if you have another Mike? And what if their last name starts with the same few letters or even is the same? You may want to opt for something like “mikem” or “mikelastname” or “mike.q.lastname.” As for formality, this will drive whether you want to use “Mike” or “Michael” or just a first name and initial or a first and last name. Some people may want their choice on this – for example, I am “Mike” not “Michael” as the latter name is used only when someone is yelling at me!

Note that in the email names I have used a period – it or an underscore are the only punctuation you can use in an email name.

Next I will talk about what to keep in mind regarding roles, and how they can be used in conjunction with or in place of people’s names.

Domain Names • Technology • (6) Comments • Permalink

As I have mentioned before, I am a New England Patriots fan. So it goes as no surprise that I would have received the biography on current Patriots coach Bill Belichick for Christmas from my wife, and this was my read for February.

For a book on football, The Education of a Coach had many takeaways for business. The biggest one that permeated the entire story was networking. Even though Belichick’s father was a well-known and respected Naval Academy football scout, on his own he continually sought out connections with coaches, general managers and owners. This is due to the lack of job security in athletic coaching, which in some regards is no different than contracting in the business world. The second, yet of equal importance, was mentorship. Though Belichick was skilled at reviewing football film to analyze past games, he sought out positions that would allow him to continually grow and be overseen by coaches that were willing to take him under his wing. He then paid it forward as he did the same for young and up-and-coming coaches. Where mentorship may not be as much in vogue today as it was years ago in business, I believe it should be.

If you are a football or sports fan, I highly recommend this book. But if you are not a sports fan, you may lose interest in the detailed descriptions of coaches, teams and games. For the fan, the book reads like you are hearing stories of people and games as being told by an old uncle who may have been at the game themself. And if you are a Patriots fan, it fills in many details of the career of coach that has made you proud of your team again!

Note that the title of this book is The Education of a Coach and not The Education of a Man. People who are familiar with Bill Belichick know all too well that he is an extremely private and publicly shy person and abhors the limelight. Where you get great insight into his maturity as a coach, you learn very little to nothing about him personally. There are barely 4 sentences about his family – only mentioning he got married, had to have his family protected when he was the coach of the Cleveland Browns, got divorced and likes to spend time with his kids. In an age where you know far too much about celebrities, as much as this is different it is also refreshing.

Shortly after I finished reading this book, its author, David Halberstam, was tragically killed in a car crash. The Education of a Coach would be his last book, though others were in process or completed but not published. After reading Halberstam’s style of storytelling, I am eager to explore his other works.

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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 • Business • Diversions • (3) Comments • Permalink

Back in January I pledged to read one book a month, and write not a review but take-aways I got from the book. If you read regularly, you will only see that I have posted one take-away so far. Well, I am catching up, both on my reading and writing. I am one book behind on my reading and have several take-away posts swirling in my head - watch for more!

Book Take-Aways • Business • Diversions • (0) Comments • Permalink

Many of you reading this are using a feed reader, where you aggregate many blog feeds and read them together. As a blog writer, I want to make my feed available to anyone who wants to read it. However, many people don’t realize that you can utilize your own blog feed for yourself, and not just to read your own posts.

Making your blog feed available on Web sites is way to draw new readers to your blog. You may have seen widgets that you can place on a Web site to share with readers your latest blog feeds. Where widgets work well in many cases, with some extra effort, namely some server-side Web scripting, you can use you part or all of your feed and control its presentation.

One of my clients is River Junction Press, the publisher of the book Lewis and Clark Road Trips, a great book on heritage travel along the trail Lewis and Clark took over 200 years ago. When we developed the Web site the author, Kira Gale, wanted to make her blog posts available on the Web site. On the home page of the Web site, we display the first paragraph of the 3 most recent blog posts. The blog itself is an option in the tab navigation at the top, and Web site visitors will get a taste of the blog, and links to it, right on the home page.

This was achieved using ColdFusion scripting, the language the Web site was developed in, plus the same style sheet for the Web site. This can be done with any other language that allows you to process an XML file. Looking at the Web site home page, does it look like there’s blog content there, other than the heading? That is the beauty of RSS!

Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink