It’s a question that comes up several times a year, and people have been asking me it for decades now. As many times as I have answered it, I have yet to write it down. Why I haven’t I don’t know for sure, but there’s no time like the present.

What is the question? Why do I sign my email messages as I do, with “mp/m”? And here’s a warning, it is a little retro-geeky!

When It Began

I have used this signature for my emails dating back to when I was a kid. Then, the messages I was sending were over dial-in bulletin board systems (I have included a link to its definition if you don’t know what one is!). I would typically sign my messages with my initials, “MPM.” But why do I sign it now in lowercase, and what’s up with the slash between the P and the M? Here comes the geek part!

There was a single user operating system for microcomputers popular in the 1980’s called CP/M. It had a multi-user version called MP/M. When I learned of this I was intrigued – it was the same as my initials! I thought of signing my messages with “MP/M” but didn’t want any confusion with the operating system name, so I made the letters lower-case, thus “mp/m” was born as my signature.

Dial-in bulletin board systems were replaced by dial-in services like CompuServe and AOL. Those were replaced by Internet email. Yet through the decades, my signature remained the same.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it.

Go ahead – comment away on this, you won’t hurt my feelings!

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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 • Social Media • Strategize • Technology • (4) Comments • Permalink

When I think back to all of the "smart" devices I have owned, going back almost 15 years with my original Palm Pilot, they always came with a cradle – a stand / holder that served multiple purposes from presenting the device to charging it.

With today’s smart devices, they do not come with any form of cradle from the manufacturer, and any cradles I have seen are more for charging them rather than their presentation or protection on your desk. I find this odd, especially with the escalating cost of these devices. However, there is an alternative that may bring the cradle back – the Wedge by Toddy Gear.

The Wedge is a pyramid-shaped bean bag-like item item with a lip for holding a mobile device into place as it rests on the shape. As a result of its flexible shape, you can place almost any device in it and at a comfortable viewing angle. The Wedge is made from the same material as cleaning cloths that Toddy Gear, a Chicago firm, creates for cleaning and polishing mobile devices, thus allowing you to do the same thing with the item you support the device with. As a result you have a highly functional and attractive item on your desk for holding your highly functional and attractive mobile device.

I have taken some pictures of the Wedge I have been using for the past several months along with my Nokia E7, my past device. Below is an embedded slideshow of the pictures of it on my Flickr account and you can also view the set of pictures by following this link.

As you can see, I can orient the device however I want. Though these pictures don’t show the power cord, I can also place the device however with it, or with headphones, and it holds it fine, especially as no cords actually go through the Wedge itself, just go out the sides of the device, so it is not in the way of them. The Wedge is also small and lightweight enough that I can throw it in my computer bag and take it with me to other places or even on vacation without taking up much room.

When device manufacturers today talk about "ecosystems" of mobile devices they often are referring to the device itself, its operating system, apps and maybe an accessory or two. There was a time when ecosystem included all of the main accessories you would use with a device. When I think back to even my Palm smartphones they came with a cradle for holding and charging the device and even charging a spare battery. Sure there were third-party or aftermarket accessories, but the main ones from the manufacturer were ones you would always want and get. The Toddy Gear Wedge is filling that gap for me, as well as the physical gap between my devices and my desk.

For full disclosure, I was given the Wedge by the brother of the founder of Toddy Gear, whose son used to go to school with my daughter! That being said, I was not asked to write this – the device itself compelled me to share my experience with this great item with my readers.

So what do you think? Do you own one? Do you want to own one? Is a flat surface enough for you? Share your thoughts in the comments of this post.

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

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Mobile Technology • Technology • Thrive • (2) Comments • Permalink

In this hyper-connected, telecommuting, Internet-enabled, outsourced, offshored, cloud, remote-working world, it is not uncommon to never meet people you work with. In some companies it has become almost the norm, and it is only rare exceptions where people see even a live video stream of someone, let alone meet them in the real world. For many people, this is ok.

As you may have guessed from the intonation of the previous paragraph, I am not one of those people. If anything, I make the extra effort to go out of my way to meet people whenever possible. It’s something I learned early on in my career, and it has worked not only to my advantage, but projects I have worked on over the years as well.

To Utah Or Bust

Back in the late 90’s I was consulting on what I would call the most unique, fun, learning and dynamic project of my career. Put it like this – I had over an hour’s drive each way to work and it never even phased me! Where I could write many posts on that project in itself, the project was my first end-to-end Web and service project, and eventually I was the manager of the entire technical environment.

But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and in this case, the client was closing their business unit I was working at and my project was sold to another company. That company had its own development and technical resources, and my job was to transition everything from knowledge to software to hardware to the new company. To add to the logistics, the new company was outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, where I and the project was south of Boston, over 2,000 miles away.

After the client manager informed me of the changes in the project he paused and asked me what was the first thing I needed to do for the move.

I said, “I need to book a flight to Utah.”

When the client manager pressed me for details, my response was straightforward and convincing. We needed to first ship the software and data to the new company, all over the Internet, and set it up on temporary servers. Then once done we’d literally pack and ship the servers to them, then move the data back onto the old servers. Not only had none of us – the current client, new company, or me – done something like this before, but it was 1997 and not many had done something like this period.

Therefore meeting the staff at the new company that would be on the receiving end of this was crucial. It was my job to ensure that the move went smoothly and we were up and running right away. I had to know what – and who – was on the other end and that they shared my commitment to the project, were capable of working on it, and if there were issues, they shared my dedication to resolving them.

Meeting and Believing

So I booked a flight from Boston to Salt Lake City and spent a week south of the city with the team. Following our initial meet and greet, we got down to business, including touring their facilities, reviewing the project plan and made some changes based on their feedback, and discussed the transition and longer term for the project, namely as I would not be a part of it any longer. We also had lunch together and a couple of dinners and got to know each other better, along with sharing stories of past tech projects. As my flight took off for my return trip to Boston, I felt very good and confident the project would be extremely successful.

When I returned to the client the following week, the client manager asked me how it went. I first showed him a list of everybody’s name, email address, and work, home, mobile and pager numbers. Needless to say he was pleased as I went into further details on the trip and overall plan.

In the end, the transition went off smoothly. We had a few issues, such as the data transfer taking longer than anticipated, but in the end everything was up and running over the course of a weekend. The following week there was an issue with one of the temporary servers on the other end, but I worked with their team and reported back the status to the client’s client to ensure everything was under control, and soon after I reported the good news we were back up and running.

Following the transition of the server environment came the transfer of the software development, and my role on the project came to an end. Where it was bittersweet for me, I was more concerned for the people who worked for the client who were losing their jobs. Another project for me was followed by a job change and onto even more adventures.

To this day I strive to meet the people I work with in person. What worked well in 1997 seems even more important sixteen years later.

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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 • Web Development • (0) Comments • Permalink

As someone who has worked with computers for more than three-quarters of my life, I can say without boasting that I have a decent proficiency with them. Where I don’t know everything about every piece of hardware or software out there, I can usually get my way around with some analysis and troubleshooting.

The longstanding line, “computers are supposed to make our loves easier” seems more like a fleeting goal for many people. Due to my technical experience, I am often held in a higher regard by those who are more tech novices, namely when something they may not understand or are having trouble with comes more naturally to me.

Don’t get me wrong – ego stroking every once in a while is a good thing! But in all reality it mostly isn’t warranted. Whenever I get a large abundance of praise or witness someone denigrate themselves over their lack of technical knowledge, I usually look at them and smile, then I explain to them the reason why I am smiling.

Why? We all have our place.

My skill and ability with computers overshadow things I can’t and mostly don’t want to do. I can’t iron a shirt without making it look worse than what I started with, I can’t lay tile, I can’t bake, I can’t ice skate, I can’t use a SLR or DSLR camera… and the list goes on. But do I care about these things I can’t do? No. Why? Because others can do them, do them well and I look to them for those tasks and services.

Untwisting Abilities

Years ago I was at a friend’s business, an auto body shop. When I was there, he couldn’t figure out how to do something on his computer and asked for my help. I don’t recall exactly what the task was but I do recall figuring it out rather quickly. When I showed him what I did, he was flabbergasted and expressed how stupid he felt that he couldn’t have figured it out for himself.

Then it was my turn. I smiled and said something like, “dude, we all have our place. I know computers, and you know cars. You can take a twisted hunk of metal and turn it back into a Mercedes. So when you have a computer question you call me, and when I get into a car accident I call you.” He’s a smart guy and he agreed with my logic.

Place Holding

So the next time you feel frustrated over something you don’t know, think about what you do know and what your place is in helping others. Plus I have to admit – I get baffled with a lot of technology issues I run into and completely sympathize with you that many things are not more intuitive.

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

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In past posts here on The Hot Iron I have talked about Real Simple Syndication or RSS. Most recently in a post titled “iGoogle Shutdown And The Demise Of The Personal Home Page” I talked about how subscribing to various RSS feeds is replacing my iGoogle home page.

Since that post a major announcement was made this week that Google is dumping its free offering of an RSS feed aggregator, Google Reader, as announced on its official blog and subsequent post on its Google Reader blog. The service will be ending on July 1, 2013, just short of 4 months away. What is interesting is that Google gave a 16-month notice when it announced it was shuttering the also-free iGoogle service. Observing online sentiment over the announcement, there was more emotion over this than the news of the day before of the selection of a new pope!

So why the frustration? For me personally, as I switched to Fever last year, losing the service won’t impact my personal consumption of information via RSS feeds. Before I get into it I’ll offer up an explanation of what RSS is – if you are already in the know you can skip it or go ahead and read it to critique my approach to defining it.

So What Is RSS?

For those who are reading this please note I will not try to get too technical, rather explain the process. RSS is a method of informing of new content published, It is achieved by posting some or all of that content and related meta data, links, inages, etc. to a data file. This data file has a particular structure as it is formatted in the XML language (I won’t get into XML here, but if you must follow this link to learn about XML). That data file is placed on a Web server for anyone to access or subscribe to with a public Web URL (the file can also be private too, but I digress). Whenever content is added or any is changed or deleted, the publisher of the content can update the RSS file. As this file can change frequently, it is referred to as an RSS feed, as in feeding new content to the consumer of it.

The RSS feed in itself is not the only place where the power of RSS lies. Software, called an RSS feed aggregator or an RSS reader processes these RSS feeds that are subscribed to and organizes them to present the content to the consumer. There are a variety of RSS feed readers out there, from installed software, mobile apps, Web services (like Google Reader), as well as Web browsers and email clients. The reader also keeps track of what has been read, so that when the RSS feed is updated, it will show new vs. old content, among other features as linking to the source content on its Web site and social media and email sharing functionality. This concludes this RSS overview – let me know if it is clearer to you, or clear as mud.

Now Back To Our Story

Of all of the RSS readers out there, one of the most popular has been Google Reader, It’s power has been in its simplicity and robust formatting and sharing features, plus the fact it was from Google and integrated well into your Google account and that it was a free Web service. So when it was announced that what may be the most widely used RSS reader is going away in a few months, there was much shock and dismay, not only from people who use Google Reader to consume content but from content publishers as well, as an important channel may go away if those consumers of content do not find an alternative to Google Reader.

So why would content publishers be upset? They are still publishing the content so people can still seek it out to read it. First, I’ll give a perspective to who all of these publishers are. When one thinks of RSS feeds, they often only think of blogs and news. Most all blogging software includes out-of-the-box the ability to generate an RSS feed or multiple feeds, and typically you have to make an effort to turn this off. Many believe – including myself – that RSS feeds plus the ease of publishing have led to the popularity and success of blogs. News Web sites are a perfect match for RSS as they are constantly publishing content. This is why most sites not only offer 1 feed but many have a feed for each section of the site or content categories, such as breaking news.

Beyond blogs and news, many Web sites and information sources offer RSS feeds. A quick look at my own personal RSS feeds show job postings and news from company Web sites, weather forecasts, LinkedIn status updates for all of my connections, sports scores, discount shopping offers, Twitter searches and of course blogs and news.

As I talked about in the previously-mentioned iGoogle post, for me RSS is my main source for information. Moving from Google Reader to Fever has not diminished this at all. However what many fear is that people won’t seek out one of the many alternatives to Google Reader out there, and it could signal that RSS is no longer a viable technology or medium, just because Google is dropping Reader.

RSS Is Simply Not In Google’s Future

This past week’s announcement from Google is not the only activity they have taken against RSS. It has been slowly dismantling and marginalizing its FeedBurner service, which is an RSS “enhancer" providing analytics like subscriber counts, the ability to subscribe to a feed by email and other features to a “burned” feed. FeedBurner has always been a free offering from Google since it bought the eponymous Chicago-based start-up several years ago. Though it integrated inline advertising thru its AdSense service, it never really innovated the overall FeedBurner service or further integrated it like it has done with other acquisitions. Even FeedBurner's look and feel has barely changed over the years.

Recently Google announced it was shutting off the FeedBurner API as well as AdSense for RSS feeds. As a result there have been rumors abound that Google will shutdown FeedBurner altogether. Despite this Google has been silent on these rumors. Now with the announcement of Google Reader, people are biting their lip waiting for the other shoe to drop, and looking to other services like FeedBlitz to replace FeedBurner and keep similar functionality along with keeping their RSS feed live.

RSS Still Not A Household Term

By what I have described here regarding the power and simplicity of RSS, you would think that everyone is using it. However that is not the case. RSS, though a free open standard, has had an image problem in my opinion. It’s as though it’s too “techy” for the average person and as a result has not had universal adoption. Though it has a familiar orange icon and browsers and email clients now process feeds, it is not a completely seamless process to subscribe to a feed. Other than Google, not many large service providers with anywhere near the same name recognition have offered RSS readers. RSS has an identity crisis, with emphasis on the latter word ‘crisis.’

What’s Next For RSS?

Just because Google Reader is going away, RSS is not. And in reality, it can’t! As it’s an open standard, as long as someone is publishing an RSS feed file and someone is processing it, RSS is more than alive and well.

Over the past few days I have seen a lot of activity online from those looking for alternative RSS readers such as Fever that I use. A am also sure that entrepreneurs are coming up with innovative alternatives, and I wouldn’t be surprised if another major player makes a goodwill PR move into RSS feed reading as well. On another note, I predict FeedBurner will be eventually shutdown by Google, though that is a whole other blog post on the impact and recovery from that!

#VIVARSS! Do you agree? If so or not, I welcome your comments to this post. And if you do comment, please indicate whether or not you subscribe to The Hot Iron’s RSS feed.

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

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Blogging • Social Media • Technology • Web Development • (2) Comments • Permalink