Last week was an off week for me, with this cough getting the best of me. It is getting better, but my mind was not always aware of things, so my list is not as extensive as last week, but ever unique. I used the back of an envelope for a bill I always pay online to capture my learnings.

• After almost a year of carrying it, someone finally recognized the design on my Discover card is a cassette tape. The guy was my age, and the guy with him had no idea what we were talking about.
• Not everyone knows that a general term for Safari, Firefox or Chrome is “browser” - seriously.
• I learned about trisodium phosphate as an effective cleaner for painted walls. I also learned it is an approved food attitive in the EU.
• Taxi-hailing app Hailo is beta testing a “black car” option for hailing a sedan instead of a standard taxi in its app. I learned this first hand as I was presented with the option last week when hailing a taxi with the app. In the beta period the sedan fare is the same or similar as a taxi. Though it was a short ride, it was a very quiet, comfortable ride, and I am looking forward to this feature going full-out live.
• This study on mobile platforms in South Africa by Deloitte Digital shows the Symbian OS in second place with 26% of the installed base. Not bad for a “burning platform!” Check out the study and see the other numbers which overall are much different than in the US.
• My 2-year old thought February 14 was Halloween, which clearly means she got way too much candy with her Valentine cards.
• When I was living in the Boston area barely a year would go by when I would miss the Hometown Throwdown, a concert series around the holidays by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. They considered it a gift to their fans and hometown, and it was always an awesome show. Now that I am a thousand-plus miles away, I haven’t caught a Throwdown in years, but I did catch this video from this year’s show at the House of Blues in Boston (which wasn’t even there when I last lived there) and some scenes from an event they held at this little old ball field across the street. Check out the video embedded below or view it on YouTube. It made me laugh, it made me dance, and it made me cry a little.

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

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Now 2 days late, but hopefully still of some value to some of you, as most were to me. These were scrawled on the back of an envelope for a credit card offer, adding some real value to this junk mail.

• Boundaries are not always bad, and when people tend to be pushing them, sometimes they are simply asking for them to be defined to them.
• Halls cough drops have little motivational phrases on the wrappers. Not a bad idea for if you are buying cough drops, you are probably not at the peak place in your life.
• There is a distinct difference between MOO MiniCards and Mini Moo’s.
• Perform a Web search on any word or phrase, followed by the word “coloring” and you can find a plethora of coloring sheets for kids to color on.
• There was little coverage outside of the tech world on the theft and compromise of the Twitter account @N by a social hacker. If you are not familiar with the term social hacker, look up anything on Kevin Mitnick. This article on The Verge about the @N theft and how the owner’s GoDaddy and PayPal accounts were compromised also includes a link to the Twitter account’s owner’s own story.
• Where that famous groundhog in Pennsylvania saw its shadow and predicted a longer winter, my forecast has always been with Dunkirk Dave who hails from the same Western New York State city that I was born in. And it has nothing to do with him not seeing his shadow, and thus predicting an early spring.
• I began taking an online course on “unprocrastination” and one of its tasks is to create a habit and commit to it. So I decided to come up with a new blog topic every day (not write it, just the topic) and I am also sharing it with the world. Look on Twitter for the hashtag #28d28bt for my topics. More on the course itself as I get into it.
• A documentary on learning how to be a pit trader in the famous Chicago markets was just released this week, though it was filmed in 1996. Pit Trading 101 was released only online, and for US$2.99 you can see a training course on how those people who are yelling, screaming and flailing their arms are actually conducting business. It was released by Chicagoan and former trader Jonathan Hoenig who is also in the documentary. I haven’t watched it yet but want to, not only to understand how the heck that process works but also to seeing a piece of this city’s history. Below is an embed of the movie’s trailer or you can watch it on the documentary’s Web site.

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

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Though a day late, hopefully you will find useful at least 1 thing I learned this past week, as collected on the back of a flyer for VHS to DVD media conversion.

• Though every media outlet and their grandmother in the Windy City reported on the demise of Chicago Grid by Wrapports, the publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, nobody has noticed the Grid Web site is still up-and-running, at least in part. I only found this out as I was still subscribed to their RSS feed, and after several days a daily summary was again appearing. Though I shared this several times this past week with media outlets in the city via Twitter, nobody else seems to be talking about the ghost RSS feed or seems to care.
• If you read any book, especially children’s stories, through the lens of the late Dr. Sigmund Freud, you will never read one the same way again, or may not want to read one at all.
• When you use a service on a daily basis and never even think twice about its quality or reliability, that is not a good thing, that is a great thing. It also probably explains why I haven’t blogged about my great experience with Phone.com over the almost year I have been with them for my home phone service. I need to do something about that.
• Beverly Hills, California got its name from Beverly, Massachusetts, namely its Beverly Farms section. Now I have been to both communities, and I couldn’t think of any 2 places that could be further opposites of each other.
• When I tell people I am from Massachusetts, the next thing they say is that I don’t have a Boston accent. When I go onto explain to them my roots are in the western part of the state, where they use all 26 letters of the alphabet and put them in the right place. For as many times as I state that, it really doesn’t resonate with people, so I thought I’d let the good Dr. Westchesterson explain it better than I possibly could with his video Western Mass. – it is embedded below or watch it on YouTube. I can’t think of a better way to end one month and begin another!

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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 a piece of Syracuse University notepad paper hosted the eclectic list of things I learned throughout the last 7 days. Special thanks to my cousin Fedora for the notepad, and away we go.

• Clearly I am not the only one having problems with the Cardmunch app from LinkedIn. This is evident from blog posts like this one and numerous threads in their support forum.
• Though Ron May may no longer be of this mortal coil, his eponymous Chicago tech news site The May Report lives on, now under the guidance of his brother Paul. And they have an RSS feed.
• Last week I mentioned about Jason Jacobsohn’s Chicagoland Entrepreneur Events newsletter, which is a bonus for signing up for his main newsletter. Follow the preceding link and you can subscribe to it directly, though you really will want to read both of them.
• Living in Chicago made it hard to not hear about the story of Vivian Mayer, whose amazing talent for photography was only found after she defaulted on payments for a storage unit and her subsequent death. That being said, I had never really experienced her work up until that past weekend when I saw an exhibit on her at the Chicago History Museum - simply amazing.
• There are a number of blogs who could benefit from having a CentUp button on their site. And when I say benefit, I mean earn money from readers.
• Though past performance may be the best indicator of future performance, there is certainly no guarantee of it. This I learned the hard way when my New England Patriots lost the AFC Championship game and will not be going to the Super Bowl next week. Thanks for an awesome season, though.
• I was talking with a colleague about hard drive storage and the accompanying picture of a magazine cover from PhotoMedia Magazine from Spring, 2006 came to mind. As she hadn’t heard about it, I searched it down – I did not recall the name of the publication only the photo itself – and found it, and thought someone may have missed it too.
• Sears is closing its State Street, Chicago store. As someone who lives so close to it, the store was not a regular shopping trip, but we made many household purchases there, had some awesome photos taken of our kids before the portrait studio was shuddered, and bought the outfits my kids wore home from the hospital after they were born. Sears was also upfront on Twitter when I tweeted about the closing, kudos on this.
• The Commonwealth of Massachusetts – my home state – blocked the sale of Apple stock to its residents when they went public. I learned this from Jonathan Hoenig when I included him on a tweet thread about crowdfunding and risk with Len and Griffin.
• If the windshield of your 2013 Honda Odyssey is covered with snow, make sure to close the driver’s side door before you turn on the wipers.
• In keeping with a new closing video theme… I learned that as many times as you see the Too Hot To Handel concert it never gets old, and this past weekend was my 7th time. What is it? Watch this video on YouTube or watch it embedded below.

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

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So that I wouldn’t forget anything, I decided to carry around a piece of paper with me, or rather a leftover envelope from our over-order of Christmas cards. Looking back on the week, I picked up a few useful pieces of knowledge, as well as some random information. So here goes.

• You can get Hood Dairy coffee creamers in the Midwest. Hood is a New England brand I grew up with and have never seen them outside of that area.
• I took my very first-ever yoga class this week, and I don’t know why I never did it before. It was awesome for my mind and my body. The class is an introduction to yoga offered by Tejas Yoga in Chicago’s South Loop, and where I can’t make it next week, this is something I want to make a regular part of my week.
• If you sign-up for Jason Jacobsohn’s Networking Insight newsletter, a great resource for networking tips, he will also put you on his Chicagoland Entrepreneur Events newsletter, listing the latest events for tech start-ups in the area.
• The 2014 Liver Life Walk to support the American Liver Foundation’s Great Lakes Chapter will be on SATURDAY, June 14, and The “A” Team is already registered.
• The days when neighbors who are having a party invite you as a courtesy, whether they want you to really come or you yourself want to go, are apparently over.
• I found the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for my wife, or at least I hope it is. As she reads The Hot Iron I will not mention what it is, but if you ask me, and promise not to tell her, I will share.
• In a conversation with Nan this week she said something we were talking about was not anything she would “die on the hill” over. I had never heard of that before, but I plan to use it.
• I had been seeing these winter coats with a small circle emblem and I had no idea what it says or what brand it was. Then one day at Mariano’s someone at the checkout in front of me had one and I was able to read it was Canada Goose. I had never heard of them, and where it may be a nice coat and all, I am sticking with my LL Bean which is about a quarter of the cost.
• Try calling a health insurance company and tell them they have been sending insurance materials, including insurance cards and statements, to someone at your home address who has never lived there. Not to mention they have been doing this for over a year and you have marked everything “return to sender, no such addressee” and put it back in the mail. You guessed it, they had no idea what to do with my call.
• There are politics of work, politics of play and even politics of choirs, but I’ll take The Politics of Dancing any day – enjoy this 80’s video below or watch it on YouTube and have a nice weekend!

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

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