In addition to realizing how much I and my kids miss hearing the words “take your mark” in a competitive swim meet, or in this case a fun swim meet, my brain was enlarged a bit with the below things as well as squeezed by a continuingly hectic schedule.

• My friend Tiffany has started an eponymous home-based bakery called Tiffany’s Brownies and Treats and was recently featured on a Boston TV station. For my readers in the Boston area and across the Bay State, you can buy them locally or have her deliciousness shipped to your door. For the rest of the world, we will have to visit the Commonwealth to get them. That is, unless, one of my Boston-area readers wants to buy some and resend them to me...
• Thinking I have too much in my head and not as much documented on life, I sought a tool to help log all of the minutiae. I found Big Book an Excel spreadsheet for structuring the information. Now to start putting it all down.
• While trying to contribute to the elimination of shortage of coins in America, one coin kicked out of the Coinstar machine that I didn’t recognize. After looking it up I found it was an Andrew Johnson Presidential dollar coin. I had no idea they made such coins. Granted I am no numismatist, but I thought I was aware of all currency out there.
• Though it has been around for several months, many are not familiar that Appleton, Wisconsin, along with other municipalities, are using the locally-created app You Get It First. Though the user experience of it is a little clunky, it gets the word out on major accidents or police actions to avoid.
• There is such a thing as renewable natural gas.
• When I had the wild idea or recording myself speaking blog content and wondering how to convert it to text, a colleague recommended Temi as he uses it himself. I have tried other voice to text methods with varying success, so I may give this a shot.
• I found another online course that I haven’t had the time to take. This time GitLab, the Web based system development and operations platform (or DevOps for short) is offering a remote work certification which I have added to my growing list. Granted I have been working remotely for years, but likely there is something I will take away from it.
• There needs to be more teen/pre-teen movies like Teen Beach Movie.
• I attended my first in-person networking event in about four months. It was held at my co-working space and they are planning them on a regular basis. It was a great opportunity to meet the others I see in passing there, and reminded me networking is not just for yourself, but networking for others is equally as important.
• The somewhat newish Microsoft Edge Web browser recently release a “feature” where it would ask you every time you want to launch an external program, like say Zoom, from a link. As I launch external programs like say Zoom all the time, this was annoying. Fortunately this week an update allowed you to check a box to dismiss the ask.
• As school systems across the US and likely the world are coming up with their phased / hybrid / contingent plans for the new school year, likely something missing from each and every one of them is a way to make it easy for parents to know where their kids need to be. I posted about it here on LinkedIn but the post didn’t get much traction. Am I the only one thinking this?
• Speaking again of school at home, Numb is a short film made by a 15-year old Canadian student about her at-home studying this spring. Sadly, this represents the same experience of many kids around the world.
• Finally on schools, I found the above-pictured display of school supply donation kits at a local market. You buy these for $7, and the market donates them to a local school. In past years I would add one to my shopping order as a small way of giving back and perhaps buying some karma. Though nobody told this year’s checkout clerks as mine was at first bagged with my groceries until I called it out. Likely these will be sent home with students and their Chromebooks for this school year.

I was serious about someone shipping me brownies.

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

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As our household got a slightly larger, more high definition video monitor, learning to get used to it fortunately is not all I learned this week, as there were heftier things that crossed my mind the last seven days.

• The purchase of U.S. flags is tax free.
• First there was the GDRP, then the CCPA, and now there’s the LGPD, which is the privacy law for Brazil, as compared to the previously-mentioned acronyms for the laws in the European Union and California. If you aren’t familiar with GDRP or CCPA, I wouldn’t worry about LGPD and focus on the first 2 to start.
• The University of Wisconsin Madison did a study on impact of loss of athletics on young people and there was an emphasis on the mental health impact of not playing and performing. This is something I have been concerned with all along. Where it is reassuring to see data behind my gut feel, it doesn’t make dealing with it any easier.
• A by-product of athletes not being athletes and then getting back into it is something called “yips” – a term I learned from a friend of mine who mentioned how his kid was almost forgetting how to accurately throw a baseball. It’s something real, much to my initial disbelief, and significant enough to be written up by the Mayo Clinic and Major League Baseball.
• A couple of new training programs came into my purview. One is the iAI Institute where you can take free online courses to learn about artificial Intelligence. It is offered by Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that makes iPhones for Apple, and has been controversial here in Dairyland around the opening of manufacturing plants in the southeast corner of the state. I hope the courses can lower my 100,000 foot view of AI to something more down to earth.
• Google is offering something called Career Certificates which are positioning themselves as an alternative to technical school training for a number of careers like tech support. Some may be able to qualify to take the courses for free, or they are offered to anyone for around US $50 each.
• I actually took a course, this one offered by my employer and delivered by the Gartner Group on Delegating Effectively. It was an interesting 45 minute Webinar and was backed by a lot of research that Gartner is known for. However it wasn’t for me – it painted an idyllic picture on delegate to a full-time team, where what would have worked better for me would have been how to do that with a part-time team comprised of employees and contractors.
• My local newspaper is the Post-Crescent and like most major papers in Wisconsin it is owned by USA Today. If you look at a few different USA Today newspapers you will notice their designs are the same. This week their local publication started touting its new look. The first thing I noticed was there were fewer ads that were on top of content and pushing it down the page. Gone was the left and right side arrows where you could conceivably scroll horizontally between stories, something I always found to be a user experience nightmare. In its place is an “X” in a circle at the top right of stories, though not completely obvious but indicates all stories are a pop-up window over the home page. In other words, a page on their site really isn’t a page, and I have no idea why they are doing this.
• Online shoe retailer Zappos announced it is just now selling mixed pairs and single shoes. What may not be obvious to many is a lot of people have different sized feet, which required them to buy 2 pairs of shoes, throwing out one from each. Decades ago I worked with someone who had to do this, as her feet were like 2 sizes different from each other. Perhaps too long overdue, but certainly welcome to people who don’t want to spend double on already increasingly expensive footwear.
• I came across this article on LinkedIn shared by my co-working space on 50 free online advertising methods. Or for me, it was more of a reminder, as many of these are not advertising sites or services per se, rather effective ways to promote your business or whatever you have to promote.
• For the first time in 2020 my family and I stayed in a hotel. Despite this half-year lag, I apparently haven’t lost my touch of finding all of the miniscule flaws in a hotel room within the first few minutes of being in it. For this room, the TV remote didn’t work with the TV and neither did its replacement, there was a noticeable gap at the bottom of one side of the room door, the emergency exit sign behind said door was for the neighboring room and different styles of lightbulbs were in the bathroom light fixture. Not to forget what I presume were used bath towels in one of the nightstand drawers… but masks were required in the public spaces of the hotel.

Happy Brady Birthday RG!

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

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As the week progressed, including three days off of work, I tried to focus on what I observed and was doing and not what I should have been doing – preparing for the ultimate swim meet in the upper Midwest, the Bird Bath Invitational. At least I tried.

• I caught up on a couple of webinars I signed up for but was not able to watch live. Both were on the topic of Agile and Scrum and were well worth the watch. The first one was on Adopting a Tiramisu Mindset. Yes, tiramisu, as in the Italian dessert. It is a great presentation, all the way through to the Q&A. My biggest takeaway from it is that Michelangelo was a Scrum Master centuries before there was Scrum!
• The other webinar was presented by Women in Technology Wisconsin on Agile in a Virtual World. It had a great panel of Agile and Scrum practitioners talking about their real life experience, especially over the last few months.
• Nobody questioned or responded to my blog post last week titled Contact Us. It is for literally what it says, a contact form for my blog, as part of enhancements I made to the content on the About page. Well, I think they are enhancements, what do you think?
• I got notice of yet another class action lawsuit, this one about the performance of older iPhones. I haven’t submitted a claim yet, but I will.
• Another band from the 80’s re-recorded one of their hits in separate locations and stitched together. This time it was Modern English’s Melt With You and another one I learned from the 80’s music blog Slicing Up Eyeballs.
• When your coffee of choice is Trader Joe’s Bay Blend and you no longer live within a few miles of where you can buy it as you have for the majority of your adult life, you stock up on it when you actually get to a store to get some.

Here we go again!

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

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As the week went on, I didn’t feel like I learned much, then again, it was a short work week.

• We finally went to Thai Ginger Bistro, a new restaurant in town that had numerous delays in opening even before the pandemic, and finally opened in the last few weeks. I heard about their Facebook page, but realized they have no Web site of their own. Under their full control. With things like online ordering. I would have hoped with the lack of control people have on social media platforms, not to mention people leaving them, that businesses still solely rely on Facebook for their presence online. Fortunately their food is delicious and I will be back.
• Have you ever taken a screenshot of something and posted it online, and used basic editing features to mask sensitive information? If so, or have thought of this, watch this great video from my college Andrew on the blog for his service Proceed.app, where he describes the proper and most effective way to obscure sensitive information for anything you post online, or in his app for documenting processes.
• French’s makes a Dijon mustard that is delicious, and rivals any true authentic French (without the apostrophe S) mustard. Thanks for the tip from John C. Dvorak who mentioned it on his news analysis podcast (of all places) The No Agenda Show.
• Piers Fawkes shared an email with items in the same vein as this post, and one of them was on “mi casa, your casa”, a social art exhibition where house “frames” have hammocks in them, and can these days be positioned six feet or more apart. Though nothing new, it fits well in today’s world.
• I worked for Larry Moore back in the dot-com days, and I still remember the conversation I had with him and others after the 2000 election on how to technology can be used to securely and efficiently eliminate the issues in voting then, and today. Larry went on to work with firms in this space, and is now on the advocacy side. Listen to this podcast interview with him and learn about tech in voting, even if you think it’s the furthest from what we need now.
• I don’t talk nearly about Nextcloud, the self-hosted private cloud platform, as much as I should. They just announced the features for the next version of the Nextcloud iPhone app, and I am looking forward to seeing it when the next version of iOS comes out. Clearly I need to share more so that you can understand my excitement over this.
• When is the last time you checked the links on your Web site? Try Dead Link Checker probably one of the best tools I have found out there to do so.
• Debbie Harry turned 75 this week. I found this out along with this video of her singing the Blondie classic Call Me with The Muppets. Happy Birthday to this rock diva!
• I finally turned in the Rice Bowl to my church. For those unfamiliar, a Rice Bowl is a way to raise funds for Catholic Relief Services over Lent. As Easter came and went without going to church, I held onto it, placing whatever loose change I had in there. It came to $28.51. So I cashed it in with one of those Coinstar machines, took the amount as a Starbucks gift card so I wouldn’t lose any money from it, then sent a check to the church for the full amount.

Happy Independence Day!

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

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Timing is everything, and the timing of rainfall this week seemed to be perfect for not disrupting my schedule, among other things I observed, saw, learned.

• When I opened the Amazon app on my iPhone earlier in the week, it asked me if I wanted to (and I forget the actual term) integrate Amazon Smile into the app. If you go to smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com, a small portion of your purchases will go to the charity of your choice, which in my case is my kiddos’ school. As Smile has been around for years, it’s nice to see this finally available in the app.
• This quote from fellow New Englander Robert Frost rang true to me, "A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone."
• I watched a couple of documentaries this past week, the first being End of an Era - Radio Shack. Technically it was a documentary, with footage of closed stores and somebody narrating over it, stitched together with classic Radio Shack commercials, which made it worthy of the 10 minutes I spent watching it.
• The other documentary was All Things Must Pass, chronicling the rise and demise of the Tower Records chain. I was a late-comer to Tower, only shopping them in the 90’s when I moved to the Boston area. This was a rather detailed history, including the founder and various staff and customers including Elton John and Dave Grohl. It was directed by Colin Hanks, son of Tom, and if you are nostalgic for the good old days of music I highly recommend this entertaining film.
• Not a day goes by when I see someone post on LinkedIn on the topic of “failing fast” in business. I could write a whole post on this, and maybe I should, but the bottom line is that not everyone knows what this means. Trust me on this.
• HBO Max, a new “network” from HBO, is available for free to AT&T mobile customers, among other services. However, the app is not yet available for the Amazon Fire TV as the 2 corporate behemoths are debating who makes what. In the meantime, I found a way to “sideload” the HBO Max app onto your Fire TV.
• In the latest edition of The Dispatch newsletter there was a mention of “2020,” a new song by Ben Folds, appropriate for being at the almost halfway point in the year where he talks about having multiple years inside of this one. It’s an interesting song and as they say on Triple J, “language warning!”
• In the wrap-up discussion of the study group I was in for Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the topic of hobbies came up. One of the 3 of us, Alan, suggested that my hobby may be blogging, as I enjoy it, and do it for fun and not for profit. I am still digesting this.
• I rented a U-Haul to move some stuff to storage for someone, and low and behold there was a lock attached to the back of the truck. For all of the years I have rented trucks for various moved I always had to buy a new lock because 1) I needed to lock the truck and 2) I never could find the last lock I bought. Well done, U-Haul.

Hey, Jurasick!

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

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