It’s not only Friday, but Good Friday. For those who believe, have a blessed Easter. For those who do not, have a nice weekend!

• If you have videos displayed (or embedded) on your Web site, you may see at the end related videos shown. In many cases, those videos don’t necessarily compliment the video, and you have no control over them. However, I did find this code on the blog of Maximillian Laumeister that can hide YouTube related videos.
• Speaking of videos, for some reason actor George Takei, who played Sulu in the Star Trek franchise, made a commercial for Milwaukee County, Wisconsin’s public transit system years ago. Where I couldn’t find a connection of him to the city, I do know several large ad agencies are based in the Cream City and that could have been the catalyst for his appearance. I have embedded it in the post below, using the code above.
• A product that has been very helpful while spending more time at home. The Dash Mini Maker Electric Round Griddle allows you to cook with minimal mess an egg or pancake with ease. And did I mention minimal mess?
• Another helpful product is the JOOLA Table Tennis Set allows you to easily convert your dining room table to a ping pong table.
• I often remind myself of a quote from the late, great sales guru Zig Ziglar, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly... until you can do it well.” This past week I had the opportunity to pass along this advice to someone who had never heard of it. The quote came up in the context of setting up a personal portfolio site and their concern it wouldn’t be perfect right away.
• I know someone who changed their name from a name that someone else I know changed their name too. If that makes any sense! Out of privacy to both I won’t share the name.
• The blog post I published last week, A Personal Business Dilemma, was actually written over 2 and a half years ago! I found it in a notebook among others that I had written and published. I don’t recall why I never typed up and published it. Perhaps because it was over 7 written pages? I made some heavy edits, but the gist of it remained.
• As shown above, there are some interesting street names in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Hopefully next week’s list will not include anything about snow that forecasted for this weekend.

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

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Thrive • What I Learned • (2) Comments • Permalink

Around the house and with minimal trips off the property to gather nourishment and supplies, my notes app was open and ready to gather those a-ha moments of the past week.

• First a correction to last week’s account that there’s not enough ground beef or turkey in my area. There is plenty of ground beef at Jacob’s Meat Market in Appleton, Wisconsin. But honestly, you’ll want to go there for their own house-cured bacon.
• CO2 containers are considered a hazardous product. Fortunately the people at Soda Sense, a relatively-new company about a half-hour north of me in Green Bay, know all about this. They offer a refill/exchange service by FedEx for the CO2 canisters for SodaStream machines. Not only do I get local spring water for my homemade seltzer, but the bubbles are locally sourced too.
• To help pass time, or perhaps simply to mix up the time more, I am finding many offerings of activity sheets. Two of my favorites are from Adam J. Kurtz and Riot Fest.
• I haven’t been listening to as many podcasts lately, and I get reminded of it every time I get an alert for a new podcast, or see online someone I know starting their own podcast.
• About 2 months ago I joined a co-working space, World HeadQuarters, as a way to get out of the house and work from their unique space. It’s closed these days, however they are offering members resources including a weekly Webinar. In the first one 2 weeks ago I suggested having a virtual “brown bag lunch” where someone gives a short presentation followed by discussion. So it was only fitting I did the first one this past week on the topic of Web Accessibility. I’ll write more about this soon, but it was a great opportunity to do a presentation and sharpen that skill.
• The popular Webinar service Zoom has a status page, which you can subscribe to by email or RSS feed, the latter I am doing as, well, I am all about RSS feeds.
• Recently when I get in my car, rather that the Bluetooth picking up the latest podcast I was listening to (or as I said before, not listening to), it will play a random song from my phone. Yesterday it started playing Gypsy from 8th Route Army, an alternative rock band from Springfield, MA back in the 80’s. They were huge locally there and started touring with major label bands, but then broke up. In addition to wearing out their albums on my college radio show I worked at the same place as the lead singer and got to know him. I found Gypsy on YouTube, and you can listen to this instrumental song from over 30 years ago as I did – or watch the embedded video below.

Until next week...

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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 • (2) Comments • Permalink

If a day goes by where you don’t learn something new, what good is it really? Sometimes that new nugget of knowledge is welcomed and cherished, and sometimes it is scary as all hell and you wished you didn’t know it. Nonetheless, learning is what we do on this journey of life, whether we like it or not.

I opened a post titled What I Learned This Week So Far This Year For January 10 2014 with the same paragraph above, where I chronicled on a Friday what I learned over the past week. I have thought about doing this again for a while, and with my renewed interest in writing, I restart sharing what I learned below. And don’t worry, it won’t be filled solely with things I learned as a result of being at home under lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic!

So here goes:

• When something says it can be installed in “minutes,” it usually doesn’t say how many, or how many hours which also consist of minutes.
• There’s plenty of ground pork in supermarkets these days, ground beef and ground turkey not so much. I heard about this on the No Agenda podcast, and found it to be the case myself for now locally in Northeast Wisconsin.
• Virtual karate lessons can actually work.
• There are Microsoft Office mobile apps, at least for the iPhone. Where I don’t think I would want to use them for creating a document or spreadsheet, they work well for searching a document on the go as well as printing one right from your smartphone.
• A colleague Raj taught me a trick for inserting common phrases you use in an email using Microsoft Outlook and its autocorrect feature. For example, he will type “please#” (without the quotes) and it will insert a sentence “Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.” I had never heard of this hack, and am setting these up as there’s many phrases or sentences I manually type over and over.
• Just when I thought voting in Wisconsin couldn’t get any easier (you can register to vote on election day at your polling place), you can now request an absentee ballot online. In order to do so, you must upload a copy of your driver’s license or state ID, which I have found many people don’t know how to do that when I tell them about it. I do and I did, and got my ballot a few days later.
• My friend Eric wanted to contribute something positive to the fears many have over the coronavirus pandemic, so he hosted a Webinar with friends of his who are a police officer, EMT and nurse. He recorded it and you can watch the webinar here.
• Beginning this year, some Web browsers will limit the length of a registration of a Web site SSL certificate to 1 year. If you have a Web site and don’t know what this means, ask whomever created or manages it.

Maybe you learned something new yourself? Please 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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What I Learned • (1) Comments • Permalink

Earlier this year I decided to write weekly posts here at The Hot Iron about what I learned over the past 7 days. Over 8 months I wrote 32 posts sharing numerous things that I learned. I wrote the last one on August 29, 2014, which will be my last in this series.

Fun for me while it lasted

The catalyst for this topic thread was simple - I had too many things I learned and/or wanted to write about but not enough time to write the posts. As much as I would like to simply “bang out” my thoughts on the keyboard, for me the writing process is more elaborate than that, from the thought on the topic to writing, to editing, to an accompanying photo… it takes me time. That being said, writing is something I enjoy and is a great creative outlet for me.

Writing posts that were more of a collection of nuggets of information was a good idea at first and something that interested me. I was also hoping to write single-topic pieces as well. Over time though the thrill waned and then it got to where I was not writing one every week, then the most recent gap of a couple of months. As for those single-topic pieces, they were few and far between.

Back to where it began

I've decided to retire this thread and return to writing as I gave before - posts on single topics on business and technology and other occasional diversions. For those of you who are my loyal readers I thank you and I hope that you'll enjoy this change as well. As always, I will never fully promise any number of posts, but am hoping to at least write one a week.

Still learning

As I still get disappointed when a day goes by when I don't learn something, I am still logging those thoughts and will be sharing them on my Twitter account – you can follow me there at @thehotiron. Of course there may be more diversions than in the blog itself, as well as more conversations and other thoughts but I still share all the business and tech news with my unbiased opinion as much as possible.

I hope you won’t miss my “learned” posts – or will you? Please let me know either way in the comments to 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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Announcements • Blogging • Business • Diversions • Strategize • What I Learned • (3) Comments • Permalink

At an early hour with a full cup of coffee…

• While browsing the aisles at the local Jewel supermarket, something caught my eye, and something I was not expecting to find in the Midwest – Friendly’s ice cream. Friendly’s is a predominately East-coast chain of restaurants which is headquartered near where I grew up. As I looked through the flavors, one caught my eye – black raspberry. Now note this is black raspberry ice cream and not sherbet – out East black raspberry ice cream is very common, but I have yet to see it in Chicagoland or Wisconsin. So of course I got some and had a small trip down memory lane. Now if they only had maple walnut, then I would have cried.
• Speaking of crying, I did shed a few tears of joy and Dad pride as my oldest daughter rode her bike with 2 wheels and without training wheels for the first time this week. As we are now closer to a park that is kid-friendly, she has simply been able to ride her bike more, and was determined to do it.
• Now that the Ventra system is the only way to pay for transit rides in Chicago, I am noticing more and more usability issues with it. One thing that bugs me is the auto-replenishment of your account, where you can enter credit card numbers online, and choose 1 to do the replenish. With the old Chicago Card system, it would send an email alert when it replenished your account, or if it was unable to. The new Ventra site does not do that, so the time you find out if your account is at zero is when trying to board a train or bus, or more likely a bus as there won’t be a replenishment kiosk there. I should probably keep a running list of the things I find for a separate blog post on it.
• An esteemed colleague shared with me information about the Kuando Busylight, a device which you attach to your computer monitor and changes colors when you are on the phone or when you set your status to “busy” so people won’t disturb you in the office place. Where the idea is clever, in my opinion I see this more of a Band-Aid approach to the failings of the modern office setup… something else I could probably write a whole blog post on.
• I received a “video bill” from Comcast this week. It used my first name, and told me my balance for the services I have and the due date. I thought this was extremely clever not to mention informative, even for a techie person like myself. The only problem with it? I cannot share or embed the video! The video is done using a service from a company called SundaySky. Not having this feature is something that could really make this service successful. Now I wonder if I will get a video bill every month?
• If a vendor had a hard time getting to you and parking once, they will most likely do it again, so don’t even bother giving them a second chance.
• This week I was browsing a few stores looking for a “temporary table” – something I could use for a short period of time before I bought (and first found) a permanent, nice table to use. As I looked around a thought came into my head from the wayback machine – you don’t find cardboard furniture anymore in stores. Back in the 70’s and 80’s I remember you could get cardboard tables or shelving or other furniture made from cardboard. So of course I looked online and I found vendors there. Granted today we have particle board furniture from IKEA, but there’s something about lighter, collapsible furniture that meets the need.
• I am still offering my loft condo in the Chicago Loop for rent. The price has been reduced – act now!
• Another esteemed colleague shared with me this timelapse video of 1,000 years of European borders changes. It is fascinating to watch, and the music is so appropriate to it. I have embedded it below or follow the previous link to watch it on YouTube.

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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 • Strategize • Technology • Web Design • What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink