To all those who believe Christ the Savior was born today, Merry Christmas! To those who do not, Happy Monday!

With all of the hustle, bustle and unnecessary anxiety over the holidays, it’s always nice to see a sign that makes you stop in your tracks, pause for a bit and get a positive emotion from it. For myself, one of them (yes, I have been blessed to have had a few) was on the flight back from the Microsoft Azure and AI Conference I attended a few years ago. On the flight down I turned off the seat-back entertainment screen so I could read an actual paper book, but on the way back I decided to peruse the options from Delta Air Lines a bit when what to my wondering eyes did appear.

That was when I had the moment, which I captured in the picture accompanying this post. It’s a yule log video. It brought back memories of watching the yule log burning on WPIX-TV Channel 11 in New York City as a kid. For some reason the cable system in my town in western Massachusetts got the New York City independent TV stations, WPIX being one of them. Every Christmas 11 Alive, the as the station’s tag line was at the time, would air the yule log, ideally to give the Christmas spirit of a roaring fire for people living in apartments in the Big Apple. It was nice for us to watch as our chimney was capped and thus our fireplace wasn’t a working one. Of course I wondered how Santa got into the house, but I digress. It’s nostalgic to watch this video these many years later, especially as when I started watching it, we had a black and white TV. I have linked to the yule log video here and have embedded it below.

From my home to yours, wherever you may be, have a wonderful holiday season!

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

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Next week, Tuesday through Thursday, December 5 through 7, 2023, I will be attending the Microsoft Azure and AI Conference in Orlando. Will you be there too?

The conference includes a wide array of presenters from Microsoft and partner firms on leveraging the latest capabilities of Microsoft’s cloud hosting platform Azure as well as artificial intelligence, or AI – the hottest topic out there in the tech world and beyond.

I will be attending with colleagues from work who all work with Azure in different capacities. This collaboration among peers will heighten my learning for certain over the 3-day conference. I am hoping to take away from this tangible ideas and potential projects to meet our team and organizational goals.

If you are attending feel free to connect with me here and comment on this blog post or you can connect with me on LinkedIn and please no spammy sales pitches.

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

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They say, “all good things must come to an end.” Whoever they are, they may have also said “even some not so good things come to an end as well.” The latter will fortunately come true in the form of Google announcing it is getting out of the domain name business and selling their domain registrations to Squarespace.

This news from the Big Tech behemoth came out late in the day on June 15 with little fanfare. I heard about it on a social media post and had to dig to find the press release announcing the deal. Even as of the writing of this post close to a couple of weeks later there is no mention of the deal on the home page of Google Domains. Digging into Google help I was able to find a mention of it. Not surprising to me, there is mention of it on Squarespace’s home page, with a link to a robust welcome page.

If you can tell by my choice of words so far, I think this is a very good thing. Why? Where Google loves collecting information about people, they don’t like dealing with people. You can’t exactly pick up the phone and call Google for support on their end-user consumer products, everything from Gmail to their Web advertising product AdSense. Interestingly on the Google Domains home page it states you can “get 24/7 Google support from real humans” which made me laugh, for as recently as within the last year that was not the case.

Out with the Old and In with the New

In the course of performing my primary income source (aka my job) I deal with many domain registrars, including Google. Many of my clients have had problems with Google domains as the login to the registrar service is integrated with the overall Google login process. Some clients have had turnover in their business and have had issues getting back into their accounts. In one case, a Web site was down for over 2 weeks because of this. No telephone support was available to accept a credit card to renew the domain name and following their automated account recovery process sadly took that long. I’m not sure exactly when they added real humans to the mix, but it is too little too late in my mind, and I have for years been suggesting people use other registrars like Name.com.

Squarespace, on the other hand, is a service designed for the non-technical user, and will likely be a good home for those domain names leaving Google. If you view the landing page I mentioned earlier they have a nice, stylish page welcoming over Google customers and highlighting the services they offer for domains, including reselling Google Workspace. This makes sense, if Google doesn’t like people and Squarespace does, it’s a win-win.

Trust and Track

If you have domain names registered through Google you can leave them there and they will be migrated to Squarespace. However you should watch for emails from both vendors to watch for specific dates and double-check all services using your domain names to ensure they are operating correctly following the move. If you are a little more technical, you may want to capture the DNS settings for each of your domain names in the event there are issues post-migration. You also have the option to transfer your domain names to any other registrar like Name.com that I have personally used for years. Note I have no stake or referral code with Name.com, but they do offer real humans who offer stellar support out of their Denver, Colorado headquarters.

Google Domains is yet another business that the search and more firm has shelved. A nice list is available at Killed by Google which lists all of their former services – some I miss, some I am glad are gone. Google Domains has already been added to the top of the list ahead of their scheduled September, 2023 shutdown.

Deconstructing Google Domains Demise

Internet-based services come and go quite often. Google Domains is one of them, but their door shutting will open a new door for their customers with Squarespace. No matter where your domain name is registered, always update your contact information and payment methods, and keep a list of them and their expiration dates outside of the registrar account for safekeeping of these vital digital assets.

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

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Congratulations to Mike Maddaloni on 16 years of successful blogging at The Hot Iron. It is a notable achievement to consistently produce high-quality content for such a long period of time.

Note that the preceding 2 sentences were not written by me, or any human being for that matter. It was generated by the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. Not bad, eh? That being said, it took some effort to generate it and put this post together.

Why AI?

Over the last few months I have been hearing more about ChatGPT and how with a query or feeding of information to it will give a reasonably understandable response. Intrigued by this, I created an account with the platform (note you need to provide an email address and a phone number to verify yourself) and gave it a try. The 2 lines above were generated as a result of the following query:

“Congratulations to Mike Maddaloni in the third person on 16 years of blogging at The Hot Iron in 2 sentences”

The query was tweaked several times, the final one here worked for this piece after I added “in the third person” as previous attempts consistently used the first person, likely as it was trying to “chat” with me rather than generate a statement to be used here. Also in previous tries it added a third statement of “well done!” at the end every time until I added the third person language even though I explicitly stated I wanted only 2 sentences.

Once I was satisfied with the text, I thought why not accompany it with an AI-generated image? After trying several AI art generators I found from search engine queries, I gave up. Trying requests with variations on “number 16” did not give me an image that had the words or numerals in it, so I went outside and took a picture of my house number, brought it into GIMP and messed with its filters to create what is appearing above.

A good first try with AI generated content; good but not great. Will future posts here contain more AI-generated content? Possibly, as I am just beginning to explore this area. If there is, I will certainly disclaim it.

Happy New Year!

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

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Merry Christmas to my friends, family, readers and anyone else who happens to read this!

When I was thinking of what photo to accompany my greeting, I could have easily taken one of the blowing snow amidst the subzero temperatures that has consumed the upper Midwest this week, but the scene above caught my eye the other day. This is the façade of the former Hollister store at the local mall that has remained long after the store moved to a more modern-looking space. With the weather outside as frightful as it is, there was something about the faux California beach scene decorated for the holidays that made me smile.

Whether you celebrate the holiday in any way shape or form, or not, may your day be as full of happiness as possible.

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

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