On this day in 1939, Ted Williams hit his very first home run. Or as I and my fellow Red Sox fans call it, one down, 520 to go. Not bad for a 2-decade career that was interrupted by war and no pliability studios near Fenway Park as they are today. More closer to the twenty-first century were a few this that hit it over the Green Monster for me.

Started Locally, Acting Globally – This past Thursday was Earth Day, an annual recognition of the planet and environment that, unbeknownst to me, started here in Wisconsin. One of the original organizers, William Cherkasky, is actually from the city I now live in.

Not Worth the Servers It Runs On – Starbucks periodically has “games” – Web sites where you can play each time you make a purchase. Without fail, each of them tends to be a less than stellar experience. Their latest one, Starbucks Earth Month Game, sadly took that track record to an extreme. Of course playing is not required, and I have endured one of these for the last time.

FeedBetter? – FeedBurner started as a start-up in Chicago in 2004 where you could run your blog’s RSS feed thru their service and get analytics and add advertising to it, among other features. After Google bought it three years later, slowly many of those features were discontinued and its user interface remained frozen in Web 2.0 time. Out of the blye this past week Google announced it was going to move FeedBurner to a “more stable, modern infrastructure” (whatever that means) and kill off its email subscription feature.

The very blog you are reading still uses FeedBurner for RSS feeds, after moving email subscriptions to Mailchimp several years ago. Why Google isn’t killing FeedBurner altogether is somewhat of a surprise, as it killed off Google Reader, an RSS feed aggregator, over a decade ago. I think it’s time to finally move the feed out from under FeedBurner.

Another Look on Voting – U.S. Senate bill S1, also known as the For The People Act, has been presented to create federal reforms to voting. Among them is a mandate for paper ballots. Where many will not have a concern or worry about this, it could present an Accessibility barrier to those with disabilities. In defense of this, the National Coalition for Accessible Voting has presented this statement on S1.

What could help those with disabilities? Purely digital voting. Many do not know that some US States are already voting electronically. Where it may take some time to adjust the paradigms of the masses to voting online, a paper ballot mandate won’t help with the research and testing needed to make digital voting more of a widespread reality.

Yes Kidding – I recently discovered tasty goat’s milk cheeses made by a local dairy LaClare Creamery. A trip to their facility last week was a treat, complete with a café to taste their great cheeses, baby goats you can pet and even full-sized goats you can pet when they are not climbing the above-pictured, several-storied wooden silo. Shopping local also helps the earth, right?

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

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