The Hot Iron - What I Learned This Week For April 3 2020

What I Learned This Week For April 3 2020

By Mike Maddaloni on Thursday, April 02, 2020 at 11:36 PM with 2 comments

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.