It was back to the pool for me, as a last minute call for volunteers got me to see my kiddos swim in person for the first time in over a year. Where some swim teams haven’t even tried hosting meets, others have, and they have done it right and with virus safety in mind. The kiddos did some big swims and I was proud of their performance. I also got to perform, for during one session I was back at the mic as meet announcer.

That’s 920-867... – Local calls in Wisconsin will soon require the area code to be dialed first due to new cross-state area codes. Or in other words, Dairyland will now be in line with dialing habits in most every state in the US.

One-Tap Scroll to Top – New to me, and likely many of you too who are reading this, is that you can tap the “status bar” on your iPhone or iPad to scroll to the top of what you are reading. The status bar is the space at the top where the time and other information is displayed. Where this function is not in every app, most Web browsers I tried can do it. And for those who don’t know, Safari is a Web browser. Special thanks to my friend Stefanos for pointing out this feature in his latest blog post.

Overplanned obsolescence – A warning message about updates to my Chromebook led to this information that the Internet device will not accept updates after this coming September. There’s a term for this – planned obsolescence. It’s when someone who makes hardware or software says that after a certain date you need to buy new hardware or software from them as they will no longer support what you have. Of course what you have will still likely work, but I digress. The Chromebook was a hand-me-down from a friend who was downsizing equipment and came in handy when schools all went virtual a year ago. Even though the Chromebook will still work with Google’s Chrome OS, I may look into alternative, non-Google operating systems for it like GalliumOS.

De-Googling May Not Be a Bad Idea – This article in The Hacker News shows what personal data Google captures on its users. The search-and-more giant was called out by smaller and less-capturing DuckDuckGo. Check out the chart towards the bottom of the article for the gory details.

Random Journey – Now that people are starting to get out more, why plan something when you can just go someplace random? Also new to me this week is Randonautica an app that uses quantum random number generation to send you someplace close by or elsewhere. Think Geocaching to a different level. I haven’t tried it yet, but my friend Randy who told me about it highly recommends it.

Last Run – This week Dick Hoyt passed away at the young age of 80. For decades he ran the Boston Marathon and races and triathlons around the world while pushing his son Rick. I met him a few times over the years that I had volunteered for the Boston Marathon, and he was a class act. The story I linked to here is by Boston sportscaster Steve Burton, someone else I have met before and equally a class act.

Temptation – Despite my track record I did not give up other blogging for Lent, and I do have other stories coming. One thing I have been moderately successful at over the period leading up to Easter is not eating meat on Fridays. Today I was successful at it despite picking up a package of beef bacon from local favorite Jacob’s Meat Market. I actually had an order in for this new delicacy of theirs as it has been selling out. By the time you are reading this it should be not-Friday and I will be cooking and enjoying this, and remarking how the above photo doesn’t do this deliciousness justice.

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

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