Pondering why my kids need to check-in to a class they are virtually in when they have a Webcam pointing at them seems like a waste of time on a day like today. I remember 9/11/2001 like it was yesterday. As I recounted over a decade ago I might have seen one of the ill-fated planes that morning. However I never wrote that on 9/10/2001 I was where I am right now – in Wisconsin – and flew back to Logan Airport in Boston that night. Needless to say the experience at Logan the next time I was there was quite different.

A Brand Evolves – Congrats to my very good friend Alex Ryan on the rebranding of her consultancy, Evolve Solutions Group! The new logo and brand approach fit very well with the work she and her team do. They created a cool announcement video that was trending on LinkedIn. Check out their Web site and if you’re looking for creative, effective business solutions, I can’t recommend them enough.

What’s In A Brand? – Another recent rebrand announcement came from Name.com, the best domain name registrar out there, as far as I am concerned. Their rebrand was done to also highlight their other services, like hosting, Web sites, SSL certificates and email. I have been a customer of Name.com for well over a decade and they provide great support, great pricing, and best of all a Web site that is by far the most superior for easily managing your domain names in the marketplace – trust me on this!

Fired Up – Planned obsolescence is a term that is often applied to technology, where “built-in” to the tech is the need to replace it as it can’t be further upgraded. Wouldn’t it be nice to know about it though? When we got a new TV our Amazon Fire TV stick started acting up, where video would cache, timeout and lose lip sync. I thought it may be the monitor’s interference with the WiFi but that wasn’t it. After looking on Amazon I discovered the model we had was actually 2 versions old. Upon getting a new one, all is working better than before.

My (New Rugged) Charge(r) – Speaking of older tech, it has been years since Mophie made the Juice Pack Powerstation Pro. This rugged (water and drop proof) battery, made of metal and encased in bright orange rubber, was perfect for accidental drops, a weekend at Riot Fest, and fully charged it could fully charge 2 devices. They stopped making it much to my dismay. After futile attempts to find one on close out, and an on-and-off quest for another model, I came upon MyCharge and their Adventure series. So far so good, and though I won’t have a Riot Fest this year to break it in, there’ll be other opportunities for it to show its true mettle.

Suitable For Framing – You can buy a stock photo of my hand! I’ll spare the story about the search rabbit hole I went down, but I found this photo from the launch of the Trump board game in 1989. At the left you see a hand holding a WNEK-FM microphone, and that’s me. Why I was there is chronicled here or you can watch a news clip of me and the microphone in action at that event event.

Your Own Scrum Gallery Too – Now you can decorate your space and learn about Scrum and Agile at the same time. Incrementor is offering free Agile posters and Scrum Alliance has a PDF of a Scrum Framework poster you can print out and hang prominently.

Tricking Browsers – Next to outright bigoted hatred and Hitler, Web browser cache is something I loathe equally. If you don’t know what browser cache is, this article explains it well. Warning I am going to get a little techy here… as this week I learned an straightforward, easy to code for Web programmers to help mitigate caching issues from a very smart engineer. By adding a querystring to the URL of an embedded file, such as CSS or JavaScript, the browser will think this is a new file and load it automatically. The querystring can be anything, such setting to something like the date of the change to the file.

Laughing and Crying – A couple of things I read this week gave me a chuckle and made me think too much as well. This article by Dr. Vincent Filak, a world-reknown Journalism professor and author, talks about back to college numbers. This article shared to be my world-reknown architectural publisher Kevin Carmody on eerily sad and dangerous things found during structural inspections.

The Music Of My Life – Sad news came this week that Khalis Bayyan, co founder of Kool and the Gang, has died. The word “sad” I don’t think has ever been equated with this great band from the 70’s and 80’s. And what better way to celebrate his life and contributions that with their hit from the 80’s, Celebrate.

This past weekend I went back to church, as inside of the church, for the first time in forever, or so it seems. Where all of the usual were in place, seeing the sign pictured above was frankly odd to me. Even more strange was saying prayers aloud with a mask on. So not to end this so sadly, I have embedded the Celebrate video below.

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

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