Without further blather...

A work (State) view with brews – I just joined Stateview Commons, a co-working space located on the main street in my fair city. It’s a great, stylish and practical space and has already helped my productivity. Although there’s always the adverse happening as it has a view to not one but two great brewpubs across the street.

Studying in former style – Former mall store spaces, abandoned due to both the shift in retail shopping as well as poor business choices, are being reimagined in varying ways. One example is a recently-relocated high school in Burlington, Vermont. As many of the store fixtures are still in place, perhaps it should be called a haute school?

Maybe this is why the store closed? – Vermont doesn’t have any billionaires living within its borders and it is not the only US state without a resident with all those commas in their net worth.

Reasons to go OTG – For as much as computers have improved our lives, it seems at every turn there’s some application of them that at least I wish wasn’t there. Google has started testing its new ad “targeting” technology in its Chrome browser whether you know it or not. There’s some solace from Apple as they are rolling out a new feature in iOS that will allow you to see what apps are tracking about you. There’s no shortage of reasons to go off the grid, even if for a few minutes.

Swimming with more purpose than usual – One of my kiddos former swim teammates is taking his swim game to a higher level. This summer he will swim 10 miles across the width of Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin, and during his training he is aiming to raise $50,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. You can support his worthy effort here as my family has. Go Ian!

A less desirable swim thru Accessibility law – If you have a Web site you should have some basic familiarity on Web Accessibility. If you don’t, this presentation I did a year ago on Web Accessibility is a good start. Even if you do, the $100,000 question is what laws apply to it, if any do. This week a ruling came down that the Americans with Disability Act did not apply in one case. To add to this, a bill is floating around Washington, DC to attempt to tie the Act to Web site. In the meantime, work with whomever manages your Web site to ensure you have the basics covered.

Minority Report – This week I watched a recording of Advancing Leadership Agility offered by the Scrum Alliance. Even if you’re not interested in the topic, fast-forward to around the 25 minute mark on a survey on employee engagement. Spoiler alert: only 35% of surveyed employees said they are engaged in the workplace!

Solid state Spring cleaning – For Mac owners, here’s how you can search and identify if you can make more space on your hard drive by deleting old log files. Sadly this didn’t yield me much more room, hopefully you’ll have better results.

Gables soon gone – I have often admired the craft that went into the design of the gables on this house. I see it often as it’s across from the local facility where my kiddos swim. Sadly its days are numbered, as the house, long empty and slated to be demolished, will finally be torn down in the coming weeks. In its place will be a parking lot for said local facility. Where such moves are always in the name of progress, hopefully what comes of its demise will sprout something else great.

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

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The phrase Spring Break conjures up images of partying in Florida that I never did in college. So when my kiddos had Spring Break this week, where that strangely came to mind, in reality it was a road trip to Ohio and a short but nice staycation. I even took a few days off of work, and actually unplugged from the office for most of it. Seriously.

No fooling – Thursday was the first day of April, often called April Fool’s Day. A couple of clever things I found were Synology’s FreshStation and the Nielsen Norman Group’s article on how much users love constant change. I opted to not write on this day, especially as something I wrote a decade ago on Google removing the search box from their home page not only fell flat but turned into a self-fulfilling prophesy with how mobile and home speaker devices listen to you constantly these days.

Capitalist tradition – Many times I have referred to the tasty meat products produced by Jacobs Meat Market, a local legend here in Northeast Wisconsin. This article tells well the story of the three-generations business tradition Jacobs is.

I gotta update what? – If you are a non-technical Web site owner and have gotten emails about updating Google Analytics code and don’t know what to do about it, you are not alone. Perhaps you may not even know what Google Analytics is, but that’s a topic for another time. The search behemoth has made changes to this free service of measuring traffic to your Web site. For those with Squarespace Web sites this article on how to integrate the Google Analytics changes is helpful as I needed it myself for some I help support.

Physics 101 – Not all doll heads turn. If you happen to force it to turn, good luck reattaching it.

You get a train station, and you... – Amtrak this week came out with a map of “aspirations” for how to expand personal train riding across the US. These are merely proposed ideas, and have no budget or approvals from governmental bodies or the conglomerates who own the train tracks. Where it’s nice to dream, until Amtrak can operate without heavy government subsidies per ticket, these new lines on the map may remain just in someone’s head.

All Things In Depth – A relatively new Web site in my area All Things Appleton has become a go-to for me for depth in news that is sadly missing from the newspapers of record. Just about every major newspaper in Wisconsin is owned by Gannett and is under the umbrage of USA Today Wisconsin. This goes beyond branding, and has consolidated printing facilities and reporters, leaving what I consider a poor overall product. Yet I still subscribe, as it gives me the headlines that I need to look into further elsewhere, like on independent Web sites like All Things Appleton.

Banked Billions – I finished binge-watching Billions. It’s fifth season was cut short due to COVID-19, and left me wanting more. In short, I liked Axe over Chuck, and Wendy over both. I have no idea if this is truly what it is like to be a billionaire hedge fund manager, but the optics are enticing.

How Are We Meeting? – Last week I took a class at work on effective meetings taught by Anthony Mersino of Vitality Chicago. The greatest thing I learned from him was to have meeting retrospectives. Often we have regular meetings and after a while they are so routine that we’re not sure if they even effective. By hosting an occasional retrospective, we may find ways to make the meeting more effective, efficient or perhaps decide to not have it at all. I plan to take this to task with regular meetings I facilitate and participate in.

At the corner of Style and Price in Chicago – A few weeks ago Irish discount clothing retailer Primark opened a store in Chicago at the corner of State and Washington Streets in the Loop. This space sat empty for years and was previously an Old Navy and Gap store. The kiddos give it high marks, and will certainly be a stop on our next visit back to the Windy City.

Partially righting a wrong in Chicago – Overdue news came this week as the Chicago Park District announced it was replacing a slide at Maggie Daley Park that has caused many injuries to people who went on it. Those injured include my kiddos, who both got scrapes and were bleeding after their first rides on the slide, prompting us never to return.

The playground was part of the new park which replaced the former Daley Bicentennial Plaza, a lovely park that needed to be ripped up to repair the parking garage below it. I lamented and paid homage to what I called the “locals park” when it closed. I felt the replacement park was too much of a showplace and not functional. A parent did not have complete line of sight over the entire park, and with little kids that can easily get lost (and did) it was problematic. Plus the bathrooms were too far away, requiring the placement of porta-potties by the playground. Add the slide to the mix, and it was a one-and-done visit for many.

Sanitary for your protection – For our staycation we went to a local hotel under the Hilton umbrella. I can count on one hand how many hotel night stays I have had in the last year, but I digress. When we arrived at our room the above-shown “seal” was on the door. This brought back memories of the 1970’s when you would stay at a wayside motel and there would be a “sanitary for your protection” ribbon on the toilet seat, causing me to wonder how clean it real was. The Lysol branding on this sticker put the image of housekeeping staff fogging the entire room. Once we entered we found a nice room and had no concerns of its cleanliness. Despite the thoughts of the chain’s CEO, we left a tip for housekeeping.

"To hold a pen is to be at war..." – Voltaire

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

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If a day goes by where you don’t learn something new, what good is it really? Sometimes that new nugget of knowledge is welcomed and cherished, and sometimes it is scary as all hell and you wished you didn’t know it. Nonetheless, learning is what we do on this journey of life, whether we like it or not.

What you just read was how I opened a post on March 27, 2020, when I brought back the concept of writing on what I learned in the previous week. This was also how I opened the original series of these posts, which I started on a Friday back in 2014. As lockdowns and shutdowns were underway and everybody was now working at home, I thought of resurrecting this idea. Call it a distraction, call it a way to breathe new life back into The Hot Iron, I figured I’d give it a try.

A year later I am still at it. Every week without fail I wrote what crossed my purview the previous week. Some weeks it hit on Friday, other weeks on Sunday, but nonetheless it did hit. Looking back on these posts, as well as the year in general, here’s what I learned on this strange trip.

I’m not tired of doing this – Going into the first edition of the series last year, I had no plans for how long I would do this. I looked back at the first run and I ended it after 8 months, and wrote a summary like this one a few months later. Trying to recall my thinking 7 years ago, I wanted to get back to writing standard, one-topic tomes rather than weekly summaries.

This time, I looked forward to compiling my weekly notes. I still do. I also tried to write one-topic posts as well, and I was relatively successful at that over the year. I continue to strive to do those as well.

This serves as a personal archive – Years ago I had a separate blog called sourcegate where I posted tech tips. Although I was glad to contribute contextualized tools to the world, its true catalyst was a personal quick reference library. My What I Learned posts ended up serving the same purpose, especially chronicling such gems as the link check tool and better meme generator I found.

People are reading it – If you know me, you know I am not exactly an introvert. My ego, though kept in check through marriage and fatherhood, is still alive and kicking. However over the years I have never assumed anything I wrote here was going to be a runaway hit. Often I wrote something for a specific purpose, striking the iron while it is hot, but much of the content here has been to share my thoughts and observations in the realms of business and technology, with the occasional diversion.

As I wrote What I Learned columns, I got feedback from people. It came in the form of comments to a post, as well as a reply to the email they received through their subscription or even a text message. And the feedback was positive! I appreciate that my thoughts in digital form resonated with people, and that has been a part of why I continue doing this.

With this I will pat myself on the back and continue looking out there. Whether it’s on the screen in front of me, the podcast playing in the background or the people I meet (and hopefully much more frequently going forward), I enjoy learning new things. Maybe you learned something new yourself?

Photo collage of images from past What I Learned posts made with Canva. Yes, this is an affiliate link.

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

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When I started blogging over 14 years ago, the last thing I thought would come of this endeavor was a strong interest in writing. Call it serendipity, call it colleterial damage, but in a process led by technology then, that very technology has become secondary today. This being said, I have much, much more to learn about the art and craft of writing.

Reading On Writing by Stephen King was also serendipitous. Last summer while on vacation my family stopped at a yard sale as they had kayaks for sale. After learning the prices of said kayaks were more in tune with a Christies auction than stuff piled on an out-of-the-way driveway in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, I found a used copy of the book at the whopping price of 50 cents. As you will read on, this find made the stop worthwhile.

On Writing is part biography, part motivational speech and part textbook from the master of horror and suspense. It chronicles his life story to where he was when it came out 20 years ago – note there have been subsequent updated editions of this since then, however what I read was the original. In addition to the craft of writing, it also tells the tales of the trappings of the industry, including rejection, publishing and how you make a living leading up to publishing.

There were many takeaways from On Writing that I scribbled down as I read through it, what follows is the top, most meaningful of them to me.

The best of the advice he received – There are many pieces of advice that King got over the years that he recalls in the book. My favorite was advice he got from a newspaper editor, "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story... when you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open” – Building on the advice he received, this really resonated with me. I have always felt that editing was just as equally important if not more so in some cases. To this extent, there is an example in the book of something he wrote, and then edited by hand, showing all of his hand marks.

“Don’t develop plot, let it happen” – As I am writing this post this rings so true, as the results of even this very sentence were not what I thought I would have written. Many times I go into writing something after already writing it in my head. Even then, as I put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, the results aren’t always as planned.

“Write one word at a time” – When you look at it that way, it makes writer’s block almost seem silly.

King spent time in West De Pere, Wisconsin – As a child, King lived in a city just about 20 minutes north of where I am now. It’s nice to see I am not the only Red Sox fan who has lived in this area.

This is my first Stephen King book – For all I knew about Stephen King and have seen many of his movies, I have never read one of his books before. As that has now changed, I think I will mix up my reading stack for the year with one of his novels, perhaps The Running Man.

On Writing was a great read for me, as it was an honest look at a man who has been insanely successful at writing, and as humble as the person who could be sitting next to me in bleachers at Fenway Park on a summer afternoon. If you are interested in writing or simply want to learn more about the man behind Carrie White, I recommend On Writing. As with all books I read, the destination of its giveaway was to a friend who has the audio book of On Writing – narrated by King himself – who I thought might like to see his words on paper as well.

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

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About a year ago someone ahead of me at the Dairy Queen drive-thru paying for my order would have been the sole highlight of my week. Fortunately times have changed.

MAzing – An afterschool field trip with my kiddo took me to MToxins, one of the few venom labs in the world in nearby Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Here they extract the venom from poisonous snakes, by hand no less, which is used to create antivenom medication. I was able to see up close (with plate glass between us) an extraction as well as other reptiles and rescued owls. It is an experience I certainly was not expecting to see, and recommend you do the same.

Thoughts on Thinking – The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast I have mentioned previously will run bonus episodes on the weekend that go well beyond the realm of Scrum. A week ago I heard an interview with Shawn Livermore talking about the creative process. It’s worth checking out this thoughtful half-hour talking about the myths of business genius.

Taking Up Valuable MySpace – When Googling myself I ran across an extremely downsized but similarly looking version of my MySpace page from the mid-2000’s. Why it is still there I have no idea, but it certainly wasn’t worth linking to.

Small Plate Double-Take – The French word for small food plates is “assiettes” as I learned when looking at the label on a package of paper plates which was translated in several languages.

Live Free or Die With Gold – New Hampshire joins Nevada and Utah in offering Goldbacks, local currency that is recognized by state law. They are somewhat similar in appearance to those in the other states, but with the Granite State’s famous motto, Live Free or Die. Wyoming is apparently next to offer these shiny notes.

Trash on Trash – I heard a story that off-beat posters were appearing in New York City about keeping the city trash free, and appearing like they were from the city’s sanitation department. First I heard about ones saying supporters of former President Trump were trash. When I heard there was also a poster calling New England sports fans trash, I knew they were bogus. Why? The hate that fans of the Red Sox have for the Yankees is far, far from reciprocated, as Yankees fans couldn’t care less about the team northeast of them.

Chaos Ending – I saw the movie Chaos Walking this past weekend. It is a story of a world where there are no women, and the men can hear the thoughts of other men. Where the premise was initially odd to me, the movie has an interesting story, though the ending was rather abrupt.

Mask Up Tax Down – Last week the IRS issued a statement that expenses on masks and other personal protective equipment is tax deductible. By now my taxes information has already been sent to my accountant, and many people in the US have already filed their taxes. Now I know why the tax filing deadline was extended by a month.

You Light Up My Zoom Life – My desk at home is not in a well-lit area for video calls, and I finally decided to do something about it. After much searching and comparing models I decided to get the above-pictures “clamp lamp” – an LED circle that can clamp to a desk and can be positioned with its gooseneck. It comes with 3 lighting modes and the brightness can be adjusted. So far so great and now my entire face can have the same lighting, for better or for worse.

Happy Birthday Thing 2! Your infectious smile and energy both bring me joy and challenge me daily!

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

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