A dear friend once suggested I write a book consisting of blog posts I have written here at The Hot Iron. My response to her, through a dismissively scrunched face, was “who would want to read past things I wrote?” After reading Things That Matter by Charles Krauthammer, I am rethinking that knee-jerk reaction.

Krauthammer was an award-winning columnist, following years as a policy advisor following years as a doctor. When I saw him occasionally as an analyst on various cable news talk shows I had no idea of any of this. As I enjoyed his commentary on TV, I presumed I would enjoy this book, not to mention taking away a few things from it. In this case my reaction was spot-on.

A good look back on history thru a unique lens – In addition to his journey from medicine to writing, Krauthammer was an American who lived in Canada in his youth. His writing style was smart yet educating with a wry sense of humor, and it was clear to anyone reading it of his conservative stance. Even if you didn’t agree with him, he wrote in a way that you would still want to hear what he had to say. This combination of background and style made for the unique pieces curated in this book.

Peace in The Devil's Dictionary – In one article Krauthammer referred the definition of “peace” in The Devil’s Dictionary. I had never heard of the Devil’s Dictionary and wasn’t aware of this satirical book of definitions for common terms. In this case, peace is defined as, “in international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”

More writers should do this – Clearly this book has got me thinking of re-evaluating doing this myself, despite the antithesis of my notoriety as compared to Charles Krauthammer. As well there are many columnists out there who should also do this... and I am looking at you Heidi Stevens!

Things That Matter is not solely a political book, as it talks of life, culture, sports, chess and, yes, politics covering several decades of his columns. I enjoyed his thoughtful writing that presented a perspective of a time when I was much younger and didn’t fully know all going on in the world.

If you are interested in a historical look at world events from the time they occurred I highly recommend Things That Matter. I was given this book several years ago before Krauthammer died and I finally got to reading it now. I passed this book along to my wife who also enjoyed him on TV and my guess is she’ll enjoy his writings as well. Perhaps you can get the book from her when she is done with it, or click any link here to buy a copy of your own – if you do I will earn a few pennies from your purchase.

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

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First some housekeeping, as I added some emphasis to the blog this week. First I highlighted the opportunity for you to buy me a cup of coffee if you like what you are reading. I also added the heading “Value for Value” to it, in hopes that will resonate with some people. I also added “disclaimer” text that some links I have to products or services I could earn money from is you click and buy. The US Federal Trade Commission has been all over bloggers on this for years. Oh, and I also removed links to my social media channels that I barely use anymore.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

I Didn’t Call You Old, Honest – I often talk about good and bad Web and digital design. Many of the concepts that go (or should go) into design come from the offline world. Here’s a great video from Don Norman, a design guru who is elderly himself, on designing for the elderly. Spoiler – design for the elderly benefits those much younger too!

Did I mention my kiddo is selling Girl Scouts Cookies?

Does Resume Size Matter? – I saw this post on LinkedIn from someone I don’t know about their 1-page resume and it made me think about my own 1-page resume. Many people have told me it’s too short, and how could someone amazing as me fit on one page. Easily!

Killer Phones – Apparently the magnets in the new Apple iPhone 12 can impact pacemakers. I mentioned this to a few people, and they didn’t know a mobile device has magnets in it. So be careful putting it in your front shirt pocket, or anywhere near your body in general.

Now I Git It – Git is a distributed computer code repository, and one I haven’t used. So I was interested in reading this Git overview by Skyline Technologies on it. My biggest takeaway is in how it differs from traditional code version control.

More to PDFs than You Thought – This week I took an online course offered by Siteimprove Academy on Accessibility for PDFs. It was eye-opening for me as I have worked with accessibility on Web pages and apps, but was unaware what goes into PDFs. I could write a lot on this, but here’s a quick tip for you – start with a tagged Word document, then save or export to PDF rather than printing it to a PDF.

Revue Who? – I got an email this week that Revue was acquired by Twitter as apparently I had an account with them. Who? Well I was able to recover my password and delete my account, and still didn’t get the gist of who they were in the process of doing so.

All Good Things... – For about the last year I have been working at a co-working space in town called World HeadQuarters. I joined back in February just in time to close in March when everything else was shut down. After things started re-opening it relocated from its unique space – a former outdoors goods store – to another unique space – a former mobile showroom. Before Christmas I got word they were closing their location in town (they have another about a half hour away) and this weekend is the final time I will be able to key in. I wish the owner Brenda, her family and team the best of luck and good fortune.

It was an interesting ride; I got to know some good people and even got some work there. One unique aspect they added to the location was this custom-built front desk, pictured above. It’s made from reclaimed wood pallets. The ops manager built it, and I helped him secure some of the pallets that went into it. As cool as it looks, it was also fun watching it being built.

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

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It’s that time of year when young girls around the country go door-to-door and setup tables at supermarkets to sell to the masses what they have been longing for – Girl Scouts Cookies. Only that this year, who will be answering their door to strangers or congregating in the entrances of public markets?

The show – or sales – must go on, and my daughter is taking to where everyone else buys things, the Internet, to sell cookies. You now have the opportunity to buy Thin Mints, Caramel deLites, Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Caramel Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Patties, Shortbreads, Lemonades, Girl Scout S’mores and the new ones – Toast-Yay. Some are even gluten free and vegan. All can be shipped directly to the comfort of your own home.

To buy cookies, simply click on the bug red button below:

If the link doesn’t work, click here to Buy Girl Scout Cookies Now!

My daughter thanks you in advance for the dozens of cookies you will be buying! The proceeds of the sales that go to her Girl Scouts troop will help subsidize the virtual activities and badges they are earning throughout the school year as well as Girl Scouts summer camps, which are planned to reopen in some fashion this summer.

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

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Gee, I watched a lot of video this week. And no, I wasn’t watching these as I drove my kiddos to school for the first time in forever, something I was thrilled to do again.

What else did I do? Maybe it’s in a journal? – This weekly blog post is somewhat of a journal for me, as I takes notes typed into my phone as the proverbial “ding” goes off in my head. However I used to journal at past jobs, carrying a notebook just about everywhere, taking down ideas, minutes and the occasional doodles. Agile coach Anthony Mersino wrote about journaling and this has inspired me to start back to do this. I have a journal a friend gave me that this would work perfect for, and I’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks.

2020 Scrum Guide Event – Back in November was the 25th anniversary of the Scrum Guide what some call the bible of the project management framework. To celebrate this there was a virtual event, and by the time I tried to connect to it the Zoom meeting was full. The recording of the anniversary Scrum Guide event was made available and I finally watched it... all 2 hours and 18 minutes of it. It was long but well worth it for anyone who is a Scrum practitioner and curious to hear about what went into the making of the latest update.

VUCA? – Under the new to me category is the acronym VUCA which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. I learned about this in a video podcast I watched of an interview with a friend from high school Lynn Turner referred to it. In summary, from what I understand, it came from the fall of the USSR and moving away from one common enemy to a time of uncertainty, and using these terms to approach how to handle not only world affairs but what is going on in your business. Or at least that’s how I understand it now, and need to spend more time wrapping my head around it.

Feel-Good Stereotypes – I had added the movie The Feast of the Seven Fishes to my watchlist in hopes of watching it before Christmas. Oops. It’s a story of a multi-generational Italian-American family celebrating Christmas with the Seven Fishes, which are literally seven types of seafood (and can vary). It was a very good movie and I highly recommend it. But as I was watching it, what stood out to me this was not my Italian-American experience growing up. The story has what I’d call “typical Italian-American movie family” of hard-working, loud, wine-drinking, loving people who have some form of organized crime ties. This was not my family at all. First off, my Mom didn’t like eel, so we never did this, but had plenty of shrimp cocktail at Christmas. I could go on, and someday I may elaborate more. Note even though it’s technically a Christmas movie, it’s a good watch even after the Epiphany.

To Boldly Laugh – With all of the videos I saw, the algos at YouTube clearly know I like Star Trek and served up blooper reels like this one I watched interestingly subtitled in Italian. I don’t know why I didn’t look for these sooner.

Watched about listening to The Watch – A new Indiegogo crowdsourcing opened this week for The Watch an audio drama series about Milwaukee, Wisconsin police officers and their lives on and off the beat. Check out the campaign, and from what my friend Randy, who is a writer and voice actor, it will be very entertaining. And I am not just saying that because one of the characters may have a name similar to mine.

Not talking in the Clubhouse yet – I have been hearing about Clubhouse a new social media platform that is audio only. Thanks to my friend John I have an account on there but haven’t had the time to go thru it. I found this Clubhouse overview article I have to still read. Hopefully I have more to report next week.

Did you hear the first? – This article about the origins of podcasting talks about the very first podcast feed, which may not be what you or anyone else heard.

Big Tech Tracking – Somehow I missed that last week Google completed its acquisition of FitBit. The first thing I thought of was if FitBit will give people refunds for their purchase like Nest did when it was acquired by the tech giant.

Small Tech Lookups – A lot of my working days revolves around domain names and their settings, called DNS for, you guessed it, domain name settings. A couple of additional sites I have been relying on are DNSChecker and DNSWatch. I share these here as, well, I haven’t started journaling yet.

General inspiration – Last week I mentioned about the new General Motors logo, which inspired Matt to write this extremely intriguing piece on how decades of design styles went into the new symbol for GM.

Heavy reading on small business data security – As many readers of The Hot Iron have their own business, I share this article from The Hacker News on the importance of application and data security. My hope is you have already considered everything in the article. Right?

Lighter reading – The Small Change Institute is looking for uplifting stories from the pandemic for a study on “joyscrolling” which is scrolling through an online stream of good news as compared to what we all read now. Feel free to fill out the form and help this upstart cause.

Reach out and touch – My friend Stefanos wrote this thoughtful story about the Touch Bar, a feature of MacBooks that have received a lot of negative publicity and in his eloquent way talks about human behavior in general and Aristotle.

Guess who’s coming to your house? – By now pretty much the entire world has seen memes of US Senator Bernie Sanders and his sitting stance at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden this past week. Someone came up with the idea of this simple Web app where you can plug in any address, and the Independent senior senator from Vermont will be sitting in front of it. It’s likely the only true laugh in American politics we’ll have for a while.

It better be – I have been seeing billboards like the one pictured here for a few weeks. I have no idea who is behind it, but it better not be a disappointment.

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

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What I Learned • (3) Comments • Permalink

One thing that drove me to work on the Web, gladly leaving behind a career of mainframe and client-server systems behind me, was the ability to create highly visible applications and projects that could be easily shared and used by the masses. Armed with this skillset, it was easy for me to imagine a system from any random idea that came to mind. If I had the proverbial nickel for every idea I had, I would be too busy sunning myself on a tropical beach to be writing what I am right now.

Along the way I actually executed on some of my project ideas, one being the very blog you are reading. The others, well, came to an unfortunate but necessary demise. Though I have written about some of these in the past, I haven’t brought them together until now, in My Project Graveyard. Inspired by similar collections by others, I am sharing projects that started with good intentions, and ended for various reasons.

Phenom – This was my personal Web site and the first I created using a domain name. Though I created my first personal Web site as early as 1993, it was using the domain name of the combined dial-up Internet / shared Web hosting providers. In 1996, I registered my first domain name – monehp.com. Why that? It is “phenom” spelled backwards. Again you are likely asking, why that? I sent out an email to the few dozen people I knew who had email back then asking them to help suggest a domain name for me. Two people came up with this one – my license plate on my car then was PHENOM, which was a take on my college radio show, the Madman Phenomenon, from the late 1980’s. Why did I call my radio show that? Now that I don’t completely remember.

This site was also my first development sandbox where I tried several ideas, including a surfing Web site where my friend RJ provided the content (trust me, I am no surfer!). It was also the first home of what became GoPats.com. The Wayback Machine at archive.org has the oldest record of what was on the site going back to 1997. I maintained this site until better homes for my projects came along. I kept it as a separate site for about 10 years, then I set the domain name, which I still own, to redirect here to The Hot Iron.

GoPats.com – This site, as mentioned above, started as a sub-site of Phenom, that I initially called it Patriots Unofficial. It then took on a life of its own within a year with its own domain name (complete credit to my friend Clint, who wrote a weekly column for the site, for the idea to register it) and went on for another 21 years, until it was “retired” which means the site wasn’t updated for years and it was time to move on. During its run not only did it serve Patriots fans but myself as well as it was a showcase of the type of Web development work I could do.

I wrote a fairly complete story about GoPats.com a few years ago and the domain name now redirects to that blog post.

Boston Jaycees – This was the first Web site I built for a greater cause. I got involved with the Jaycees (also known as Junior Chamber outside of the US) and, recognizing they didn’t have a Web site, I offered to build one. It was also the first time I worked with someone who is now referred to as a digital marketing professional; it was another Jaycees member who worked for an ad agency who was developing a digital practice.

The site evolved both as my technical skills did, along with higher user expectations as more people were using the Web. What started as a “static” site – one that had to be hand-coded – evolved to one “dynamic” – one that had what is now called a content management system or CMS. A lot of the functionality was similar to what I built for GoPats.com, and often I would design elements to be used across many of my sites. At the point I became president of the chapter, I handed the reigns of the site to another emerging digital marketing guru John Wall, who discontinued the paper newsletter we had and evolved the Web site even more.

Within a few years of leaving the organization and the Boston area, the site went dark as the chapter ceased operations. For a time I “rescued” the domain name but eventually I dropped it. For another time it was pointing to the last Jaycees chapter in Massachusetts, but now it is once again available for registration. You can see the last version of the Boston Jaycees Web site as I had built it here.

Control – In the course of running my former Web consulting business, I was tracking more and more information, from domain names to project elements to billable time and everything else I could possibly track. I was fairly organized with multiple spreadsheets, but over time they became too much to manage. I then decided to build an application to manage it all, and I aptly called it Control.

I don’t want to brag too much, but I was able to easily manage and control all of items I needed to with this platform. I even impressed myself when I brought on a bookkeeper at one point, and with creating a few simple reports she was able to generate invoices rather easily using the system. When I decided to shutter the business and return to the working world, this application was shut down as well.

tasklogr – When I first heard of Twitter I wasn’t immediately drawn to using it, but the idea of a short-messaging system did inspire me in how I keep track of bits of information, as I wrote about back in the day. That inspiration led to me creating tasklogr, a system of capturing short messages. The interface to enter these messages was Web pages – one that was a top bar frame on my browser’s home page, and another that would fit nicely on a mobile device. Notes I entered were captured within my Control system, and from there I could manage a straight task list or convert to other actionable information for my business.

This solution served me well for a while, but eventually I found other note-taking apps like BugMe that I still use to this day.

GoPats.com Report – Bitten by the podcasting bug, I decided I wanted to create one. But about what? That question seemed to be the only thing I should be concerned with creating a podcast. Little did I know how wrong I would be.

I came up with the idea for a podcast on the New England Patriots, an audio companion to GoPats.com. As both my own and my friend Clint’s activity on the site had been waning, I thought this would be a good way to breathe life into it. There I go thinking again. The podcast lasted exactly 1 episode. In short, it took too much work for me to edit and produce it, and in the end wasn’t something I was interested in doing on a regular basis.

Flagship CMS – As I mentioned earlier, I was developing code for GoPats.com and the Boston Jaycees Web site, and in some cases leveraging code from one for the other. This came in handy as I grew my Web consulting business and I used this code as the foundation for the CMS for client sites. This worked well for many years, and I eventually gave these tools a name – Flagship CMS. This was solely an internal name and I never really developed it as a branded product. The timing of the name was actually at the tail-end of using it as I was pivoting to commercial CMS applications for sites. This decision was based on many factors, including the proliferation of such tools in addition to reevaluating where I should focus my time on. Eventually all of the sites running Flagship CMS were taken over by others firms who deployed their own technical solution to the Web sites, which coincided with the winding down of my former business.

Looptopia Memories – In 2007 and 2008 a weekend arts festival in the Chicago Loop called Looptopia took place. At the time I was living in the Loop and decided to create a Web site about it, featuring photos and videos from the event. All of that content was uploaded to Flickr, with whom I have since deleted my account. Where I kept the Web site around for a few years I didn’t update it much. The last state of Looptopia Memories can be seen here.

sourcegate – As any good technician should I keep notes of code, services, procedures, etc. that I have used or think I would use at some point. And lots of them. Like any burgeoning collection of information, it needs to be managed to be effective. After several systems didn’t quite do the job I decided to try a public blog, where each item would be its own post. That way I would not only be curating the information but sharing it with the greater community. Eventually I decided to shutdown this additional blog as I wasn’t actually referencing much of the information I was posting. An early version of this tech tips blog can be seen here.

What’s interesting is the domain name I gave the site – sourcegate.com. I acquired the domain name several years after I worked for SourceGate Systems, a dot-com start-up in the Boston area. I had placed the name with a backorder domain name system and eventually the name was available and I was able to register it. At this point I have owned the domain name longer than the company was in existence, and certainly longer than the six months, five days I worked there.

psURL – This one isn’t as much a site demise as one reimagined. I decided to build my own short URL service, one where I could take a ginormous URL and have a short one that I could easily pass along in a message or even speak it for someone to easily remember and access. For example, https://psurl.com/mike links you to a longer URL for a PDF of my resume.

Using Flagship CMS as a base, I built my own system. As an addon I built the ability for a short URL to display a Web page with a text message on it. There were similar services out there like this that were inspired by the desire to workaround the then-120 character limit of a tweet on Twitter. Several years after I built this I found YOURLS an open source short URL application, and decided to move to that. Where I liked the Twitter workaround, I didn’t really use it much, and in its place I gained a system I didn’t have to maintain much at all.

dMorning – This is one that is out there, lost, wandering around the streets of northeast Wisconsin. After moving here a few years ago and not finding a tech/creative networking venue, I decided to create one, and called it dMorning. Well, I tried to at least. For some reason it never took off, and I tried twice to do so. The Web site is still out there in hopes that a third time is the charm. Though it will have to wait until in-person network resumes in general. What does the name mean you ask? Look at the dMorning site to find out.

Domain Names – Ah, domain names. I never kept a log of all of the domain names I no longer own. Most of them I simply dropped by not renewing them, and a few I sold off over the years. I would likely have to irritate my friends at Name.com for a history of all of the domain names I once registered with them. The fact that I don’t have that exhaustive list is probably a good thing, as I am guessing it would be rather long and a reminder of many, many more fleeting ideas.

Deconstructing My Project Graveyard

There’s a saying in business today to “fail fast” whereby we move on quickly from something that different work. Where I basically agree with this, we must also recognize the good and bad from these failings or things we simply decided to no longer do. Burying them in a project graveyard is a good way to acknowledge them, and move on to the next big thing.

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

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Business • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink