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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Diversions • (0) Comments • Permalink

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

A lot of what I am recalling here from my week is technology related. This isn’t a surprise, as that’s what I do most of my days. I guess it’s better than if I worked in politics?

Back To The Future – A friend and loyal reader here forwarded me this article from a few years ago on the founder of the Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee talking about the Web going back to its roots. I remember the article from then, and it was a good reminder of the “good ol’ days” as myself and many others were getting on the Internet for the first time.

Can We qTox? – I have been seeing a lot in recent weeks about online privacy and controlling your own destiny online. One such endeavor is qTox, an online chat and video tool that is built around privacy. People connect with each other using a long, cryptic key. I don’t know a whole lot of people using it, but it’s another alternative tool to keep around. If anyone reading this uses qTox, let me know!

Lower (Case) Expectations – This past week General Motors came out with a new logo. It’s a take on its iconic logo, but the letters are lower case, and only the “M” is underlined. Apparently the change is to reinforce their move to building more electric vehicles. Clearly they didn’t learn from AT&T doing the same thing with lowercase letters years ago. At least the sign makers will benefit from this.

Taxation Without Dealerships – There are no car dealerships in Washington, D.C. This is nothing new, but it came up in a conversation with a friend who is a car dealer. Rumor has it cars are for sale in neighboring states.

Domaining In The Dark – My favorite domain name registrar Name.com came out with a “dark mode” for their well-designed and easy-to-use Web site. They wrote about the change and how they went about developing it, which was an interesting read. I turned on dark mode then turned it off – it’s just not my thing.

TikTighten – The video social media service TikTok announced it was tightening privacy features for younger users. That’s nice, but I still won’t let my kiddos use it.

Learning Tech – If you’re like me, you are going to be learning and working with cloud technology this year. That’s why this article on managing DevOps was a great read for me. But if you’re not like me, you may want to pass on it.

Using Tech – For as long as the Americans With Disabilities Act has been around, it fascinates me how there is still not complete adoption of it, and the ambiguity with regards to how it applies to technology just causes for all kinds of problems. The law firm Seyfarth laid out its predictions on all Accessibility for the coming year. There are also good tips for anyone who has a business or works in tech to consider for the coming year.

Back to School Shopping in January? – As my kiddos will finally be going back into a school building for their education for the first time in 10 months, of course they were asking to go school shopping. This reminded me of a classic commercial from Staples on one parent’s joy for their kids going back to class. Where I am ecstatic they are going back, it has more to do with at-home remote education simply not working.

Speaking of That At-Home Thing – John Stossol’s latest video report is on actions by school districts and teachers union to keep kids at home. Where I completely respect people who want to keep their kids home, I have met teachers who have kids and who want themselves and their kids back in the classroom, and I am with them. And so is the science on the low spread of COVID-19 in schools that are open.

End of a Safe For Kids Era – The other day I saw a missing spot on the saved channels in my car radio, and after checking I found that Radio Disney was no longer listed with other SiriusXM channels. That’s due to the fact that the kid-friendly pop music channel has left satellite radio, and Radio Disney in the process of shutting down altogether. I was sad to hear this as the contemporary pop songs carefully edited for kid consumption was a very good thing, even though I am sure my kiddos know the full versions. It also made for great swim meet warm-up music. I’m hoping someone will fill the gap that Disney covered for years.

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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 • (2) Comments • Permalink

As Frida said best, I know there’s something going on. Personally I want to know what that is – the who, what, where, when, why and how and all sides of a story. If there’s an opinion about it to be made, it will be created in my own mind.

Call me old fashioned, but that’s the way the news was like when I grew up; I liked it then, and I still do now. However today and for many preceding years, the news has been nothing like how it was. Stocked with thin, incomplete coverage and opinion coming from talking heads in boxes on a screen – that’s not news to me.

As the saying goes, misery loves company, and after reading Slanted by Sharyl Attkisson, I realized I was in very good company. Attkisson is an award-winning investigative journalist and has worked for CNN and CBS in the past and is the host of the weekly news program Full Measure. Slanted chronicles the devolution of mainstream media news from the major TV networks and cable channels. Where their news reporting was once revered, it has become a shell of what it was, and biased or slanted towards a certain side or stakeholder in a news story.

With a strong desire to go back to the days when news was news, I certainly had takeaways from reading Slanted.

It’s not just me – Slanted presented thoughtful analysis of what I observe when I do watch or read the news. Often I am left head-shaking when I consume a news story, wondering why I feel like what I just read or saw was not the whole story, or if a perceived bias was correct or not.

Let’s all play the Substitution Game! – Attkisson uses a technique called the Substitution Game, where she will take a story that is biased towards one party – political or not – and substitute one side’s name for the other, typically in a story against one of those parties. Almost instantly a lightbulb will go off over my head realizing how absurd or incredulous a story appears when that’s done.

Who said there’s no money in objective journalism? – I am willing to pay for it, and am not willing to pay for bad, biased journalism, let alone consume it. This is part of the reason why we haven’t had cable TV in my household for years.

As much as I enjoyed Slanted, it’s unfortunate such a book had to be written. It provides great context and insights from others who work in news media. I enjoyed the interview Attkisson had with Lou Waters, with whom she co-anchored on CNN back in the 1990’s. Where Waters is named, many of the other interview subjects and not, and my guess was to protect their identities as they likely still work in mainstream news. Had more of them come forward that would have provided even more credibility to the state of news, but I can understand why.

If you are curious as to what may be going on behind the story in news coverage, I highly recommend reading Slanted. I purchased my copy, actually pre-ordering it when it was announced back last April. I have in the past purchased and wrote takeaways on Attkisson’s other books – Stonewalled and The Smear. As I give away all books I read, this one is going to a colleague whom I had a recent conversation with on the news and feels similarly to me on today’s reporting. You can always get your own copy with one of the links in this post, and note that if you do click and buy, I earn a few cents.

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

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Book Take-Aways • (0) Comments • Permalink