As our household got a slightly larger, more high definition video monitor, learning to get used to it fortunately is not all I learned this week, as there were heftier things that crossed my mind the last seven days.

• The purchase of U.S. flags is tax free.
• First there was the GDRP, then the CCPA, and now there’s the LGPD, which is the privacy law for Brazil, as compared to the previously-mentioned acronyms for the laws in the European Union and California. If you aren’t familiar with GDRP or CCPA, I wouldn’t worry about LGPD and focus on the first 2 to start.
• The University of Wisconsin Madison did a study on impact of loss of athletics on young people and there was an emphasis on the mental health impact of not playing and performing. This is something I have been concerned with all along. Where it is reassuring to see data behind my gut feel, it doesn’t make dealing with it any easier.
• A by-product of athletes not being athletes and then getting back into it is something called “yips” – a term I learned from a friend of mine who mentioned how his kid was almost forgetting how to accurately throw a baseball. It’s something real, much to my initial disbelief, and significant enough to be written up by the Mayo Clinic and Major League Baseball.
• A couple of new training programs came into my purview. One is the iAI Institute where you can take free online courses to learn about artificial Intelligence. It is offered by Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that makes iPhones for Apple, and has been controversial here in Dairyland around the opening of manufacturing plants in the southeast corner of the state. I hope the courses can lower my 100,000 foot view of AI to something more down to earth.
• Google is offering something called Career Certificates which are positioning themselves as an alternative to technical school training for a number of careers like tech support. Some may be able to qualify to take the courses for free, or they are offered to anyone for around US $50 each.
• I actually took a course, this one offered by my employer and delivered by the Gartner Group on Delegating Effectively. It was an interesting 45 minute Webinar and was backed by a lot of research that Gartner is known for. However it wasn’t for me – it painted an idyllic picture on delegate to a full-time team, where what would have worked better for me would have been how to do that with a part-time team comprised of employees and contractors.
• My local newspaper is the Post-Crescent and like most major papers in Wisconsin it is owned by USA Today. If you look at a few different USA Today newspapers you will notice their designs are the same. This week their local publication started touting its new look. The first thing I noticed was there were fewer ads that were on top of content and pushing it down the page. Gone was the left and right side arrows where you could conceivably scroll horizontally between stories, something I always found to be a user experience nightmare. In its place is an “X” in a circle at the top right of stories, though not completely obvious but indicates all stories are a pop-up window over the home page. In other words, a page on their site really isn’t a page, and I have no idea why they are doing this.
• Online shoe retailer Zappos announced it is just now selling mixed pairs and single shoes. What may not be obvious to many is a lot of people have different sized feet, which required them to buy 2 pairs of shoes, throwing out one from each. Decades ago I worked with someone who had to do this, as her feet were like 2 sizes different from each other. Perhaps too long overdue, but certainly welcome to people who don’t want to spend double on already increasingly expensive footwear.
• I came across this article on LinkedIn shared by my co-working space on 50 free online advertising methods. Or for me, it was more of a reminder, as many of these are not advertising sites or services per se, rather effective ways to promote your business or whatever you have to promote.
• For the first time in 2020 my family and I stayed in a hotel. Despite this half-year lag, I apparently haven’t lost my touch of finding all of the miniscule flaws in a hotel room within the first few minutes of being in it. For this room, the TV remote didn’t work with the TV and neither did its replacement, there was a noticeable gap at the bottom of one side of the room door, the emergency exit sign behind said door was for the neighboring room and different styles of lightbulbs were in the bathroom light fixture. Not to forget what I presume were used bath towels in one of the nightstand drawers… but masks were required in the public spaces of the hotel.

Happy Brady Birthday RG!

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

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