Better late than never, though it wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t have the time. As I edit the things that passed my mind over the last week I am looking out over a beautiful lake, though sheltered from the elements inside. It’s opening weekend of hunting season here in Dairyland, and I was again invited to my friend’s hunting camp. I don’t hunt, but that’s not why I am here. Though altered a bit this year, it has been an overdue respite and good way to burn vacation time I would otherwise lose at the end of the year.

Sing it, San-ta Claus is Driving Through Town – Where I live there’s an annual tradition of a Christmas parade preceded by the Santa Scamper, a running sprint down the route the parade will take. Said Scamper has gone virtual this year, and instead Santa will be taking to the streets. The latter will be reminiscent of my kiddos (and heck, my wife and I) watching Santa riding the El trains in Chicago.

Digging Too Deep – Every so often I hear of an app that, upon the surface, sounds like a great idea, but upon further review is lurking a privacy nightmare. Once such app is Tiller. Not only do I not want an app mining my financial data, I certainly don’t want it handing it over to Google either. Talk about a one, two knockout.

Head My Way – Just when you thought (or likely didn’t) the calculation of latitude and longitude was difficult, you can simplify it with the Maidenhead Locator System. This is by no means nothing new, rather new to me, and has its roots in HAM radio. You can easily determine any short code with this lookup site as I did by determining Fenway Park in Boston is at FN42ki. Hat tip to the PodcastIndex podcast for once again unleashing more of my inner geek.

DRYV She Said – I learned of the acquisition of DRYV, a Chicago-based dry cleaning and laundry delivery service by Rinse. If you search here at The Hot Iron you will see several mentions of the previous service, as I was one of their first customers and a huge fan of the startup. What was once a new thing to me is all I do these days as my current cleaning service went all-delivery earlier this year. Congrats to all involved, and hopefully the unique DRYV brand will continue on somehow.

Ignore What I Said – The HBO Max app is now “legitimately” on Amazon Fire TV devices. So you can ignore what I previously said about sideloading it.

Happy 25th Scrum – This past week marked the quarter-century anniversary of the Scrum framework, a better way for managing all kinds of projects. To celebrate this, its co-creators Dr. Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber released an updated version of the Scrum Guide which states the core principles of the framework. Among the changes are the inclusion of all members into one Scrum Team and an overall product goal. For more you can watch the recorded Webinar presentation of all of the festivities.

Golden Attitude Change – Over the years since I graduated from college I have had an indifference with it. At every turn the school was not talking to me about what I wanted to know about – the major and school I graduated from, nor its radio station – rather it was just hitting me up for money. This week the school previously known as Western New England College and now a university released a video from its new president, Dr. Robert Johnson, with a holiday greeting. This is the first time in decades that the school has actually spoken to me and I was interested. Maybe it’s the start of something more? Who knows, but I will take it.

Do You Apologize? – After having to spend some of my “time-off” centered around work and reflecting on the time spent, I posted this question to Linkedin with a simple query – do you apologize in the workplace when a mistake is made? So far I have a few thoughtful responses, and I welcome yours too.

Stubborn But Tasty – I happened to come across the Stubborn Brothers Brewery in Shawano, Wisconsin by simply driving by it. What was a former theater is now a gleaming, beautiful space producing some great beers (I’m partial to Whiskey Fugitive) and food. As part of the artistry is the respect for the original design elements of the theater and some new ones, including the unique restroom sign pictured above.

To The Hunt!

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

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