What better a way to celebrate a birthday than with a cake? As these days I am not eating the ingredients you typically make a cake with, I went to OpenAI’s DALL-E AI image generator to make one. As you can see from the accompanying image with post, I have some major work to do on my prompt writing in the new year.

That being said, I didn’t put much time and thought into my prompts, which are the natural language queries you enter to get an image. Of all of the prompts and adjustments to them, this image was the best of them all.

Where I don’t have plans to use AI to create major portions of the content of this blog, you the reader should expect to hear more about it as I – and most of the known world – will be thinking and acting on AI in the future. If something is AI-generated, I will also note it as such. I do hope to have more timely topics that live up to the genesis of the name of this blog, along with takeaways and giveaways of the books I read. That being said I don’t want to get ahead of myself as I suck at predictions, especially when it comes to my productivity with my humble blog.

Happy 17th to The Hot Iron and a Happy 2024 to you!

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

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Announcements • Blogging • Build • (0) Comments • Permalink

I guess if a month goes by without any posts here at The Hot Iron, then that next post should have some significance to it. It just so happens that today, December 30, marks the anniversary of this humble blog going live. And December 30, 2021 marks 15 years since that first Hello World post.

Thank you to all who are reading this now, and to those who have read what I have written here over the years. Where I don’t often hear from readers, stats say people are reading, so I don’t feel like I am talking to myself. I sometimes equate this to my days in college radio when I would do a great show and ask for requests, yet the phone would never ring. However when I would run into people on campus or out on the street, they would tell me they listen, and even mention songs I played so I knew they were sincere. Of course the balance of sharing information and my ego are heavily in play when I write.

What will this 15th year of blogging have in store? We’ll see.

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

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My last post at The Hot Iron, Lower the Minimum Age to Work, was the one-thousandth post I have written for my blog over the almost 15 years since I started it.

I say that calls for acknowledgment and some reflection.

Where It Began

Over the years I have often mentioned why I started and have continued this blog. In short, I had a client of my Web business who asked me to stop building them a Web site and build them a blog first using specific software. After building theirs, I realized I had no “showcase” blog to use as an example to future clients. I had registered the domain name thehotiron.com years earlier, as I thought a play on “strike while the iron is hot” was a good name for a blog. At the end of 2006, what you are reading this from was born.

I slowly got into writing, namely as I wasn’t much of a writer previously. Some posts were things on my mind, others were on what was bugging me, and others were a way to promote myself and my business. Types of posts emerged over the years, such as mobile phone evaluations, book takeaways and What I Learned for the previous week. No matter what I wrote, I tried to contribute something unique to the global conversation. Looking back on random posts as I am writing this, I think I did a good job at keeping to this mission.

1,000 Could Have Been Sooner, Thanks Social Media

There’s no doubt on the impact on social media in the world. A little closer to home, it certainly impacted what and how often I wrote on my blog. Something that was bugging me could easily be boiled down to 120 characters in a Tweet or a little longer in a Facebook post. Over time however those social accounts have gone away or ground down to a halt, as I have preferred to write in longer form in a platform I control. Am I anti-social? No – I certainly do share links on social media to my blog posts. However it’s nice to have my collection of written thoughts in one place, making The Hot Iron the center of my digital presence – something I have written about before and will continue to in the future. Judging by the little bit of observing I do of hits to the blog, others do find me here and keep coming back.

What’s Next

A grand of posts down, another to go? We’ll see, as I stopped making predictions here a long time ago. A little celebration to go along with this reflection... now that’s something that will happen for certain.

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

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Announcements • Blogging • Thrive • (3) Comments • Permalink

There’s a phrase I see often on the little bit of remaining social media I use – “pictures or it didn’t happen.” It stems from claims that people make in these social channels, and people asking for photographic proof as they don’t believe those claims. However, I am here to say that it’s ok to not always have those pictures.

As I was driving home late last night in the rain from Milwaukee, Wisconsin (about a 1.5 hour ride) I realized I did not get a picture with my cousin whom I went there to meet. He was in the Cream City for a conference, and I wanted to get together with him as he was so close. We met up and went to dinner and had some great beer at a brewpub just next to the new arena downtown and had a nice time. After I dropped him off at his hotel, I got some coffee for the road and headed home.

It was in the process of keeping my mind off of the rain – and on the road – that I realized there was no picture of us; no selfie, and didn’t even ask our friendly waitress to take a picture. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a good time – we talked of the conference he was here for, tech, healthcare, beer, all good. We both had our phones with operating cameras on them, and it wasn’t even that I didn’t take any pictures last night – see above for the huge bowl of cole slaw that came with my brat burger, as I had never seen a serving of cole slaw that large, ever.

This is not the first time I have done something that could be considered a “Kodak moment” and didn’t capture it... yes, I am a Gen Xer and I remember that term well. Being in that age range probably means why I am not always “on” taking pictures, especially with my conscious effort to be on less social media channels and use the ones I am still on less often. Then there is the “management” of these pictures, for lack of a better term. What do you do with all of the photos you take? And what about the ones you may have taken in the dark ages with actual film? My guess is the boxes of photos and albums you have are similar to what I have.

Over the summer my family took a road trip West and went to Mount Rushmore. I was in awe of seeing the mountain carvings in person that I have seen in photos since I was a child. The pictures I took were great, especially with the family, but they didn’t quite match the magnitude and emotion I felt seeing it for myself. For me that’s ok, as I have my memories of that August night to go with those pictures to make for a complete experience.

As I was mulling all of this over in the ride home, I recalled an article by Derek Sivers where he talked about traveling without a smartphone altogether. Where he couldn’t take any pictures or use GPS for maps, he felt he remembered his time more without the device, and what it offered as well as what it could take away from the moment. Where I don’t think I would consciously do this, it at least made me feel better about the one picture I don’t have of the many thousands of pictures I do have.

By the way I highly recommend the cole slaw there; it’s made with red peppers.

Deconstructing Not Taking A Picture

In our constantly-connected world, moments when we are not stand out. If the fact that we weren’t connected didn’t distract from the life experience, then that’s ok. There are other ways to “capture the moment” such as recounting it to others, or even writing a blog post about it.

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

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Blogging • Diversions • Thrive • (2) Comments • Permalink

If you are one of the proud readers of The Hot Iron who reads my posts in your email inbox, please note I am changing how those emails are delivered. To ensure you continue to receive them, you will need to “whitelist” the email address new posts will be coming from.

That email address is: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Why and How?

In this pervasive world of spam email, you can “whitelist” email addresses to indicate you want to receive mail from it, whether it’s a person, business or – in this case – a blog.

As there are a variety of email services people use, there are a variety of ways to do so. If you are not familiar with this process, look to see how you can do the following with the email address above:

• Add it to your Contacts
• Add it as a Trusted Sender
• Add it to a Whitelist
• Check your marketing, promotions or spam folder and mark the email address as Not Spam

Switch Email Delivery Now

If you would like to switch to the new email delivery now, simply click this link to subscribe by email and enter your information. You will receive a confirmation email once you have been added to the list. Eventually I will move all email addresses to the new service and discontinue the old one.

Check into RSS and Check Back

As it’s always good to have a Plan B, there are a couple of ways to check if you are missing any posts from this blog. One way is to subscribe to the RSS Feed within your Web browser or email app. There are also mobile apps for subscribing to feeds. However if this is something you can’t or don’t want to do, please check back at the Web site at thehotiron.com and see if there are posts you have missed. If so, please contact me and I will help you get it resolved.

Please let me know if you have any questions on any of this in the comments to this post, and thanks for reading!

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

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