Sunscreen – check. Sand shoes – check. Desire to check email while on the beach – check!
I’m off to southern California for the Nokia E73 Mode beach party to be held on Sunset Beach in Huntington Beach, CA. The folks from the word-of-mouth marketing team of Nokia, WOMWorld/Nokia, have invited me and others from around the country, as well as a number of folks from the LA area, to participate in this unique event, which you can read more about here.
While we take advantage of the sun and beach, we’ll be trying out the new Nokia E73 Mode mobile device, which is available at T-Mobile in the US. It appears to me to be similar to my E72 device, and I will find out first-hand for sure this weekend.
If you’re so inclined, you can follow along on Twitter, and we’ll be will be using the hashtag #e73mode. I’ll also be checking out the camera and may do some video streaming, though my main focus will be on how the E73 can fit into my work life. Seriously!
Thanks again to the folks from WOMWorld/Nokia for inviting me out to this great event. And for the sake of full disclosure, or more like to keep the FTC from coming after me, you can read about my relationship with Nokia.
It is with a heavy heart that I write about Father Joseph McGlone, a retired Catholic priest from the Boston area, who passed away earlier this year. I just found about this news by chance when I was performing some Web searches. Allow me to take a diversion from my usual writing to remember a great man and leader.
Fr. Joe, as he was known to everyone, was the pastor of Corpus Christi Church in the village of Auburndale in Newton, Massachusetts. He was there for over 30 years, which is rare for a priest. I was fortunate to have been a member of Corpus Christi when I lived in the Boston area and was honored to have had him marry me and my lovely wife several years ago.
Fr. Joe had a unique appeal; unlike many priests this good Catholic boy had known over the years. He was very real and down to earth. He welcomed you into his church and made you feel at home. He prayed for the issues that many other priests would jam down your throat! As a result, Fr. Joe made Corpus Christi a truly welcoming church, and it certainly wasn’t a chore to go to his church every week. This is not to say Fr. Joe was not assertive or a leader. Even when he used his great sense of humor, he was making a point. There was a period of time I had not been regularly going to church. When I did finally start going back, one week I brought my family with me and he made sure I knew I hadn’t been there and how much I missed and how much I was missed. He jokingly let me had it, all the while welcoming me back.
As the sex abuse scandal was exposed in the Archdiocese of Boston, it took its toll on everyone, including Fr. Joe. When the Archdiocese announced that churches would be closed, he pointed this out one week in his sermon that church expenses weren’t being met my offerings and this was not a good sign for Corpus Christi. This must have been tough for him to say as he never asked for money. But the next week, offerings nearly doubled and maintained that level. I also remember asking Fr. Joe how he was doing throughout the scandal, especially as many of those priests were in surrounding towns. His response was, “I am a woodcutter.” When I asked him to explain, he said if anyone asked him what he did for a living, he would say he is a woodcutter and not a priest. That was on par with his style.
At the time of the almost heartless church closings taking place in the Archdiocese of Boston, Fr. Joe was asked to retire, to which he refused. Everyone was ecstatic he stood his ground! Here was a new archbishop coming in from out of town and wanting what was right about the church to leave? A few years later, after I had moved form the Boston area and Corpus Christi had merged with another church, he was asked again to retire and did. Though I cannot speak directly to the circumstances after I was away, I did hear he remained active in the church close to his hometown where he was a member after retirement, and I am sure they were fortunate to have him.
Right before I moved to Chicago, I lectured one last time at Corpus Christi and Fr. Joe was the presiding priest at the mass. At its conclusion he surprised me by announcing to the congregation that both my wife and I were leaving for a city where he had once studied once in his career at Loyola University. His thoughts were touching as he recalled our wedding and wished us well. That was one of the last times I saw Fr. Joe and a great memory of a great man, along with the many others I have of him from over the years.
What was unique about this project was I did not read the book before the Web site went live. Though I knew what the book was about, I didn’t know the full story. When I finished OUIJA – For The Record, I put down a fascinating story about a family who traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960’s as the result of sessions with an Ouija board. Seriously! Where the story may be somewhat far-fetched to some, my only comment to people is to get a copy of the book for yourself, read it, and then form your own opinion.
As with all books I read, including non-fiction and novels, I have a list of takeaways from OUIJA – For The Record, including:
Tell Your Story - Most all of us have a unique story to tell. It may not be about all of our life, perhaps a small period of time. Even if it is not truly unique there will be someone else interested in what you have to say for a variety of reasons. It may be best told as a blog post or straight to a bound book. But tell it.
People Need Something to Believe In - Whether you are always on the move or live a simple life, we all want something to believe in. In the case of the family in OUIJA – For The Record, what they believed in was that they needed to go to the Middle East. Whatever that something is, it may not be even something you are necessarily looking for. What did that wise British philosopher say about not getting what you want, but what you need?
OUIJA – For The Record was a good read about a family that could be your next door neighbor, or yourself. If you like stories about every day people, or even in the paranormal as the Ouija board was a key element in these peoples’ lives, I highly recommend you get a copy of this book.
If you are still reading this after the last sentence, thank you! I know some have strong positive or negative opinions of Beck, however I am writing this as I do about all books I read, penning my takeaways from it, which I received the book as a gift from a family member.
My greatest takeaway from the book was not from Beck's writings at all, rather from its appendix which had the full text of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776. With this, Beck reinforces his points with the complete writings of the original pamphlet. Many authors I have read use numerous quotes to make their point, but not an entire piece. Granted it was probably easier as Paine's writings are in the public domain. But if you can, why not? It made it easier to read one set of points, then another.
Another takeaway from the book was to publish what you say. i am not a regular viewer of Beck's Fox News show, but I have watched it. What I read was in line with what he says on his show.
My final takeaway from Common Sense is to be a well-informed member of society. And I'll leave it at that!
Common Sense was a quick read and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys political discussions or watches the author's show.
If you are a regular reader of The Hot Iron, you may have gotten a sense that I am surely glad 2009 is over and 2010 is off to a great start, both from a business and personal perspective. It surely is nice to see when things come together and progress, whether we are overtly looking for them or not.
One sign things are better presented itself to me when I wasn’t even looking for it. As I added a bottle of wine I just purchased to our wine rack at home, I realized the rack was full, as shown in the accompanying picture. For the record note my wife and I are surely not sommeliers, but we do like to have a glass of wine with a meal and friends. The brands stored on this rack are also more than likely not to appear in any article by Chicago Tribune food and wine critic Bill Daley. We always like to keep a few bottles on hand and will usually get something for special occasions. But the point here is this – last year, the rack was not full all the time last year. Not only is it now full, but the couple of bottles of champagne we have are chilling for the right time to pop them open.
Another sign of good times is there have not been as many posts here on The Hot Iron as I would have liked. For now, I will share this, and write more pointed pieces in the future.
To all my friends and family and readers of The Hot Iron in the US and those who celebrate Thanksgiving around the world, may you have a safe and happy holiday, and most importantly - a great turkey! The photo above is of our turkey which, as I write this, is cooking and filling the room with some great smells! As there are plenty of photos out there of cooked turkeys, why not show what the bird looks like before?
As a way of promoting their E series of mobile devices, Nokia created a Web microsite called The Unloader, where you can upload a digital document and it is either recycled or destroyed through the site. It is a clever idea site which takes an image of the uploaded document and merges it with video and audio of “real” equipment doing the destruction.
The site has been out for a while, but I just rediscovered it this week. To play with it again, I decided to destroy the FTC guidelines for blogging! Below is the embedded video from the experience.
What else can you destroy here? Perhaps a PDF of a small paystub or a copy of your tax bill? The options are endless! And for the sake of full disclosure, I was an attendee at Nokia’s first OpenLab and the global device manufacturing leader lent me an E71 device to evaluate for a month at no cost, for which I wrote a review.
It has been said, “desperate times call for desperate measures.” These days, this is said a lot. Myself I have thought about it quite a bit as well. However the more I think of the phrase, the more I take a different approach to it, as follows:
Desperate times call for creative, sensible measures.
Creative? Sensible? Mike, the economy sucks! Who are you to take such a soft approach to it?
Well, I am someone who needs to. After putting a lot of thought into it, the second “desperate” is usually driven by anger, fear or anything that gets your blood boiling. Go ahead, blurt out what you will do, then give it a rest. There is a high likelihood what you said in frustration makes sense, and there is a chance it doesn’t. As you think more of it, creative juices are now replacing the adrenaline that was previously flowing through your veins, and some great options and alternatives can come from it.
That’s my story and I am sticking with it. Until those ideas don’t work, then I get frustrated and start all over again.
Happy Halloween! Today is the day where people dress up and go door-to-door asking people for candy, else they play a trick on them. And some of these people are even children.
Halloween means different things to different people. Some people do Halloween big, like my friend Chris who lives in Salem, Massachusetts, the home of the historic Salem witch trials. Others like the camaderie of dressing up their kids and having them roam the neighborhoods and guess who the other kids are. Some don’t celebrate it at all, as it technically is the eve before All Saints Day, a religious day of obligation. And some find a happy medium and call it Orange and Black day.
For myself and my family, it has new meaning as we have an infant daughter. Last year we dressed her as a pumpkin, this year a bumble bee. We also took her the last 2 years to Bengston’s, a pumpkin farm in suburban Chicago. This is where I took the photo above of the face carved in a large pumpkin by someone who is a pumpkin artist. Who knew?
Today, October 15 is Blog Action Day. According to their Web site, “Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.” I have written posts in the past on the topic of the environment and poverty. This year the topic is climate change, and when I sat back to think about this, all that swirled through my head was a lot of questions.
As I write this, it is about 20 degrees cooler than it normally is at this time of the year in Chicago. But when the meteorologists get into the details, there have been extremes in temperatures over the years. In the meantime, glaciers are melting. Not all of them, as I hear the one on Iceland is actually getting bigger. There are all kinds of opinion both ways on climate change, including from scientists. Though my degree is in business and not in science, but as I consider myself a relatively aware individual, I don’t know how to take such conflicting reports.
Recently on a trip through Wisconsin I saw more conflicting signs what could be impacting climate change. First there were the smokestacks billowing from mills and factories. As much of a scientist I am not, I know in general that is not good. Then there’s a wind turbine farm I went by where none of the turbines were spinning. I don’t know why that was the case, but I have seen them in motion before. I have heard cases where the power grids can’t handle the power being generated by the turbines. Oops. Someone didn’t do their homework.
Take carbon offsets, or as they’re being referred today in the US as cap and trade. This concept doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. If you want to keep producing the same amount of emissions, you can buy the right to do so from people who don’t produce the emissions. So not only do you have to pay to change how you do business (or generate power) now you have to pay extra in the interim. To me this is like paying someone else to exercise or lose weight for me as I try to do it myself! Why not just spend the money on a health club and healthier food? The incentive, in my opinion, is lost to improve the environment if carbon offsets can be purchased.
So here I am, watching the cursor blinking on my screen wondering what to write next. Don’t get me wrong, I do my damnest to conserve and protect the environment – a search on the word “environment” on The Hot Iron will give you many examples. And in most of these cases, there were financial incentives from my conservation efforts. Everything from buying a duplexing laser printer for the little I have to print to buying Adobe Acrobat to go as paperless as I can, these are but a few of the steps I take in the normal course of my personal and business life.
As the goal is to “trigger a global discussion” I believe I have contributed something to this – questions. And I’m sure I am not alone! It has always seemed like environmental causes have been out in the fringe of normal, everyday activities. Maybe they need to go mainstream as well, and people will think about them more everyday? Then we’d have to come with something else to write about on the next Blog Action Day.
The Hot Iron strives to present unique content and perspective on business, technology and other topics by Mike Maddaloni, founder and president of Dunkirk Systems, LLC, an Internet consulting firm based in Chicago.
While we take advantage of the sun and beach, we’ll be trying out the new Nokia E73 Mode mobile device, which is available at T-Mobile in the US. It appears to me to be similar to my E72 device, and I will find out first-hand for sure this weekend.
It is with a heavy heart that I write about Father Joseph McGlone, a retired Catholic priest from the Boston area, who passed away earlier this year. I just found about this news by chance when I was performing some Web searches. Allow me to take a diversion from my usual writing to remember a great man and leader.
If you are a regular reader of 
