As I was compiling and typing up my new wisdom for the week, the picture above was the view in front of me.

• When you learn something in the presence of someone else who asks if it will be in your next blog post, it may be a good idea to actually include it. So a carryover from last week was how much more I learned about the Chicago Pedway, a series of tunnels that connect buildings in the Loop, and ways of accessing them that aren’t all that clear.
• After calculating what I thought was the percentage increase of traffic to a Web app, and getting a value that looked completely wrong, I learned the proper way to calculate percentage of increase.
• A “regular” yoga class goes at a much faster pace than an introductory course. And I am happy with that.
• Has the selfie jumped the shark? After it was uncovered that David “Big Papi” Ortiz of the World Champion Boston Red Sox is a paid social media ambassador for mobile behemoth Samsung, and they were accused of staging the selfie Ortiz took with President Obama at the White House earlier this week, I couldn’t help but laugh. Granted I am a huge fan of Papi and the Sox, and thought of the irony of when Obama took a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service. If you read the linked article here, it is from the Boston Globe, who is now owned by the majority owner of the Sox. Talk about a win-win situation.
• I finally had a hamburger at Chicago’s Rockit Bar and Grill, who is famous for their burgers. I got the Locavore burger cooked medium rare, and it actually came medium rare. I usually get burgers medium rare as I like them medium and most places overcook them. Now that I have been to the summit, I now have to return.
• I got an email from Apple about in-app purchases made by kids on iPhones and iPads without their parents’ knowledge, and it also mentioned parental controls available in the operating system iOS. For someone as technical as I am, and knowing many people who use and love the iPhone are not, these are not exactly intuitive. One thing missing is locking out the kids from use as exists with Windows for the Surface tablets.
• I got a postcard from a local Chicago university conducting a study on kids and sleep, and it asked for kids to participate who did not sleep much or showed signs of “fatigue (feeling tired a lot).” I was surprised they needed to define what fatigue means, then again as they are researchers, I am sure it was included based on empirical experience.
• The only video I saw this week that wasn’t work related was a sad story. It was a human interest news story of a Dad dying of cancer who walked his 11-year old daughter down the ‘aisle’ as most likely he wouldn’t live long enough to do it when she got married. The video is embedded below or you can watch it on the link above, and be forewarned, it will make you cry.

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

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Business • Diversions • Mobile Technology • Social Media • Strategize • What I Learned • (0) Comments • Permalink

So I got me a dotUNO domain name. And some of you, reading that sentence, are probably wondering what I am talking about. I mentioned in a previous post I was going to be writing about generic top-level domain names – and I will – but in the meantime I felt it more important to talk about this new addition to my digital identity.

The domain name is maddaloni.uno.

The .UNO domain name extension, commonly referred to as a generic top-level domain or gTLD, was just recently released as part of a mass expansion of extensions to join the likes of .COM, .N ET, .ORG and others. As the word “uno” means “one” in Spanish, Italian and other languages, it is targeted towards to businesses and entities – including individuals – to use for a unique domain name for their presence and branding on the Internet targeting those who speak those languages.

So why did I register maddaloni.uno? The reasons are many, and I’ll start with the base which are more qualifying for the gTLD.

• I am a second-generation Italian-American and my ancestry is 100% Italian
• My surname, Maddaloni, is Italian
• I have had these qualities for all of my life, which has at least gone for 40 years.
• My wife and children also have this same surname, carrying it along for another generation
• I do know some Italian, and especially know when I am being insulted in Italian

Though I did not have to apply or provide these qualifications, I am proud to present them here. Where all of this is well and good, what am I going to do with the domain name you may ask? Where I am still developing the high-level and detailed personal branding plan, in general I will be using it for identifying me on the Web. As an interim step, I am pointing the domain name to this very blog.

Size Matters

There are many gTLDs on the marketplace today, and this list from Name.com shows many of the gTLDs. If you look at this list, you will see extensions of varying sizes. What I like about .UNO is that it is short – only 3 letters – and easy to spell. As .UNO will be competing primarily with the “Big 3” of .COM, .NET and .ORG primarily, it is unique enough and should not bring confusion like, for example, a .CO domain name (known as a country-code TLD or ccTLD as it is for Columbia) as many may add an “M” to a .CO.

This is not to say that nobody will register or use a longer domain name, but many have been out there for years, like .MUSEUM, .AERO and .JOBS. How many of these have you ever seen or typed? I have probably seen 3 or 4 uses of a .JOBS domain name – one that comes to mind is hyatt.jobs for the eponymous hotel chain. In general I am bearish on the widespread usage of some of the longer gTLDs, but only time will tell how successful they will be.

Congrats on the Launch of .UNO

With the launch of .UNO I am proud to say congratulations to Shaul Jolles, the CEO of Dot Latin, LLC, the company behind .UNO. He is also the co-founder and co-owner of OfficePort, the facility that I worked from for many years and continue to use as my workspace away from home. His hard work and leadership has paid off in his firm being awarded the opportunity to launch .UNO, and though I registered the domain name like everyone else, I am thrilled for his success. #FFL

Capise?

Does .UNO or what I talked about here make sense to you? Do you think maddaloni.uno will be unique and successful as part of my personal brand on the Internet? I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments to this post.

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

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Back in February I talked about an online course I was taking on “unprocrastination” and one of the exercises was to create a new habit and stick with it for a month. The habit I chose was to come up with a potential blog topic for The Hot Iron every day for the month. If I thought of more than one in a day, then I would log them as well, but as an extra, not for the next day.

Now that we are at the end of March, you may be able to guess how well the course was for me overall! But I did stick to the habit, and as shown in the accompanying photo, I did log the topics. I was tweeting them with the hashtag #28d28bt but I found I was not able to find them all when I did a search on the hashtag – not sure why, so I curtailed the tweeting after a few days.

A List Of Ideas

At the end of February I had a list of 35 potential blog topics, or ideas. And they are just that – ideas. It will not be until I write a topic around it that it becomes a tangible blog post.

This is why I have chosen to share them here. Even if someone else takes the idea, they wouldn’t write the same thing as me. And I have to be honest, not everything I have written about has been a purely unique idea, though they have expressed my point of view which is certainly unique.

Here’s the list by day, and concluded with 7 extra ones.

1. What is a gTLD and Why Should You Care?
2. GiveBackBox Makes Donating Excess Easy
3. Fever is my #RSS Reader of Choice and Here’s Why
4. Nothing is Forever
5. CentUp Offers Unique Profit Model For Bloggers
6. OwnCloud Gives You Control Of Your Data With Style
7. Rivet News Radio Offers Local News By Mobile App
8. Odiogo Still Reads The Hot Iron To You
9. My File Backup Strategy
10. The Project I Didn’t Politically Work On
11. Being Removed From It All And Thrown Back In
12. We Spend Most Of Our Time Around Our Work
13. How The Web Once Gave Me An Attitude Adjustment At Atlanta Airport
14. Few Apps Leverage Promotional Opportunity With App Store Update Description
15. High Demand For Winter Indoor Kids Play In Chicago
16. Phone.com Is My Home Phone Service And More
17. Why Don’t You Carry Business Cards?
18. Everything I Learned About Management and Leadership I Learned Working In College Radio
19. Hailo Taxi App Gets Me Around With No Worries
20. 2 Things To Consider Before You Start Blogging
21. Do We Need Better Stock Photos Of People Or None At All?
22. Discover Offers App-Based Card Freeze For Better Security
23. My College Internship Experience And Why I Don’t Care I Didn’t Get Paid For It
24. Results of 28 Days 28 Blog Posts #28d28bt
25. When The App Doesn’t Do It All For Complete Customer Experience
26. Don’t Get Used To A Desk
27. Procrastination And The Course On It I Am Catching Up On
28. Have You Googled Yourself Lately?

Over the course of the month, I came up with 7 additional ideas.

1. Cardmunch App Working Again And I Am Cautious On Its Use
2. Dryv Dry Cleaning And Laundry Delivery Service Is What I’ve Needed
3. When Is The Last Time You Exported Your Connections From LinkedIn?
4. 5 Blog Post Topics from 2007 That Still Matter Today
5. 3 Things Microsoft’s New CEO Must Do To Win With Mobile
6. My Next Daily Activity Of One Task A Day for March #31d31t
7. Build Web Content Management Systems Since 1997

Off To The Races – Both Sprints and Marathons

Looking back at the list, I feel I have a good set of ideas to work from not only in the near term but over the course of the year. Some of the ideas I have already used, and regular readers of The Hot Iron may recognize them. This is not to say this is all I will write about, but if I am every short for inspiration or simply want to use something good I already thought of, I will refer to this blog post. I like it so much I may do it next February as well, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I welcome not only your thoughts and comments on this endeavor, but on the ideas I came up with and if you are interested in me writing on something. Don’t be shy – really.

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

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Though today is March 21, 2014, I am finally publishing what I learned for the previous week. Just as I was about to pass on the list from last week and focus on this week to be current, I get the latest newsletter from CentUp, which featured several items from the last few What I Learned posts! Needless to say this piqued my interest in finally typing up last week’s list. And the ego stroke wasn’t bad either.

• The Pringles brand of potato “crisps” is now owned by cereal giant Kellogg’s and has been since 2012. Is it only a matter of time when the Pringles breakfast cereal comes out?
• I pre-ordered a domain name with one of the new global top-level domain names (gTLD). I won’t say what it is as I don’t want to jinx it in case others registered it. But if I get it, it will be put to major use.
• I don’t know who Victoria Carpenter is, but I have no idea why or how she is liking my Facebook status as being “so cute” over and over and over again, especially as I quit Facebook over a year ago. Yes, I realize it is spam, and it’s clearly not working.
• A new app was announced to pay for parking meters in Chicago. Where it will offer the convenience of adding more time to your parking from the app remotely (aka not running back to the car), I can only imagine the problems that will come from this. Currently in Chicago you buy a paper receipt to put on your dashboard for your time to park. Even with this “foolproof” system, many parking tickets are issued to people who have paid for parking – I know some personally. The only way to fight it is to go to court. I have no idea what the app or software that the meter checkers will use, but I can only see more headaches for parkers.
• Most people do not know how to take a screenshot or screen capture from an iPhone, let alone a PC or a Mac.
• Despite what Dr. Seuss wrote in his first children’s book, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” Bliss Street does not intersect with Mulberry. I know, as I used to live near THE Mulberry Street in Springfield, MA.
• The domain name digital.com is up for auction. It’s last major use was as the primary domain name for Digital Electronics Corporation, or DEC for short, the former mini-computer and PC manufacturer based in Maynard, MA. As someone whose first mini-computer was a DEC PDP/11 and grew up knowing many people who worked for DEC, it is sad to see it for sale. At an opening bid of US$100,000 I am not sad enough to buy it myself.
• I have been asked to be part of a career-mentoring group for a trade organization in Chicago. The group is one of several “pillars” the group is building to work with young people starting in their careers. I am excited to get started with it and will surely report more on it soon.
• The week before I mentioned my good friend Andrew Cornelius who is a talented actor, comedian and improviser. He has created a new demo reel of his work, and present it for your viewing pleasure. I would have included it in the last installment, but it was trumped by the Name.com video featuring me. There’s that ego again.

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

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Rather than showing a scribbled sticky note with my learned knowledge for the week, I decided to show my decoration for Mardi Gras.

• A color photo of a new air filter for my car is not going to compel me any further to have it replaced when all I wanted today is an oil change.
• Watching the Stadium Series game played at Chicago’s Soldier Field, the home of football’s Bears, between hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins was a lot of fun, even as I was watching it on TV. With the snow falling, it gave me a déjà vu moment to a few years ago when Boston University played Boston College at Fenway Park a week after the pro-hockey game there. In this case, I was there in stands at Fenway for this amazing experience.
• If you find yourself in New York City and need a good laugh, check out my friend Andrew Cornelius’ Web site to see when he is next performing.
• In the process of troubleshooting a technical problem with my podcast app on my mobile device, I unsubscribed to all 6 of the podcasts I had in my queue. Rather than resubscribe at once, I decided to subscribe as I had time to listen to something new. First I subscribed to No Agenda and after several weeks I finally subscribed to another, The Voicemail. Not sure when I’ll get back to 6 or what my number will be.
• I almost snorted my coffee out of my nose the other morning when reading my favorite Web comic, Questionable Content when Angus called out Faye for saying ‘wicked.’ The comic takes place in Northampton, MA, not far from where I grew up and a tell-tale sign of a “Masshole” is if they say wicked a lot.
• Life won’t be the same in my house after the DVD for the movie Frozen comes out on March 18.
• Not a meeting goes by where someone is saying they are looking at something from their ‘perspective’ or that of their team or function. But who is looking at the big picture?
• Not a day goes by when I am not telling someone about the blog Leadership Freak by Dan Rockwell. Each day he posts extremely usable prose on leadership, all under 300 words. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t subscribe to it by email or RSS. Special thanks to Dr. Dietmar Schloesser for being the source of knowledge on this great blog.
• Tickets are now for sale for the Spring Benefit for Chicago’s South Loop Elementary School on Friday, May 16 at 6pm at the Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile. This year marks the silver anniversary of the school, and the red carpet will be rolled out for all who wish to have a great time while supporting this great community school.
• In preparation for their activities at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas which starts today, my friends a Name.com wanted to show how they will promote small businesses at the conference, so they used me as an example. Jared, their social media director, is an amazing actor and video producer as well as keenly in tune with the needs of their community and made this awesome video which is embedded below or you can watch on the Name.com channel on YouTube. And when I say friends, I mean it – it is because of a personal connection that I learned about Name.com over 6 years ago and their team applies the personal touch, plus strong business and technical acumen, to all they do. And I am not just saying this because Jared pronounced Maddaloni correctly.

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

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