In addition to realizing how much I and my kids miss hearing the words “take your mark” in a competitive swim meet, or in this case a fun swim meet, my brain was enlarged a bit with the below things as well as squeezed by a continuingly hectic schedule.

• My friend Tiffany has started an eponymous home-based bakery called Tiffany’s Brownies and Treats and was recently featured on a Boston TV station. For my readers in the Boston area and across the Bay State, you can buy them locally or have her deliciousness shipped to your door. For the rest of the world, we will have to visit the Commonwealth to get them. That is, unless, one of my Boston-area readers wants to buy some and resend them to me...
• Thinking I have too much in my head and not as much documented on life, I sought a tool to help log all of the minutiae. I found Big Book an Excel spreadsheet for structuring the information. Now to start putting it all down.
• While trying to contribute to the elimination of shortage of coins in America, one coin kicked out of the Coinstar machine that I didn’t recognize. After looking it up I found it was an Andrew Johnson Presidential dollar coin. I had no idea they made such coins. Granted I am no numismatist, but I thought I was aware of all currency out there.
• Though it has been around for several months, many are not familiar that Appleton, Wisconsin, along with other municipalities, are using the locally-created app You Get It First. Though the user experience of it is a little clunky, it gets the word out on major accidents or police actions to avoid.
• There is such a thing as renewable natural gas.
• When I had the wild idea or recording myself speaking blog content and wondering how to convert it to text, a colleague recommended Temi as he uses it himself. I have tried other voice to text methods with varying success, so I may give this a shot.
• I found another online course that I haven’t had the time to take. This time GitLab, the Web based system development and operations platform (or DevOps for short) is offering a remote work certification which I have added to my growing list. Granted I have been working remotely for years, but likely there is something I will take away from it.
• There needs to be more teen/pre-teen movies like Teen Beach Movie.
• I attended my first in-person networking event in about four months. It was held at my co-working space and they are planning them on a regular basis. It was a great opportunity to meet the others I see in passing there, and reminded me networking is not just for yourself, but networking for others is equally as important.
• The somewhat newish Microsoft Edge Web browser recently release a “feature” where it would ask you every time you want to launch an external program, like say Zoom, from a link. As I launch external programs like say Zoom all the time, this was annoying. Fortunately this week an update allowed you to check a box to dismiss the ask.
• As school systems across the US and likely the world are coming up with their phased / hybrid / contingent plans for the new school year, likely something missing from each and every one of them is a way to make it easy for parents to know where their kids need to be. I posted about it here on LinkedIn but the post didn’t get much traction. Am I the only one thinking this?
• Speaking again of school at home, Numb is a short film made by a 15-year old Canadian student about her at-home studying this spring. Sadly, this represents the same experience of many kids around the world.
• Finally on schools, I found the above-pictured display of school supply donation kits at a local market. You buy these for $7, and the market donates them to a local school. In past years I would add one to my shopping order as a small way of giving back and perhaps buying some karma. Though nobody told this year’s checkout clerks as mine was at first bagged with my groceries until I called it out. Likely these will be sent home with students and their Chromebooks for this school year.

I was serious about someone shipping me brownies.

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

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What I Learned • (1) Comments • Permalink

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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Where I’d like this simply to be friendly advice, I present it as a warning – update the contact and payment information for your domain names as soon as possible or you could risk losing your Web site and email.

Keep It All Current

It’s a challenge to manage all of the online accounts we have, both personally and for business as well. Often an account can “linger” out there without any problem, such as a frequent flyer account, if you don’t have your most current mailing address on file with the airline. However, a domain name registrar account doesn’t fall under this category. Why? You never know when you will need to make a change to or renew your domain names, and if you need to do so right away, you may be prevented from doing so.

Even if you have private registration on your domain name account, your contact information needs to be current. For those not familiar, private registration is when someone looks up the registration of your domain name, instead of seeing your actual name, address and phone numbers, they will see masked information. This is to prevent someone from scraping your contact info for the means of soliciting you, or worse – scamming you.

Keeping it all current means your domain name registration remains active and accessible. This includes your name, address and phone numbers, as well as the billing credit card for renewing your domain name.

Untimely Lockout

If your information isn’t correct, you may lose access to your domain name account and would need to have it reestablished, or worse, your domain name can expire and you can’t renew it in a timely manner.

How does this happen? Many domain name registrars are activating two-factor authentication, or 2FA, without explicit notification to or opt-in by its customers. 2FA is when you get prompted to enter a code that was sent to you by email or text message, or an app like Google Authenticator which generates a code. I have personally experienced this from several registrars, and if the phone number or email on file is no longer accurate, then you can get locked out of your account. Where the registrars say they are doing this to protect their customers, when a Web site and email is down, more damage is done.

If the information is accurate and correct, you won’t run the risk of losing access to your account. If this does happen, you may have to “prove” who you are offline, including sending in a copy of a driver’s license or other forms of ID, or even articles of incorporation for a business.

Remind Yourself Online and Offline

Most domain name registrars will send you reminder emails or texts when it’s close to your domain name expiration date. That is, if they have your correct email address and phone number, and you have enabled these notifications.

A simple way to remind yourself to check your domain account information is to put an alert in your calendar. I recommend setting one sixty days before the domain name is set to expire. That way if the information is not current, you have some time to take care of any process your registrar imposes, and can still renew it before it expires. Setting alerts every 3 months is not a bad idea either, especially if your credit card changes or your home or business address changes, especially in an increased work-from-home environment.

Additionally, information on your domain name should be in your “vital records” file. In the event there is a change in management or leadership in your form or organization, the first thing the successor may not be thinking about is the domain name. That is, unless it expires and the Web site disappears and email stops working. A simple 1-page sheet, sealed in an envelope and clearly marked, listing all domain names and their expiration date, the registrar Web site and contact info and the login and password should be sufficient.

Pro Tip on Extending Your Registrations

Domain names are often renewed annually, however you have the option to extend their registration up to ten years in advance. I recommend this for the primary domain name for your Web site and email, and any other domain names tied to key sites and services. Where it is not completely a “set it and forget it” scenario, you do gain some peace of mind in not having to renew it annually.

Deconstructing Domain Name Registrations

Everyday your Web sites and email become increasing vital to yourself and your firm or organization. Maintaining their domain names is equally as vital to ensure those services are accessible. This maintenance is not laborious or even time consuming; it simply has to be done. Reminding yourself and others key people will ensure there is awareness and coverage for this important task.

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

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Business • Domain Names • Technology • (2) Comments • Permalink

As the week progressed, including three days off of work, I tried to focus on what I observed and was doing and not what I should have been doing – preparing for the ultimate swim meet in the upper Midwest, the Bird Bath Invitational. At least I tried.

• I caught up on a couple of webinars I signed up for but was not able to watch live. Both were on the topic of Agile and Scrum and were well worth the watch. The first one was on Adopting a Tiramisu Mindset. Yes, tiramisu, as in the Italian dessert. It is a great presentation, all the way through to the Q&A. My biggest takeaway from it is that Michelangelo was a Scrum Master centuries before there was Scrum!
• The other webinar was presented by Women in Technology Wisconsin on Agile in a Virtual World. It had a great panel of Agile and Scrum practitioners talking about their real life experience, especially over the last few months.
• Nobody questioned or responded to my blog post last week titled Contact Us. It is for literally what it says, a contact form for my blog, as part of enhancements I made to the content on the About page. Well, I think they are enhancements, what do you think?
• I got notice of yet another class action lawsuit, this one about the performance of older iPhones. I haven’t submitted a claim yet, but I will.
• Another band from the 80’s re-recorded one of their hits in separate locations and stitched together. This time it was Modern English’s Melt With You and another one I learned from the 80’s music blog Slicing Up Eyeballs.
• When your coffee of choice is Trader Joe’s Bay Blend and you no longer live within a few miles of where you can buy it as you have for the majority of your adult life, you stock up on it when you actually get to a store to get some.

Here we go again!

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

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There are certain things in life we seem to remember forever. It could be a song, a saying or advice that really resonated with us. The latter happened to me, and it is something that has been a positive message to me over the decades of work and into these current times.

What was it? “Don’t get used to a desk.”

The Origin of It At a Desk

Shortly after completing the multiweek training program at my first job after college, I would be sent off into the wild to add value for clients of the consulting firm. Or in this case to the “bench” – as there was not a billable project to work on, I would await one while working on internal, non-billable projects. But before I was released, I was to meet with the vice president of HR for the firm.

For some reason I can still remember the scene – he sat behind his large desk in his large office. There was some small talk, then he espoused the wisdom that stuck with me, “don’t get used to a desk.” Being the naïve early-20’s kid that I was, I didn’t question it, simply said thank you and went on my way. My first desk was a traditional metal desk with a large cathode ray tube, or CRT, workstation on it in a large room in the building that was called a bullpen, that I shared with several other recent trainee-graduates. Certainly I didn’t want to get used to this desk.

One of Many Career Tools

As I progressed along in my career, I collected a wide variety of tools that I carried in the metaphoric toolbox I brought to work every day. Some were major, like what I learned about programming in the “real world” as compared to what I taught myself and learned in college. Some were minor but no less significant, like the soft consulting skills I learned the hard way that I was never formally taught anywhere. Not getting used to a desk was one of them.

This advice came in handy many times over the years, namely due to the variety of desks I have had. I had my share of folding banquet tables, namely in temporary offices setup for the work I was doing at the client. But that wasn’t the worst case, as that honor goes to the plywood-walled off section of a dimly-lit warehouse of a defense contractor during the Persian Gulf War. To the other extreme were nice cubicles in an office environment, and some of them even had a window view. But nice wasn’t just for the office equipment; for on one project I worked on we had a “war room” where the entire team was in one high-collaborative space. Some of the offices even provided me with a nametag, and in most cases my last name was spelled correctly.

Where the advice really resonated with me, however, wasn’t directly related to the esthetics of the desk or workspace itself. It had more to do with the fact that where I sat or stood to do work really didn’t matter. Despite the worst of the scenarios (did I mention I had to wear my winter coat in the dimly-lit warehouse as well?) I was able to be productive and get my job done. Sure, I have preferences to where I would like to work, but for the most part my physical surroundings have been a non-issue to where I have worked over the decades.

Coming Full Circle

As this advice was given to me long before social media, eventually I connected with the person who offered it years later on LinkedIn. When I did I shared with him that his advice stuck with me and was vital to me as I worked in consulting and for companies.

His reaction? He laughed! In addition to being a senior leader at the firm I first worked for, he is an extremely talented improvisational musician. Though he wasn’t able to recall the meeting as vividly as I did, he admitted he often would improvise such advice to young employees of the firm as the started on their careers. He was grateful I remembered it and that it served me well.

Deconstructing Not Getting Used to a Desk

There are many things we learn informally in life and our careers, many of them are soft skills that never appear in any text book or course material. Where many go by the wayside, some stay with you over time. I believe these that do are situational, especially ones that are put to the test and work to your advantage. Not getting used to a desk served me well, not only in the midst of a less-than-ideal work location, but in the hope of a better one to come along in the future.

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

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