The last thing I want to do is pile on to the loathing of this calendar year. That being said, this week didn’t turn out completely as planned, but after stopping and shifting a few times I can fairly say I pretty much made it to Friday.

A Facebag of Cash – If you or someone you loved lived in the State of Illinois between mid-2011 and the present and also happened to have a Facebook account, you may qualify for money from the social media behemoth. A class-action lawsuit against Facebook has been settled over their use of facial recognition software on their platform. I’m also interested to see what the next class-action case is against them.

The New Gold Standard – Speaking of states and money, new to me is the fact that Nevada and Utah have issued something called ”Goldbacks” which is valid currency in those states that resembles traditional paper money but made with gold. A $1 Nevada Goldback is valued at about $3 as of this writing. You can buy them in those states as well as online. I’m intrigued by this and may order some – worst case scenario I would have a nice shiny bookmark.

Never Thought It Was Dead – I learned about LinkedIn Live from a colleague’s post on, you guessed it, LinkedIn, as he was asking if anyone had used it. I wasn’t aware of it, especially as I haven’t seen anyone using it or promoting they are using it. An “integrated” solution certainly adds value, but for me simply linking to a Zoom event will suffice.

If you have used LinkedIn Live, please post a comment as I would like to know how it works for you.

IWM FTW – The University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh (UWO) has been named one of the top schools in the US (number 6 actually) for the next generation of Web designers according to College Magazine. This is attributed to UWO’s Interactive Web Management (IWM) program. IWM is a cross-disciplinary program that creates well-rounded, holistic students that understand all aspects of the Web and online. I have a little insight into its awesomeness as I have been honored to be a guest lecture at one of its classes, Application of New & Emerging Media Journalism, for the past few years and will be this fall as well. Go Titans!

Short But Sweet Links – Raise your hand if you like to create short URLs that you can share with people that are easy to read? You know, something like https://psurl.com/elmo that will take you to this cute but annoying video for brushing your teeth. If I have lost you, read on with caution, but there’s the ability to create your own with self-hosted Web software called YOURLS. I have used it for years, and that was after years building my own Web software to create short URLs. If you use YOURLS, a vital update came out over the pandemic.

Note if you would like to have your own URL shortener and don’t have your own Web server, my friends at Name.com offer this service. And if you follow this short URL https://psurl.com/domain you will get a $5 towards it… and I get something too!

Deep Fried Thoughts – There’s only one way to learn if you don’t like a deep fried Oreo and that’s by eating one. It sinks in even more if you make it yourself.

Stacking Up Work – Part of the Scrum framework is the backlog. In short, it is what you want to work on, and the process of refining the backlog helps determine what you will work on next. I watched an interesting presentation this week titled “Stack Your Backlog” by Joe Krebs which used the analogy of fire wood to describe how you can effectively work with your backlog, from the condition and size of the wood to how you stack it. Where the recording of the presentation is not available yet, the slides are available. Though the audio doesn’t accompany it, you can infer much of his points from the slides alone.

Good for Deeds – Whenever a political candidate is asked why they are running, rarely do you get an answer that is anything close to down to earth. For me that has been the case until I heard about Seth Reid, who is running as an independent candidate for Winnebago County, Wisconsin Register of Deeds. This office is hardly one that drives people to vote, but Reid’s goals are noble and interesting – he comes from a computer security background and wants to apply this knowledge to the office to ensure all records are secure. He is running against a Republican incumbent and there’s no Democratic opponent. Watch this video of Seth Reid and you’ll know why he has my vote.

Nice Wheels – This past weekend my family finally ventured the whole 2 blocks to the taco truck that has been showing up in our neighborhood for a month or so. Why we hadn’t patronized it earlier is unclear, but we went there the day after seeing the movie Chef. Coincidence?

Savage – While on a caffeine quest the other night I found Starbucks was closed, yet the Dunkin’ next door was open. And in case anyone has tunnel vision when they were going to the Seattle-based store, the Canton, Massachusetts-based store is making sure your horizon is broadened.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

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

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As I compile this week’s learnings, I am getting alerts on my phone of the score of the Red Sox / Yankees game in progress. As much of a Boston fan as I am, I didn’t even realize they were playing. Sadly sports hasn’t been anywhere near top of mine as it usually would be this time of year.

TMI – It’s somewhat strange getting the “making of the sausage” of my kiddos’ education in the form of alerts as to assignments and grades are posted by their teachers. One alert in particular had feedback from the teacher on the analysis of a short story Thing 1 read. As I had no idea what the story was about, and it was some form of very creative writing, it made for interesting dinner conversation to get the context of it all.

Podcasting 2.0 – Just when you though Joe Rogan’s deal with Spotify was the biggest news in the world of podcasting, recently Adam Curry, the co-creator of podcasting and Dave Jones, the creator of the Freedom Controller platform announced the Podcast Index. Its goal is a next-generation, open directory of all podcasts out there, open to any app or technology that wants to deliver podcasts to your ear. And fittingly, there’s a podcast for the project (its RSS feed link here) which I finally got a chance to listen to the first 2 episodes in the morning this week. There’s a lot of “making of the sausage” of podcasting along with the goals for this project. Though I don’t produce podcasts – yet – I consume them, and am looking forward to seeing this in action.

Oh, 2-1-3-4 – There’s such a thing as contact requests in Zoom, as I got my first one this week.

Let There Be Journalism – Dr. Vincent Filak is a professor of journalism who literally writes the book on it, and his textbook is a mainstay in many university programs. I know him through the guest lectures I have done where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh, and in between the great philosophical chats we have I read his blog, Dynamics of Writing. This week he wrote about looking back on the “incident” with the Covington Catholic high school kids from a pure journalistic standpoint. I wish there was more of this type of reporting out there, as I might even re-subscribe to cable TV and newspapers again.

A Presidential Trek – John Burke, the president of Trek Bicycles, has written the Presidential Playbook 2020: 16 Nonpartisan Solutions to Save America. You can buy the book or get it for free in PDF format if you provide your email address. I did the latter, and though I haven’t read it completely I scanned the table of contents. His solutions, on the surface, are rather obvious, including “fix the health care system” and “reform campaign finance.” I am interested to find out, however, how he thinks progress can be made towards these.

Modern Proverb, By Me – She who controls their own Web hosting truly controls their Web destiny.

Cool Possible Trigger Warning – A contest is going on to nominate the Coolest Things Made in Wisconsin. Of course there are things related to cheese and the Packers, and there’s even one thing that’s NSFW. It’s also a great showcase of innovation here in America’s Dairyland.

A Smarter Way To Web – A wise person shared this article with me on how you can use heuristic analysis to increase Web site performance. For me personally, there wasn’t a lot I learned new from it. However it did reinforce my belief that a Web site is not a chicken spinning in a Popeil oven – you don’t just set it and forget it!

A Smarter Way to Learn – I participated in an intriguing Webinar on EduScrum, or how the Scrum framework is being applied in education. It was interesting to see how one particular school in the Netherlands had self-driven classrooms. The recording of the Webinar is not live yet, but it may be posted on this page where the concept of EduScrum is discussed.

2020 Has Been a Grind – Bruxism is the clinical term for teeth grinding. I know, as I suffer (is that the right word?) from it. This article talks about all the ways the pandemic has impacted people’s teeth, even if they didn’t contract the pesky virus.

More Good News – This weekly summary you are reading is not the only one coming out of the Fox River valley of Wisconsin. Insight Magazine’s editor Brian Rasmussen publishes Feel Good Friday weekly to those who subscribe to their newsletter. Insight is a local business magazine (yes, actually in print) that has kept me informed of all going on in my still relatively new home, and this weekly list is a nice addition to their reporting.

As the temperatures have dipped here in US upper Midwest, I found leaves on trees are already starting to change colors. I also found Words are Birds.

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

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Several years ago I “got into” writing. Granted, I was blogging here at The Hot Iron for over a decade at that point. Even with a body of work – some of it even beyond the world of business and technology – I never considered myself a “writer” per se. Visiting the Lit Fest in Chicago and taking it all in for the first time, a mere few blocks from my then home, was the boost I needed. Where I haven’t published yet beyond this Web site, I have expanded on what I write here, and have in various stages pieces in need of time to finish and submit for possible publishing.

That is if you don’t count some short stories I have submitted recently. And the emphasis here is on short – as in 53 words short. On and off for the last year I have submitted entries for the monthly 53-Word Short Story contest by Press 53, a fiction and poetry publishing house in North Carolina. I discovered this when looking for writing contests for one of my kids, who at one point was interested in such contests then later wasn’t. However I got bitten by this serial unique challenge.

For August’s contest, the writing prompt was to write about “Sunday.” That’s it, that’s all they give you, and it is up to your creativity – and brevity – to craft something unique and prize-winning. As you can tell by the title of this post I did not win, and as a result my prose will not be published in one of their journals.

But as words must be free, I share “Any Given” with you here:

"While awaiting our lobsters to brighten, we slurped steamers – simmered in Harpoon IPA, from the same Portsmouth dock as the crustaceans. Aptly accompanying our ocean harvest was corn on-the-cob, homemade potato salad and more of said IPA.

Ten o’clock may seem early for such a feast, but there’s only three hours till kick-off."

The preceding is a true story, as annually we would have a lobster bake during one week’s tailgating before a New England Patriots home game back in the day.

If you’re so inclined you can read the winning entry here, learn about this month’s contest and how you too can compete with me for the fame and glory of a very, very short story.

Deconstructing Short Story Writing

Writing can take many forms. What I originally saw as business and technology writing was in reality story writing, and upon that realization it opened and expanded my mind to what else I could write. But I will save an in-depth deconstruction for another time – just get out there and write!

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

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Pondering why my kids need to check-in to a class they are virtually in when they have a Webcam pointing at them seems like a waste of time on a day like today. I remember 9/11/2001 like it was yesterday. As I recounted over a decade ago I might have seen one of the ill-fated planes that morning. However I never wrote that on 9/10/2001 I was where I am right now – in Wisconsin – and flew back to Logan Airport in Boston that night. Needless to say the experience at Logan the next time I was there was quite different.

A Brand Evolves – Congrats to my very good friend Alex Ryan on the rebranding of her consultancy, Evolve Solutions Group! The new logo and brand approach fit very well with the work she and her team do. They created a cool announcement video that was trending on LinkedIn. Check out their Web site and if you’re looking for creative, effective business solutions, I can’t recommend them enough.

What’s In A Brand? – Another recent rebrand announcement came from Name.com, the best domain name registrar out there, as far as I am concerned. Their rebrand was done to also highlight their other services, like hosting, Web sites, SSL certificates and email. I have been a customer of Name.com for well over a decade and they provide great support, great pricing, and best of all a Web site that is by far the most superior for easily managing your domain names in the marketplace – trust me on this!

Fired Up – Planned obsolescence is a term that is often applied to technology, where “built-in” to the tech is the need to replace it as it can’t be further upgraded. Wouldn’t it be nice to know about it though? When we got a new TV our Amazon Fire TV stick started acting up, where video would cache, timeout and lose lip sync. I thought it may be the monitor’s interference with the WiFi but that wasn’t it. After looking on Amazon I discovered the model we had was actually 2 versions old. Upon getting a new one, all is working better than before.

My (New Rugged) Charge(r) – Speaking of older tech, it has been years since Mophie made the Juice Pack Powerstation Pro. This rugged (water and drop proof) battery, made of metal and encased in bright orange rubber, was perfect for accidental drops, a weekend at Riot Fest, and fully charged it could fully charge 2 devices. They stopped making it much to my dismay. After futile attempts to find one on close out, and an on-and-off quest for another model, I came upon MyCharge and their Adventure series. So far so good, and though I won’t have a Riot Fest this year to break it in, there’ll be other opportunities for it to show its true mettle.

Suitable For Framing – You can buy a stock photo of my hand! I’ll spare the story about the search rabbit hole I went down, but I found this photo from the launch of the Trump board game in 1989. At the left you see a hand holding a WNEK-FM microphone, and that’s me. Why I was there is chronicled here or you can watch a news clip of me and the microphone in action at that event event.

Your Own Scrum Gallery Too – Now you can decorate your space and learn about Scrum and Agile at the same time. Incrementor is offering free Agile posters and Scrum Alliance has a PDF of a Scrum Framework poster you can print out and hang prominently.

Tricking Browsers – Next to outright bigoted hatred and Hitler, Web browser cache is something I loathe equally. If you don’t know what browser cache is, this article explains it well. Warning I am going to get a little techy here… as this week I learned an straightforward, easy to code for Web programmers to help mitigate caching issues from a very smart engineer. By adding a querystring to the URL of an embedded file, such as CSS or JavaScript, the browser will think this is a new file and load it automatically. The querystring can be anything, such setting to something like the date of the change to the file.

Laughing and Crying – A couple of things I read this week gave me a chuckle and made me think too much as well. This article by Dr. Vincent Filak, a world-reknown Journalism professor and author, talks about back to college numbers. This article shared to be my world-reknown architectural publisher Kevin Carmody on eerily sad and dangerous things found during structural inspections.

The Music Of My Life – Sad news came this week that Khalis Bayyan, co founder of Kool and the Gang, has died. The word “sad” I don’t think has ever been equated with this great band from the 70’s and 80’s. And what better way to celebrate his life and contributions that with their hit from the 80’s, Celebrate.

This past weekend I went back to church, as inside of the church, for the first time in forever, or so it seems. Where all of the usual were in place, seeing the sign pictured above was frankly odd to me. Even more strange was saying prayers aloud with a mask on. So not to end this so sadly, I have embedded the Celebrate video below.

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

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My lists of learnings is a little shorter this week, and it was due to a different kind of learning – what some are calling “virtual school” or what I call it with many more words and also has some words that my family is hoping I stop saying so much, especially when it comes to attempts at my kids to have a positive classroom experience at home.

5-115-1 – I was on vacation last week with my family, and thinking I was going to have some extended times to read I brought 5 books. Of those I only cracked open one of them, reading just 115 pages. To make matters worse, I picked up another book at a yard sale where we stopped in to look at a kayak for sale. I also learned a little more about kayaks too.

The Trees Are Nervous Again – First there was the rush on toilet paper. Then as I learned last week there is a rush on beer cans. Now there’s a rush on computer printers as families need them for their kids to do their schoolwork at home. This doesn’t surprise me as I have known many people over the years who didn’t have a printer. Where I last lived in Chicago I think only one other family in our block had one, and I was often asked by neighbors to print files for them.

The Emperor’s New Pajamas – Should you sleep naked? The experts seem to think so.

Money Ball – Fenway Sports Management, the entity that owns the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool Football Club among other sports-related assets, is offering a free online program for people to learn the business of sports. You can sign up for FSM University here. I don’t know if there is a limit on it or if they admit everyone, but in some cases you may be able to earn internship credit. As a Sox and New England sports fan I am intrigued by this.

Define Lifetime – This week I learned of yet another class-action lawsuit, but one that actually makes a lot of sense to me personally. The suit is against satellite radio firm SiriusXM and limitations it puts on its “lifetime” subscription plan. If you have this plan that they no longer offer, you were limited to the number of times you could transfer it to a new radio, such as when you get a new car or if the one you have breaks. Granted you had to pay to transfer each time, but there was a cap they never told people about. I know well about this as I have a lifetime subscription and I have only one more transfer left, and I had to haggle with SiriusXM the last time I went to transfer it as I was also unaware of this limit.

Coming In For A Landing – Do you know what a landing page is? I am sure at least one person reading this is shrugging their shoulders! A landing page is a Web page for a specific purpose, typically lead generation or sales. Rob Hope this week released his book Landing Page Hot Tips. Hope for years has published a Web site and newsletter called One Page Love that is dedicated to landing pages and 1-page Web sites. If you have either of these, or want to learn why you should, you need to get this eBook.

Sign O’ The Modern Times – Several years ago I heard a new design was created for the what is formally called the “International Symbol of Access” or commonly referred to as the handicapped symbol. The familiar blue square with a stick figure sitting upright was redesigned showing the person leaning forward to symbolize motion and mobility. This article talks about the redesign of the logo. However, I have never seen the new symbol in use until just this week, where I noticed it painted on a parking space at a local retail center.

This week I will close with this video of Jerry Lewis singing You’ll Never Walk Alone by Rodgers and Hammerstein. To say this was a staple for me every Labor Day weekend growing up is an understatement. If you don’t know about this song and its meaning with the holiday weekend, contact me. If I get queries about it I may write something 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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