What I Learned This Week For April 17 2020

By Mike Maddaloni on Thursday, April 16, 2020 at 10:23 PM with 2 comments

photo of snow on the lawn

The idea behind this series of posts on what I learned during the week is that I’d write on things, topics or ideas presented to me throughout the seven days. This week I had the chance to mix it up a bit.

  • Scrum – I took a 2-day course towards becoming a Certified ScrumMaster. It has been a while since I have taken a formal class. Originally the class was supposed to be in-person, but was moved to being hosted on Zoom. I did try to postpone it to a later date as my preference was in-person learning for this type of course, however the vendor made it difficult to do so. In any case, it was a great class, and now onto take the exam this weekend – wish me luck!
  • Miro – In said course, there would be a lot of whiteboard work had it been taught in-person. To have a similar experience online, the instructor used a service called Miro, which allows for multi-person whiteboard-like collaboration. There was a learning curve to using it and a lot of stepping on each other, but in the end it generally worked well.
  • Timer – When we took breaks during said course, the instructor used a Mac program called AS Timer to track the time. It is a free program, and one I see myself using as a countdown clock to better manage my time on tasks.
  • Miasma – my word for the week is miasma, which I picked up from, you guessed it, said course.
  • Slanted – Actually in full Slanted: How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism, is the title of the new book coming out by investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson this fall. It is available now for pre-order on Amazon. I have enjoyed Attkisson’s work and writings and have read and written takeaways on her previous books Stonewalled and The Smear, and I sure this will be equally as intriguing.
  • Fifty – Easter is actually a 50 day season, with 10 days after the 40 days of Lent, as said by my priest. Yes, this former Roman Catholic alter boy didn’t know that previously.
  • Snow – It’s still falling in mid-April in Wisconsin. So much for the groundhogs.
  • Withdrawal – I have a lot of friends who are longing for live sports, and it is driving them to watch past games online. And text me pictures from them. And videos too. These reminded me of once when I watched the 1975 NBA All-Star Game played at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Arizona, after a time when I went down an online rabbit hole trying to remember the name of the arena I had visited in the mid-1990’s. I share the video embedded below, for those longing for the days when basketball shorts were, well, short.

And that’s the way it looks from here right now.


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


Did you enjoy this? Subscribe to The Hot Iron by RSS/XML feed or Read by Email

What I Learned • (2) CommentsPermalink