If a day goes by where you don’t learn something new, what good is it really? Sometimes that new nugget of knowledge is welcomed and cherished, and sometimes it is scary as all hell and you wished you didn’t know it. Nonetheless, learning is what we do on this journey of life, whether we like it or not.

I opened a post titled What I Learned This Week So Far This Year For January 10 2014 with the same paragraph above, where I chronicled on a Friday what I learned over the past week. I have thought about doing this again for a while, and with my renewed interest in writing, I restart sharing what I learned below. And don’t worry, it won’t be filled solely with things I learned as a result of being at home under lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic!

So here goes:

• When something says it can be installed in “minutes,” it usually doesn’t say how many, or how many hours which also consist of minutes.
• There’s plenty of ground pork in supermarkets these days, ground beef and ground turkey not so much. I heard about this on the No Agenda podcast, and found it to be the case myself for now locally in Northeast Wisconsin.
• Virtual karate lessons can actually work.
• There are Microsoft Office mobile apps, at least for the iPhone. Where I don’t think I would want to use them for creating a document or spreadsheet, they work well for searching a document on the go as well as printing one right from your smartphone.
• A colleague Raj taught me a trick for inserting common phrases you use in an email using Microsoft Outlook and its autocorrect feature. For example, he will type “please#” (without the quotes) and it will insert a sentence “Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.” I had never heard of this hack, and am setting these up as there’s many phrases or sentences I manually type over and over.
• Just when I thought voting in Wisconsin couldn’t get any easier (you can register to vote on election day at your polling place), you can now request an absentee ballot online. In order to do so, you must upload a copy of your driver’s license or state ID, which I have found many people don’t know how to do that when I tell them about it. I do and I did, and got my ballot a few days later.
• My friend Eric wanted to contribute something positive to the fears many have over the coronavirus pandemic, so he hosted a Webinar with friends of his who are a police officer, EMT and nurse. He recorded it and you can watch the webinar here.
• Beginning this year, some Web browsers will limit the length of a registration of a Web site SSL certificate to 1 year. If you have a Web site and don’t know what this means, ask whomever created or manages it.

Maybe you learned something new yourself? Please share your thoughts in the comments of 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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