While the internet is a vital tool for research or social media outreach in many industries, thousands and thousands of company hours and company electricity is sapped away by personal email correspondence, tweeting, designing family Christmas cards, shopping, stocking your eBay store, forwarding jokes and watching television shows. Although you may be sharp enough to not use your “work email” for dating site registration, you may still be busted if your company uses employee internet monitoring.
Essentially, your boss can’t see a snapshot of your computer screen or keystrokes, but can find out what sites you visited and for how long. While a sympathetic boss might not mind the occasional check of email, or even some entertainment on the lunch hour, if your job performance is slacking, they have hard proof on where your real focus was if the sites weren’t company or industry related.
Is this fair? In some ways, it could be construed as an invasion of privacy. However, if you are indeed using a company’s work station or a company-provided computer, you are essentially borrowing someone else’s equipment and need to act accordingly. Such software really mainly is used to detect trends.
With smartphones and even iPads, employees can discreetly conduct personal business. In that regard, monitoring software falls short if you are truly looking to keep track of all of an employee’s time. For the most part, if an employee is abusing company time on personal business, it will spill over into their use of the company copier and computers as well.
Do you tend to spend your work day sucked in by the internet, or have you managed to maintain the barrier of “personal” and “company” time?
I cleaned out nearly 1,200 spam comments from the blog this week. Some were incomprehensible and some were about enhancement products, casinos and slot game guides. A relative of mine likes to putter around at casinos all day and parks herself in front of the slot machine. When I mentioned the spam, she got excited and wanted to look at everything I had on computer gambling, particularly the rating guides. Somehow, she thinks that because something has user ratings, it means that Consumer Reports backs it.
That’s just what I need. At least at a casino, there are the pleasant distractions of food and shows, but at the computer, Aunt Edith can sit down all day and all night clicking buttons. That’s exactly what I need. Of course, that alleviates the need to drive her to the far side of the world a weekend each month. Fine by me, as long as she doesn’t miss her Impersonator show fix.
There are so many widgets and tracking services catering to bloggers, and I never can sift through them all. It’s a matter or prioritizing exactly what I need. The latest one I’ve stumbled across is Blog Copy (blogcopy.com).
When you paste the code into your blog template, you will receive stats on who is quoting you or lifting information from your site. While not a plagiarism buster, per se, the true intent is to notify you of other folks that are talking about you. Sure, it would be great if they had added a link back to your site. However, the “trackback” functions of some sites aren’t 100% reliable, and if you rely on googling yourself, it may take a long time for pages to be indexed, particularly if they are obscure.
As of now, I don’t know of any inherent problems with the code interfering with other code or widgets, but if you have experienced hiccups, let me know.
Stanford News reprinted the text of the commencement address Steve Jobs gave in 2005. Jobs reminisced about the days following his decision to leave Reed college. Sometimes, the our most mundane experience help us connect the dots. To visit the Stanford news to read the complete text, Click Here.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
(Apparently it is more believeable to tell someone they are the long lost distant relative of Frederic Chopin, at left. It would be too over the top to say Beethoven).
Do you believe it?
Remember spam’s “greatest hits?” Every day it seems that you are winning the lottery in a foreign country, or are the last known relative of an oil tycoon. It morphed from the version that was going around about a dozen years ago now that you were in Princess Diana’s will. I have been named as Frederic Chopin’s long lost heir through my mother’s side before as well. I have learned to hit “spam” on many of these messages, but sometimes they sneak by my spam filters. Now, they are getting more creative. Some of these similar love notes are being left as comments on my blog!
The spam filters don’t catch them as they appear to be real messages, not just a spattering of links to various unrelated sites. (By the way, my favorite spam comment of all started out with, “Stop Oval Haired Woman.” Was this referring to a gal with an assymetrical 80s hairdo, a bad Toni home perm or is she a newscaster with helmut head? Oh. And who could forget the comment on my Targus review post that asked me what I thought about baby acne. Just the right plausible/odd ratio to get me to click. Ha-ha. I didn’t. )
The story remains the same. Someone is in trouble and somehow, I am the only one who can save the day if I would only send a certified check, accept a certified check, or give out my banking details. My response remains the same, in not responding.
However, sometimes I receive them with phone numbers and addresses from some out of the way island. Perhaps I should forward their information to missionaries in the area to check to see if they really exist or are really in trouble? Maybe I will go onto a forum and ask someone from that country to look up who their next door neighbor is, alert them to the situation, and have them knock on their door, unraveling the whole scam….and of course helping them with that heart condition they are having which caused them to reach out to me as the last traceable heir of their family in case they die. Oh well.
Moviestorm is enabling a new generation of amateur film-makers to realize their visions.It offers easy, affordable animation tools that can produce sophisticated high-quality films on practically no budget. After several years in development, Moviestorm has demonstrated that home movie-making needn’t be limited to cheap hand-held cameras and clips of the kids goofing around. Its virtual movie studio allows users to break free of the limitations of the real world, and allows them to direct, film, edit and distribute 3D animated movies without any knowledge of animation techniques or 3D modelling. And best of all, it’s free, and comes without any copyright restrictions.
Iain Friar, known as IceAxe, is one of Moviestorm’s many successful film-makers.His short film, Clockwork, a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain after a Soviet invasion in the 1980s, is winning accolades and awards around the world, most recently the audience prize at the Atopic Festival in France and the Grand Prize at the Machinima Expo.Clearly influenced by both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a visual style that evokes both Communist era propaganda posters and more recent animated movies such as A Scanner Darkly, it is a stark, powerful film that belies its modest origins.
Iain, who’s 42, works in marketing, and started making movies just 18 months ago. “I’ve always been a hands-on person, in music, sport, and everything else,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to shoot a music video, but I’m not the most technical of people, and it seemed extraordinarily hard. I remember when computer games started using in-game animation to tell the story instead of video clips, and this interested me, especially now that game technology has become so sophisticated. So I bought a book, Machinima for Dummies, which had Moviestorm on the CD, and I was hooked. I liked Moviestorm because it did what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for at the time, and the Moviestorm community was very supportive. I initially made comedies, but I could see that the movies people respected were more dramatic, so it seemed that was the direction to go in.”
He spent four months working on Clockwork, and then the same again on his next short, Cloud Angel, a steampunk thriller set on board an airship.Apart from the voice acting, he made the entire film himself at his home in Basingstoke, England.“I’m lucky that my friends are so willing to step up to the mike and read my silly scripts!” he laughs. His next film is Gridlock, a science fiction comedy which he is co-producing with another successful Moviestorm director, James Thorpe.For this, they’ve stepped up the production costs a notch: they hired a recording studio and got the local amateur dramatic group to do the voice acting.
Iain is realistic about his future, though.“Am I ambitious? Yes. Do I want to keep it as just a hobby? Well, probably yes, because I imagine that if it became a full time activity, the fun might go out of it. I make movies as escapism. That said, I think that this industry would be really interesting to work in, because it’s embryonic; I’m not sure what direction it will go in. It’s exciting!”
Moviestorm’s CEO, Jeff Zie, is hugely enthusiastic and supportive.“Iain and the many other Moviestorm users are an inspiration to us all,” he says. “We’re really proud that we’re giving talented people like this the tools they need to unleash the creative potential they never knew they had, and to produce these wonderful films.”
Try it and see!
You can download Moviestorm for free: Windows and Mac versions are available. If you want, you can expand your virtual film studio and buy extra costumes, sets, props, and sounds in their marketplace. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be the next Tarantino, Ang Lee, or J J Abrams, now’s the time to find out!
I cleaned out nearly 1,200 spam comments from the blog this week. Some were incomprehensible and some were about enhancement products, casinos and 
