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?

While surfing, I was really surprised to see that the prices were at or less than what I paid. In some ways, I expected the equivalent of my model to cost slightly less, and the brand spanking new styles to cost slightly more. Is Apple discontinuing something? Even though the price wasn’t dramatically lower, still, the list price diving $20-150 is something I have my radar finely tuned to. Shopping spree? Then, I realized I was surfing a CANADIAN price-comparison site for Macs. While the exchange rate isn’t what it used to be, where the dollar saved you 30% or more if you shopped over the Blue Water bridge or through the Tunnel. It’s not worth it to drive and pay duty by the time I get back, but sites such as www.canadapost.ca/shopper/apple/brand/30 certainly are a boon for all of you Canadian readers– you might have a hard time wading through American sites wondering if prices and even shipping area actually apply to you.  Sure beats visiting 100 tech sites individually.

Right now you can sign up for the MyCube private beta to be in the first wave of early adopters. (Enter in the code “blog” to join.) I am not quite clear if you need to have a lot of personal friends using it to make it worthwhile or there are enough connections with common interests for someone to jump in without their posse. There are so many sites languishing with too few users, but if a core group can get excited about it, time will tell.

Jobs has gone from co-founder, to out of the Apple family entirely, to being re-embraced as CEO. In some way’s Life’s title “His Life and Times” sounds more like a memorial than a retrospective, but let’s think positive. The future remains uncertain for Jobs as far as his health struggles, though Jobs seems to be working to ensure that the idea man in the black mock-turtleneck behind Apple will never be too far. You are in our prayers, Steve. At least mine and Zarvox the iMac’s. I can’t speak for Hal9000.

This is all fine and good, but is there a DVD Ripper Mac version? Yup. Rip those DVDs right iPod, iPhone and iPad as well as Android formats.  Want to do more than just rip and add a few effects? Video Converter for Mac allows you to take your videos and add soundtracks, and clip and merge, and recognizes over 150 video formats.  I had no idea there were even that many, but I suppose with different generations of technology, there are probably more formats out there than the household names.

Have you tried a ripping program before? If so, what did you think? Can’t live without 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.

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.