"In my mind, it's like any other medication," said Karapandza, 28, a Sterling Heights resident and cell phone repairman. "You wouldn't go up to your boss and tell him you've got a prescription for Vicodin."
via freep.com
From Mug InfoManager [October 2009], a kindred soul speaks out:
One of my pet peeves is having someone send me an email about some thing that at least to me is an obvious urban legend. Of course some of my friend actually send it to me expecting me to do the Snopes search.
via www.ugnn.com
Online or offline, protect your privacy. Just remember: Never give anyone your password, your social security number or your driver's license unless you are in their physical presence and staring them in the eyes! ☺
and for more about Craigslist and other helpful scam warnings =
This is a very simple Nigeria scam and they will send you some sort of “evidence” that they paid like a false screen shoot from Pay Pal or Western Union. They might also say that Pay Pal does not work so they want to send you the money with wire but they want more information they normal. Here is a sample email they might send you
via www.internetspampolice.com
and lots of good information here: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams
Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was “going to make a shift with my Facebook use - going to just mostly family stuff.”
Worth reading - prospective employers and others are increasingly turning to FB and other sites to gather information about people.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20091008/1927006467.shtml
"It's really stunning how various labor departments are simply ill-equipped to handle a modern labor force."
[interesting blog post about an unemployed person who had her unemployment compensation cut back because she blogged and earned $1 from that activity while unemployed]
Backing up: why it's important and how to do it right.
The entire internet of Sweden [".se"] was down for an hour recently:
Royal Pingdom writes of the error: “The problem happened during planned maintenance of the .se domain. The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name. We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating “.” to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that “.se” is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.”
http://mashable.com/2009/10/13/sweden-internet-downtime/
I'm sure you've heard something about the Jamie Leigh Jones case, where she went to work for Halliburton in Iraq and was beaten, gang-raped, held hostage and threatened by her co-workers and Halliburton. She finally won her freedom and came home [thanks to her father and her diligent Congressman]. She brought suit for all those things done to her and the defense was that she signed an employment contract requiring her to go through arbitration run by the company.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals [Jones v. Halliburton Co., 2009 WL 2940061 (5th Cir. Sept. 15, 2009] just came out with a decision in which it confirmed that although some claims were limited to arbitration in the company, not all of them were.
In the meantime, she also provided sobering testimony to Congress this year about her treatment and the treatment of women by our contractors in Iraq, and about the limitations on her right to a jury trial. As she testified, "it should not be legal for a large multibillion-dollar corporation to force [arbitration] on a person who needs a job to survive and doesn’t understand what the process involves."
Kudos to Jamie Leigh Jones and her counsel on appeal, John Vail of the Center for Constitutional Litigation.
It looks like a typical age discrimination scenario. A supervisor makes hostile remarks about older employees and expresses a preference for younger ones. An older employee with an excellent record gets fired for trumped-up reasons and a younger employee is hired to replace her.
Finally, some good news out of the 8th -- kudos to Ellen Simon for writing this blog post and for WorkPlaceFairness.org for linking to it.
Being careful not to lose data, redux
In my opinion [and that of others] the best way to deal with photographs on those CF and SD and other cards which you take from your camera is to: 1. attach the camera to the computer or use a Card reader and put the card in the reader, 2. transfer the pictures from the card to the computer [do not erase!!!!], 3. remove the card and save it for another day [labelling is a good idea] but keep the pictures on the card, 4. back up your newly-transferred pictures to another device [burn a CD or DVD, save a copy to a harddrive, online storage, etc.]. Now you can import and work with those transferred images in whatever software you have. You have those images, the ones [still] on the card and the ones backed up.
This cautionary tale is occasioned by my daughter’s “loss” of 80 out of 130 pictures when she thought she had imported them but they were missing. She had imported then selected ‘erase’ [don’t ever do that = you may need those images later] and then realized that 80 of the images were not imported. It has taken her days to get this handled [using photo recovery software helped, but can’t be guaranteed].
I wrote about this issue back in April in the Technology category, here: No more Excuses: Backing Up!