Stupid Work Tricks

"I received an e-mail re: the discovery of MP3 music files on my machine. These MP3s are from my music collection - I burned them onto CD-Rs (from CDs I have at home) to bring into work so I could listen to music while working. I copied these files from a CD-R onto my machine because I felt the sound of the CD-ROM drive spinning might be distracting to people working around me. (I have admin rights to my machine, as my job responsibilities dictate.) I fail to see how bringing music I paid for into work constitutes a "potential copyright issue", nor do I understand how this may cause "negative financial and customer impacts", nor do I feel it is necessary to delete this music from my hard drive."

Not that it's a big deal to just nuke the one folder where the offending music files reside, but, sheesh. I eagerly await the groupthink response.

I was recently advised to remove Mozilla Firefox from my machines as they present a security risk! Oy vey indeed.

I was told the same thing by my I.T. guy. We finally compromised in that I have to keep Firefox hidden from everyone else.

Our IT bloke, when he saw I'd downloaded Firefox at work, smiled, nodded and said "good move". (I seem to have admin status, which is odd but I'm not complaining)

The place I worked at used to be an entire OSS shop. Did all my work on BSD machines running X.., it was heavenly and blissful. After they merged with another company we had to start developing under Microsoft's .NET platform which screwed things up mightily. :(

According to the powers that be, this whole thing comes down to 3 things: VOLUME, SECURITY RISKS, and LICENSING ISSUES.

1) VOLUME - you put too much skeez on your hard drive, it's hard for "business-critical" updates to be added to your PC, which creates SECURITY RISK etc etc. (Of course, if you have trouble installing software on a harddrive that has TEN GIGS free, then, you know, you stupid.)

2) SECURITY RISKS - Any unauthorized software yadda yadda virus yadda SECURITY RISK. Which is funny, as I'm running these very same files on my PC, and I don't have any viruses or such @ all (aside from Bonzi Buddy, which I love).

3) LICENSING ISSUES - Installing music or movie files, quoth the script, is illegal, as CORPORATION X does not have a license to run it. But is that really how it works? And how is running an MP3 from my harddrive any different than playing a CD in the CD-ROM drive?

Anyway, they say I can bring CDs to work to listen to, or purchase an MP3 player, which is nice of them to suggest. (Thanks CORPORATION X!) But, y'know, I'm tempted to "escalate" this to my manager, just for giggles.

I don't think I can even access Mozilla's site from my PC! CORPORATION X sucks (and not just because of their substandard product)!

Corporation X are Japanese, right? I mean, English isn't their first language, surely?

Also - is "escalate" the lamest corporation co-opted word / notion ever? "I'm going to escalate this request and talk to my manager" = "I'm going to talk to my manager, but POINT A LOT!"

Ranting. Arrgh. Our incompentent unit chief just got promoted to section chief! Fuck up, Move up! I hate you, government.

My stupid work trick is that I spent all day today and almost all day yesterday submitting my resume to every place I could find and signing up for a technical job fair at the convention center tomorrow, and getting paid for it.

can firefox run from a usb key? startup might be a bit slow but the caching of pages etc should be ok as that'll still be on the hard drive.

Also, I'm not the one to know about these things, but I think the Bot is OTM about every damn thing.

[xpost]

Here at CORPORATION X, I had to get ADMIN RIGHTS to my machine because, without ADMIN RIGHTS, I was unable to browse the database I needed to work w/. Also here at CORPORATION X, it takes, on average, approximately 30 seconds for changes I make to a dinky little ASP file to get saved to the servers we access through our fancy "new" TOKEN RING NETWORK. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some cards I need to punch.

OTM! I'm amazed at some of the stuff users can do sometimes.

According to the powers that be, this whole thing comes down to 3 things: VOLUME, SECURITY RISKS, and LICENSING ISSUES.

1) VOLUME - you put too much skeez on your hard drive, it's hard for "business-critical" updates to be added to your PC, which creates SECURITY RISK etc etc. (Of course, if you have trouble installing software on a harddrive that has TEN GIGS free, then, you know, you stupid.)

We get around this an easy way: every new desktop machine that comes in gets its primary partition resized down to about 8Gb. That should be plenty of space for anything anybody ever needs to do. If someone fills their disk up with crap - and they do - then we can whinge at them, but if the stuff on their disk generally *is* important then they still have lots of pristine, unused, inaccessible gigs which we can open up for use.

The rule of thumb, of course, is that the higher up someone is in the company, the more (non-work-related) crap they shovel on to their machines. Our MD, for example, has Everquest on his.

[I'm back! I wasn't sure whether to come back to ILX at all, but it was kind of irristable. Camping was good!]

firefox can run from a usb, there's a special version, you can google around for it.

Some people at work - ones who are particularly unpopular with my boss, mostly - have had all the USB ports on their computers disabled to stop them doing this sort of thing.

(OK, not to stop them running Firefox - we applaud that - but to stop them bringing in their own USB devices and messing about)

-- koogs (il...), May 18th, 2005.

Fox in a Box.

I use it, I love it. We don't have admin rights on our PCs, we do have an IT sanctioned copy of Firefox (I was so pleased by this). IT hasn't been patching it though, I can update the keydrive verison with impunity. I keep Winamp on there too.