My first experience with email was in the early '90s at a place where every desk in the office was wired. I almost split stitches trading electronic quips all day with people. It didn't occur to me at first that there was nothing at all private about these communiques and that our harmless fun could have gotten us all fired.Bad jokes, villainous memos about management, personal secrets and thoughts of scouting for a better job were scattered among the day-to-day memos. All of this visible to our superiors and charges alike, and dutifully archived every evening. I should have been much more paranoid.
It can get ugly. If you simply forward a note making fun of Ebonics for instance (which is hard not to do--Ebonics makes such good fun of itself) you could be accused of being a racist! Stately firms like Morgan Stanley & Co. and R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co. have had recent squabbles over allegedly racist internal communications. Ever forward a blonde joke? You're a criminal! Clean out your desk.
Obviously some feel, as I did at first blush, that email is so ethereal that it just kind of "goes away" when you punch "Send." My father, a retired lawyer, once told me (when I got caught passing a suggestive note to a cheerleader in Jr. High School), "Son, never put anything in writing if you can help it." When I think of some of the things I have written and sent via email I cringe. Electronic mail is an open, exposed postcard that many eyes can see and will probably be automatically saved somewhere--accessible to anyone who wants to mess with your life.
Feel free to email me your thoughts.
Usually, diners contract hepatitis at a restaurant because an employee who is infected (and most probably knows it) neglects to wash his/her hands after using the toilet and then proceeds to make your Caesar Salad or something. By hand. By the same, dirty hand.
I called the local health authorities' "hotline" and was disappointed (but not too surprised) to learn that there is no law requiring a restaurant owner to ask an employee if they have infectious hepatitis. There is no law forbidding a person with infectious hepatitis to apply for and accept a job handling uncooked food you and I will place in our mouths.
Boulder Country has had a record incidence of hepatitis outbreaks over the past year. We've had so many cases the county has run out of the immune globulin needed to treat the victims. Mainly because some individuals are either just uncaring slobs, or worse: sociopaths.
Hepatitis can wreck an otherwise healthy person's liver if not caught in time and properly treated. There are those would would suggest I take it upon myself to have a doctor inject me with a vaccination so as to"protect" myself from people who don't wash their hands and go to work sick. I would suggest that the more poisons I inject into my system to "protect" me from infected folks with a callous disregard for anyone else and pitiful personal hygiene habits, can eventually weaken my natural immune system. No thank you. I'm not the one who should be dealing with this anyway. Who are we protecting and why?
Pocket calculators were invented when I was in high school, but we weren't allowed to use them in class. We used to oooohh and aaaahhhh at the physics teacher's Texas Instrument thingie that had all these mystery keys on it. You couldn't fit it into a pocket but they called it a pocket calculator anyway.
I worry about spell-checkers and our increasingly dimmer youth in schools today. Will the crutch of automatic spelling correction cripple the next generation of journalists? Are we destined to wear a personal utility belt of applications that brings us up to the skill level of an unplugged high school graduate of the 1950's? At least somebody set up a spelling bee, site.
It hasn't taken long for the schools to allow stoonts the timesaving short cut of doing their ciphering with a calculator. (Sure is easier than actually trying to TEACH them!) As long as their Energizer Bunny keeps going they can do math I suppose. Maybe I'm just jealous, but I had to figure this stuff out with my addled brain--scratching in the margins and counting on fingers and toes.
Even the SAT suggests you bring along your calculator. All I was allowed to carry in was my pencil and the fear of no future. It just doesn't seem fair.
Are you an innie, an outie or an extra? This is getting confusing. First the inTERnet, then inTRAnets and now EXTRAnets. From what I can gather, "extranet" currently describes the availability of select "insider info" to the web at large. If an intranet is company-private, an extranet is selectively company-public. Federal Express is a good example: you are accessing private company data (your shipment tracking information) from any computer anywhere in the world out of Federal Express' private database.
This approach allows companies in a common interest group to openly share essential information and sheild other data from general view. This also allows businesses such as banks and malls to include only those people who are pre-qualified customers. A more secure environment for both patron and proprietor.
Bob Metcalf is said to have coined the term "extranet." Some marketing weenie from Adobe Systems would like to lay claim to it as well but let's give it to Bob. After all, he thought up the "ETHERnet."
Ted Nugent used to come through town in the late Sixties with The Amboy Dukes, then as a solo act during the early Seventies. He was always crazy. Even when he was with the Dukes he would shoot his bow and flaming arrows during performances (Fire Marshall willing). He's a musical maniac when he plays--a true gonzo guitarist with an impressive career that spans three decades and counting.
Perhaps Nugent's success and longevity is a result of his strick anti-drug lifestyle. Which is laudible. Some other aspects of Mr. Nugent's lifestyle get a lot of people upset: he eats what he kills. People who think we shouldn't eat animals consider Ted uncivilized. Mr. Nugent prefers to view himself as perfectly in tune with Nature.
When you think about it, ol' Ted is actually playing his proper role in the food chain: clever animal gets hungry; less clever animal gets eaten. Animal lovers see it very differently. When Ted's television shows came on the local PBS channel showing how he hunts down, kills and then dresses in the field the wild game he then feeds his family--subscribers quit by the dozen. But more subscribers joined than the number that quit. In fact the shows were so popular they repeated the entire series and gave away Ted Nugent hunting hats during the fund-raising campaign.
A staunch conservative (Nature & Politics) Nugent used to be an occasional caller on The Rush Limbaugh show and now labels himself "the Official rock n roll, hunting, conservation representative of the EIB Network." Pretty much a Ditto-Head with really long hair and an incredible attitude, Ted's a very entertaining guy. I guess when you're too old to rock, you start to shock and he's building his very own radio empire. That's right, Ted Nugent is the latest player in the Radio Talk Show arena. His flaming arrows will be verbal in this venue. Nugent's an excellent monologist. I'll bet he tears up the airwaves while he burns down the house and then cooks his family's dinner over the coals.