Want a job – don’t post your "sickies" on Facebook

Fears As Online Info Used To Vet For Jobs screams the usual tabloid-esque Sky headline. It’s not quite that bad but I can say that my current employers do indeed trawl Facebook and the like looking for information on prospective employees.

The thing is, it’s common sense. If you go posting stuff in a public forum along the lines of “I went out on a right bender last night. Must have had 18 pints. Sick as a ****** this morning, so I rang in and told them I had ‘flu” then you’re asking for trouble. People are still in the mindset that what they post online has some kind of confidentiality. Well, it doesn’t.

Using the above example, someone could (and should) be disciplined by their employer if they were found out. I can guarantee they’d go mad about work “spying” on them. But had the same person said those words out loud in the work canteen and been overheard by their manager, would they be as annoyed at the “earwigging”? Or more at their stupidity at being caught?

I also find it hard to believe that 60% of 14-21 year olds think their online data is somehow transient and can’t be dug up in the future. Leave stuff on a blog and it’s there to be found, even if you delete it. There are numerous websites archiving the internet and they can often even have old versions of web pages that have since been erased or altered.

Basically, don’t be a ****. Whinge about your work. Complain about your manager. Point out the flaws. I personally don’t think anyone can complain about that. After all, you could do the same thing at the pub. For some reason companies react very badly to people badmouthing them on web pages, but don’t have a problem with you telling all your friends by mouth.

Thing is, this is a two-way street. If companies would listen to their staff then perhaps they wouldn’t feel the need to badmouth them on Facebook or wherever. Conversely if someone does mouth off and a manager finds it online, why not take them aside and discuss the problem instead of the kneejerk reaction of sacking them forthwith?

LOLCODE – satisfying my inner geek

One for the sadder elements of my readership, this one. LOLCODE is a new-ish programming language that – amazingly – seems to be genuine. I came across it on Elliott C. Back‘s rather good blog where he has a couple of examples.

For those really interested, the specification for the current version (1.2) is available from the official LOLCODE site. I really can’t believe this is serious but when you take a good look, it’s really BASIC for people who insist on using that moronic “1337” speak. And what’s even more sad is that it makes some kind of sense to me when I look through it…

Do you want wi-fi with that?

In a move that actually makes our McD’s better than the ones in Paris, they’ve announced that by the end of the year 1200 McD’s in the UK will have free wireless internet. Whoop!

Why is this better than Paris? Because although they’ve had free wi-fi for ages, you have to buy something to get the keycode for the toilets… So in the UK, you can McSurf after your McShit and not spend any money!

Music downloads mean no free wireless

A confusing title perhaps, but let me explain. BT are currently trying to convince people to open up their wireless routers so that the UK becomes a huge wi-fi zone. Very commendable, especially when a lot of their accounts are bandwidth-limited, so if some guy sat in a car outside your 2-up/2-down decided to leach Lost Season 3 on BitTorrent, your downloads are crippled or chargeable for the month thereafter…

The illegal download thing comes in again with this case in the US where a woman has been charged £108,000 for downloading 20 songs. Bizarrely, the case hinged around the fact that she made them availabl for download, so it wasn’t so much how she got the songs – it was what she did with them afterwards. The prosecuting lawyer said she broke the law by making them available, she maintains it was an accident and she knew nothing about it.

So, folks, lock up your CDs. If you leave them lying on a table then someone could copy them and you’re looking at a twenty grand fine for each track that someone else steals. Well, that’s te loiv they’re following.

OK, so how does this relate to the BT story? Simple – if someone else uses your router (no matter how “secure” a portion of it is and regardless of a logon being needed), any illegal activity goes back to your IP address. Child porn downloads, Torrents, hosting of pirated films… by the ruling in that court case, it’s your responsibility. The two clash completely. OK, you have the defense that it wasn’t your computer so you had no control, but it’s your responsibility and the music lawyers seem to have started a nice precedent for “guilty until proved guilty”.

OpenOffice

I’ve installed this a few times recently for people who didn’t know about it. If that dodgy MSOffice CD no longer works, or the hacked keycode you were using to install it now causes Word to shut down every time someone on your network opens their copy up – what you need to do is go to OpenOffice.org and download their nice, free Office-a-like product.

The full Windows download (also available for various UNIXs and Apple) is 118Mb – a fraction of the size of Microsoft’s beast. It installs in next to no time and there is no need to even register it. All is purely optional.

It’s not 100% compatible with the MS suite, but it’s damn close to it. Anything most normal people want to to in Word, Excel and Powerpoint is available. Files from those programs can be loaded, and files saved back into those formats from within OpenOffice. In addition, there’s a maths formulae editor and a database product.

Give it a try. Even the shortcut keys and interface is much the same!

While you’re at it, consider ditching the bloated IE7 for Firefox and Outlook for Thunderbird. Now there’s a decent calendar plugin it’s a very satisfactory replacement if you don’t want to rely wholly on an online email solution.