All About Working

What is your preferred search engine for inquiries?  Yahoo or Google?

Google has been sweeping the market up the last few years.  In fact, the term for searching, “googling” has now become a part of our lingo.   “I need to google that” is often heard.  So the brand has become the item now.

I continue to prefer Yahoo over Google for several reasons.  So imagine my surprise when I found an article by Gina Trapani on Lifehacker.com on this topic.  In “Break Google’s Monopoly on Your Data: Switch to Yahoo Search, the author points out the major feature that keeps me coming back to Yahoo.  That feature is Search Assist.

Search Assist: Google’s got Google Suggest and Yahoo’s got “Search Assist”—that helpful drop-down of words you’re likely to be looking for based on what you’ve typed already. Google Suggest has one thing that Search Assist doesn’t—the number of results each suggestion will yield—but Search Assist offers an “Explore related concepts” area that shows other searches related to the one you’re doing.

I find this feature to be a tremendous time saver.

To see more of the article, go here to read it.

What happens when you walk into work one day and you’re told “thanks for all your hard work, but we have to let you go.” You might be given time to pack up your possessions, but what about all the things you have on your computer that the company owns?

In a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Wiped Out: Along with Jobs, Laid-Off Lose Photos, Emails,” Joseph DeAvila addresses this issue:

Michele Wallace had worked for Medialink Worldwide Inc. for 18 years when the New York video-distribution company laid her off last May. When the company’s information-technology staff quickly shut down her computer and her BlackBerry, the senior vice president of client services lost family photos and every personal and business contact on her cellphone and computer.

“I couldn’t even call my sister because I don’t know her number off the top of my head,” says Ms. Wallace, now a 47-year-old managing director at Mega Media Worldwide and living in Asbury Park, N.J. “I know you shouldn’t even have that stuff on the computer,” she says. But in the course of working 10- to 12-hour days for several years, “you don’t pay as much attention as to how much is personal on your computer.”

We normally don’t cover articles about being laid off on this blog, but we covering this one, because it involves work practices that can be followed when someone is employed that will help avoid the scenario described above.

This article can be found here and it is well worth a few minutes of your time to read.

This was just too amazing not to post on this blog. It seems as though Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just patented a system for a roving cone of silence, so that you can walk around your office building without anyone ever eavesdropping on you.

Sound like something out of a future shock movie? Well it’s real and it’s here now!

The problem the inventors worked on was how to stop the sound of conversations in an office from being heard. For example, if you are talking on the telephone, how can you prevent everyone within a certain range from hearing your conversation?

The solution they came up with is a sound-damping sensor, comprised of an infra-red motion-detector, a speaker and a microphone. These would be scattered around the walls of an office. Employees can then activate a personal mute button from their computer. The system locks onto you, identifies anyone close enough to eavesdrop, and hits them with a murmur of white noise so they can’t hear you.

Wow – that is amazing.

Sound masking systems have been on the rise in popularity lately. Babble and Accumask already are on the market. They shroud voices by mixing them with randomized noise. But this one allows it be controlled on demand by a single system.

Initial word is that the downside that the system required a lot of infrastructure.

This was just too good to let it pass without a mention. It seems as though Bryan Benilous, a historical newspaper specialist at the digital-archive company Proquest, said he and his colleagues came across a Boston Daily Globe article from August 24, 1902, titled, “Face Book The New Fad,” describing a party game where revelers sketch out cartoony caricatures for fun.

“I think it is interesting to note the similarities with this first iteration of Face Book as a shared social experience,” said Mr. Benilous. “It’s almost like having friends write on your wall in a much less tech-savvy way.”

According to Ellen Gruber Garvey, a professor at New Jersey City University:

Drawing games and versions of the Surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse were popular activities. . . . it was common for Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries to keep guestbooks in which visitors and friends could scribble thoughts or jokes -– not unlike a MySpace or Facebook profile page. One notable version was kept by Amy Matilda Cassey, an abolitionist from Philadelphia.

Mr. Benilous and his group also discovered what appears to be an emoticon in a transcript of a speech by Abraham Lincoln, they’ve uncovered a 1942 Washington Post article titled “Think Before You Twitter” about gossiping and a 1903 article referring to the first “pocket telephone.”

Goes to show, there is nothing new under the sun!