Fascinating article here.

Upshot: employees may risk getting fired for what they put in their blogs — especially if they talk about who they work for. This kind of speech is NOT protected under the First Amendment.

My opinion: Duh. Just because you CAN say something without being thrown in jail for it doesn’t mean you SHOULD. When I worked for Novell there were all kinds of things that I was not to talk about openly, under pain of being fired with cause. It’s a no-brainer, folks.

The article also talks about NON-employees being targeted, and how they can defend themselves the same way mainstream media journalists do. In this case the First Amendment is pretty good protection. If what you’re saying is true, or at least substantiated, you can’t really be sued for it. And as a non-employee you certainly can’t be fired for it.

Anyway, the article struck home for me because of my relationship with Novell. For example, while employed by Novell I was not allowed to voice ANY sort of opinion about SCO’s lawsuits even though as an IT industry insider it’s obvious that I HELD an opinion. Following my departure from Novell, I cheerfully mocked SCO and McBride with impunity, expressing an opinion formed from publicly available facts and the application of the same intelligence available to any primate capable of walking upright.

The 21st century has elevated the street-corner soapbox well above “lectern” height and handed us all megaphones. Through the resultant cacaphony, there actually seems to be useful information… just be careful about discussing the fingernails of the hand that feeds you, dawg.

–Howard

I ran a couple of errands this evening — new URL cards for schlockmercenary.com (they’re slick — 600 of them feature some fresh artwork you’ve never seen before, 200 have a shiny Tagon Silhouette logo, and 200 have a plasgun logo similar to the one on the navigation buttons) and cough-drops. Well, at Albertsons, where I was picking up the cough-drops, there were five guys in line at the express checkout, and all five of them had the identical “on sale” plastic-wrapped roses in one hand, and heart-shaped-box-of-chocolates in the other hand.

“Honey, you shouldn’t have.”

I wish I’d had a camera. I did a double-take when I saw these guys in line. They were as different demographically as you can get in Utah county: an old white guy, two hispanic men, a teenage-looking guy, and a yuppie… the only thing linking them was “I’m coming home from work, and I still haven’t done anything for Her for Valentine’s Day.”

–Howard

I haven’t given a lot of thought to this particular holiday for a long, long time. Mostly Sandra and I wake up in the morning, realize it’s Valentines Day, smile at each other, and get on with what needs to be done on that day. We pay more attention to birthdays, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, and Christmas. Valentines Day is an odd sort of holiday because for the last decade we’ve never needed an excuse to be extra nice to each other.

Oh, certainly there have been days when we’ve needed to be extra nice. We’ve hurt each others’ feelings from time to time, and we take care to patch things up as soon as possible afterwards. Waiting for a special day to do so would be patently absurd. “Happy Anniversary, honey! I’m sorry I made fun of your Mom six months ago, so here’s some chocolate.”

Absurd.

Before getting married, Valentines Day was a holiday I never had someone to celebrate with. Sure, I had girlfriends, some of whom I even dated “with intent,” but through some conspiracy of the calendar, the first Valentines Day that actually fell DURING one of those relationships, as opposed to BETWEEN them, was in 1993. I think I may have proposed marriage to Sandra on or about that time. It’s a blur, really. We got married in August of that year. It’s been over 12 years since I went on a date with anyone other than her (and that last non-Sandra date was pretty pathetic, since I’d just met Sandra, but already had this particular date planned. I probably owe whatever-her-name-was an apology, because we wrapped things up early and I hurried off to see this Other Girl I’d Just Met. How rude!)

I have this memory of a Valentines Day in 1990, or thereabouts. I was walking through University Mall in Orem, Utah, and I bought myself a plant. I decided it would help me be less bitter about a holiday in which to celebrate loneliness if I bought myself a plant EVERY year on Valentines Day. The tradition never got off the ground, and that particular plant died a couple of years later.

The only thing that got me thinking about Valentines Day was an article about how the Saudi Government is taking extreme pains to put down any attempt by its citizens to celebrate the holiday. Ah, theofascism, how unsubtle are thy dictates. As if they don’t have other problems they can be sniffing out. I mean, you have to work really, really hard to make chocolate explode.

Enough with the politics. All I’m saying is that I read that article, and realized that people were trying, under pain of prison, to celebrate a holiday that I couldn’t care less about. I mean, I don’t even know where to put the apostrophe.

–Howard

I heard, through an unlikely channel, that UPN is cancelling “Star Trek: Enterprise.” There are links to the news all over the web (Google “star trek enterprise cancelled”), but I learned it when reading this morning’s Sheldon.

I may need to get out more.

In one of the related articles (Link!) Executive Producer Rick Berman said they’ve done 624 hours of Star Trek in the last 18 years. I’m not sure if he means episodes or actual sixty-minute hours. Depending on that crucial piece of information, you could, in theory, watch Star Trek shows for between 18 and 26 days straight, with no breaks for sleep, snacks, or stool.

By contrast, you can watch the entire Star Wars franchise in about 10 hours. No, I’m not counting the many excellent games, nor am I counting the books set in the Extended Universe. And no, I’m not counting the 1978 Christmas Special, or the made-for-TV Ewok movie, either. Rolling the TV stuff in brings the total to just under 14 hours, and (depending on who you talk to) raises the entertainment value of those 14 hours significantly.

Anyway… no more Star Trek. What can I say? I never watched even a single episode of Enterprise, and missed out on pretty much all of DS9 and Voyager, too. I did watch every last episode of ST:TNG back when Fox ran them in order in 1994/1995, and those evenings were, interestingly enough, capped off with an hour or two of PC gaming — “X-Wing Fighter” and “Tie Fighter” from the fledgling behemoth game company “Lucasarts.”

Me == Geek.