Blogging Boo-Boos

Top 11 Things My Employees Shouldn't Have Blogged About

11) Where I hid the money I embezzled

10) That broken card reader on the data center door

9) All the lies on my résumé

8) My best pickup lines7) The CIO's breakfast of champions-- a couple of Budweisers and some Ring Dings

6) That time I lifted networking gear from our demo booth at the convention to cover my gambling losses

5) Our secret plan to outsource the entire IT staff

4) The fact that every application we ever released has the same hard-coded backdoor password

3) Tips on using a cell phone camera and an iPod to smuggle nuclear missile blueprints out of the lab2) The strange odor coming out of the creepy IT guy's car trunk

1) Our CEO's after-hours Web surfing activities

Special thanks to our indiscrete bloggers--George Barrows, Tom Flynn, Gregory Mamayek, Nick Nielsen, Douglas Rockney--for baring their souls online. Unfortunately, too many suggestions were more appropriate for Howard Stern than Network Computing. You know who you are.

Animated Conversations

If you're the type who thinks personalizing your mobile phone with ring tones is cool, you might want to hop a plane to Tokyo, because you're way behind. A new service from NTT DoCoMo, the largest Japanese cellular network, lets you swap out your own image for a 3-D talking avatar during mobile videoconferencing. Subscribers can substitute their own faces with any image, including pets, cartoon characters, even automobiles. Streaming technology from a company called SeeStorm then animates the image in real time to do your talking for you. It could give a whole new meaning to the phrase "Talk to the hand."Junior IT Pro Kit 2.0

IT pros of a certain age may remember Digi-Comp I, a 60s-era mechanical "computer" made of styrene that boasted an operating system of rods, rubber bands and plastic tubes. Released as a toy in 1963, the Digi-Comp I taught budding hackers the basics of computer theory and binary numbers and included simple programs. The original manufacturer stopped making the device decades ago, but a company called Minds on Toys sells the Digi-Comp I v2.0, which you can see here. Now made from binders board, it still runs on rods and rubber bands, and greybeard hackers may find themselves reliving memories they haven't accessed for years.

LOLHave a IT-related Chuckle you want to share? Spotted some strange tech? Want to contribute to the latest Top 11 List? Drop on by the Last Mile Repository!