IT Insights Blog — training

Several years ago, unbeknownst to me, I downloaded a rootkit to my home computer. It was a nasty little bugger and I soon ended up unable to access my files. Not being a techie, I hauled my desktop to the local store where I had purchased it. This particular establishment had given me a guarantee that they would fix, free of charge, any computer they sold.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were expected to chitchat with another person but you didn't know what to say? Of course you have! We all have. As you probably already know, one safe and rather universal topic for such situations is the weather. No matter where you are, there is always weather happening there, and people are usually aware of its effects. There are even online tutorials to help you learn to converse about the weather.

In the modern business world, many people communicate via text, or by using any of a variety of different chat apps. It's often more convenient than a phone call, and usually quicker (if inevitably sloppier) than sending an e-mail. It's likely to be a long time, however, before e-mail entirely disappears as a means of communication and sharing information. And as long as e-mail continues to exist, if not precisely flourish, it will remain a potentially dangerous point of entry to your workstation and, more problematically, your employer's network.

First there was Amazon. Now everyone is doing it. Amazon Echo, the home assistant "smart speaker" that offers you a voice-activated connection to the web, as well as to various internet-enabled devices in your home, lit a tiny consumer fire at the end of 2014 as a special offering to Amazon Prime members. (The cheery program that responds to Echo commands is named Alexa.) Then the gizmo caught on, fueled by a general release in 2015, and Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl ad (featuring Alec Baldwin) in 2016.

This past weekend I went to see the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. I have mixed feelings about the movie. I spent the two hours and nine minutes of show time wading through a myriad of tangled storylines and interweaving plot threads, masked by lots and lots of action.