Most people use these to transfer files home from work and back again, but the USB drive can also be used to run small open source applications from PortableApps.com. These programs can be used as a digital Swiss Army Knife and can come in extremely handy, especially for work computers that don’t allow you to install software. My favorites have helped me out many, many times, and include:

GIMP Portable – GIMP is an open source graphics/photo editor, similar in many ways to Photoshop. While it isn’t quite as slick as its inspiration, it works great for resizing and cropping images, and if you take the time to learn it you’ll discover it’s extremely powerful in its own right.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition – When I browse the Internet, I typically have about 8-10 tabs open in Firefox. In fact, browsing without tabs drives me nuts. If your work computer has an old version of IE, this portable version of Firefox can be a godsend.

PDFTK Builder Portable – One of the strengths of the PDF format is that documents look the same across systems and platforms and they can’t be easily edited by others. One of the downsides is that they can’t be easily edited by you, unless you have Adobe Acrobat. Fortunately this program is around to help you split up and recombine pages from PDF files. This is one of those programs that you might not realize you need until you actually need it, and by that time it can help you avoid some very frustrating situations.

Each of these programs are small in size, so you can fit several of them on any modern USB drive. They’re a great way to put an extra drive to use, and in the right circumstances can honestly save the day.

For most people, the brain is their rational, analytical side. It tells people to be cautious, to take in all of the factors before making a decision. The gut has a more spontaneous, reckless influence. People who work on logic work with their brain. People who work on feeling work with their gut. Right?

Not for me. My gut is, and always has been, my “voice of reason.” In fact, I’m pretty sure my conscience dwells somewhere in my abdomen. My brain causes me to think too much, and by over-thinking, I end up procrastinating or trusting my brain to remember important details that my gut tells me I should double-check. Then when I realize I’ve made a mistake and it’s too late to do anything about it, I feel it right there in the pit of my stomach. It’s my gut’s way of saying, “I told you to listen to me, and since you didn’t, I’m going to make you feel terrible for the rest of the day.”

The problem is, my brain is much louder than my gut, and tends to overpower it. Sometimes I’ve got to listen really hard to what it’s trying to say, and when I do, I almost always realize it’s right. It’s truly subconscious – almost an instinct – and my instincts are normally pretty spot-on.

From now on, if I’m ever caught in a situation where my gut is telling me something that my brain disagrees with, I’m taking a moment to listen closely. It’s always worked for me in the past, it’s just taken me a while to realize where my loyalties should lie.

Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive – It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!

The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)

Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)

After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?

I wonder sometimes.

This is a situation that we’re bound to hear more and more of, and while I think it’s great to keep a blog about your career, the burden rests on the employee to only post what she wants her co-workers and bosses to read. If this employee in question was really frustrated or overwhelmed with her workload, then there’s nothing stopping her from letting her manager know her feelings. To post about it instead seems more passive-aggressive than anything else.

There is also nothing private about blogs, especially when you make your co-workers aware of them. In this case it’s perfectly acceptable for the boss to take the employee aside and address what he read, with the assurance that he would rather hear it directly from the employee in the future rather than reading it online.

Let’s break down the offending photo: It’s a woman in a pirate hat. She’s drinking from a large yellow plastic cup, which obscures most of her face. The caption reads, “Drunken Pirate.”

Presumably Millersville University has more of an issue with the caption than the actual photo, because they justify their actions (according to Snyder) by claiming they believe Snyder’s photo encourages underage drinking. That may hold up when high school students are photographed with bottles of beer in their hands, but this photo shows no evidence that any alcohol is actually being consumed. And there’s also the little detail that Snyder is over 21, so even if there is alcohol being consumed, she’s doing nothing illegal.

When we hear stories of people getting fired or punished for their online activity, they usually deserve it. This, however, is a gross example of over-reactive behavior on the part of the university, and Snyder is rightly suing. We should remember, however, that if she were fired from a job over this photo, she would have no recourse. It’s a reminder that we need to err on the side of extreme caution when we put anything online for public consumption, since we never know the sensibilities of who’s viewing it.

At Weber Shandwick, a global public relations firm, a father recently called the company to inquire about how his son could apply for its Atlanta internship program.

“I was very surprised. I answered my phone, and he said he had a son interested in internships,” says Jennifer Seymour, who runs the intern program at the Atlanta office, where two full-time internships are offered every summer. They largely go to recent college graduates. She says helicopter parents create a negative view among hiring managers. “It hurts. Absolutely.”

This is but one example, and perhaps not even the worst. Can you imagine anything more mortifying than your Mom or Dad calling up a new/potential employer about your benefits or salary?