Putting aside the vested interest of the source, which sells a web and email blocking system, the data had managers scrambling to introduce restrictive policies.

Our company’s response was a sensible one. Employees were notified their web and email use was being logged; excessive private use of the internet in company time was not acceptable; and suspicious web behavior would be reported to department managers.

I received the first of those reports today, showing the web usage of two employees (the others were all clear). One appears to be addicted to Facebook and the other to MySpace.

Without even speaking to them, I’m satisfied there has been no abuse of work time. The employees in question are both highly productive, meet all their deadlines and voluntarily contribute extra time.

Like many such things, a flexible response is better than a rigid one.

It uses the XFCE window manager and includes my favorite programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, the Gimp and OpenOffice.

I’m unfamiliar with the Slackware package management, but it seems simple enough, although there aren’t many in the net repository. Contributed packages through the Zenwalk web site are easy to download and install.

The total distro is only a 478MB download, which must be one of the smallest around to include the full version of OpenOffice.

I like the look and feel. Zenwalk boots faster than any other Linux system that I’ve used. I’ll stick with it for a while.

Kelly said on ABC Television the Telstra assault on government regulation is alienating all parties, driving down the share price, and has no hope of success.

I have to agree with him. I’ll go further and say it’s damaging the public goodwill that Telstra has worked hard to cultivate in recent years. I did some PR work for Telstra a while back, and they were committed then to improving their image in regional Australia.

The new American executives may be on sound economic ground, but their external communication skills and political acumen appears dodgy.

In years to come this will make an interesting case study in corporate communications.

The agenda confirms that council received funding to employ a Greenhouse Officer. I joked here when the job was advertised that I thought it was a horticultural position.

But it’s no joke. Our council is seriously concerning itself with global warming.

Given our reliance on the ski industry some may say that’s reasonable. I say it’s a waste of taxpayers money regardless of where it comes from.

For interstate and overseas readers, our municipality is in one of the cleanest and greenest parts of Australia, with very little industry apart from one timber mill.

The objectives for council are to reduce corporate and community emissions by 20 percent between 2003 and 2010. A council manager is quoted in the local daily newspaper saying that council might switch its vehicle fleet from petrol to alternative energy. Hilarious.

What happens if the targets aren’t met? Probably nothing because everyone will have forgotten about this wasteful exercise the moment funding runs out.

I wonder how many trees will die to leave the necessary paper trail.

I had an email from an Albury reader on the weekend saying Alpine Shire Council is hypocritical on this issue because it supports fuel reduction burning. I have to agree with him.

I won’t argue against fuel reduction burns here, but the volume of emissions must be far greater than corporate and community use combined.

There are four councils in the so-called North East Greenhouse Alliance. Wangaratta and Indigo aren’t among them. Presumably they had more sense to hang onto their dollars.

Even though taxpayers may be funding this, I imagine there is some cost to council through in-kind support, office provision, management brainpower, etc.

My final point is that councils frequently complain they are involuntarily given more responsibility by state and federal governments. It looks like Alpine has walked into this one with its hands out and its heart willing.

Generally I specialise in content management systems. I like them to look good, but mostly you have to sacrifice some creativity for functionality.

A pure HTML site requires more thinking to develop. The menu also has to be carefully planned, because you don’t want to be changing multiple pages. I downloaded a DHTML/Javascript menu creator from AllWebMenus.

It took a little practice to get used to it, but I’m happy with the results so far.