A couple of days ago, I was sending two of these boilerplate messages to customers and *thought* I had copied them out of the text file. I was about to hit send when I suddenly realized what I had really pasted was part of an inflammatory political analysis regarding Gov. Palin. I had copied it earlier to send to my friend as part of our ongoing political argument.

A fine lesson on why work time and personal time should be kept separate. It keeps you from sending angry political rants to your customers.

Governments really shouldn’t use laptops. They just seem to lose, misplace or let the dang thangs get stolen a little too easily. In another privacy embarrassment for the British government, an encrypted CD with “highly confidential” government data was found inside a laptop purchased on eBay, according to the BBC.

The auction winner took it to a local computer shop because the laptop apparently wasn’t acting right. While checking it out, technicians found a CD hidden between the keyboard and motherboard. It was, helpfully, labeled “Home Office – highly confidential.” For those not familiar with the British government, the Home Office is “the government department responsible for leading the national effort to protect the public from terrorism, crime and anti-social behaviour,” according to the official site. But who protects Brits from them?

The BBC quoted a Home Office spokesman:

“Both the laptop and the disk were encrypted, thus safeguarding any information that might be stored on them.

“Investigations are now under way. It would be inappropriate to comment further while they are ongoing.”

I can’t tell from the photo that the BBC used whether its a mockup or an actual picture of the computer (I really wish news organizations would label such things). It looks like a late model Lenovo in the pic.