Good

Readers need to be careful when strutting around the office with their GBU mug. Happy with his new coffee cup, a Sydney IT manager showed the mug and the published GBU piece to the user who featured in the story. Now every request for assistance he receives from the user ends with: "This information should be treated as commercial-in-confidence and should not be disclosed to any third party." Oops!

Company changes its e-mail systems and begins to remove deleted e-mail automatically after two weeks instead of leaving that to users. And that makes one user howl. "Turns out he stores all his e-mails in the Deleted Items folder as soon as he reads them, because he can get them out of his in-box with just a click on the big 'X'," IT says. "I suggested that he create a folder for items he didn't want to disappear. His first reaction: "You mean I have to make a new folder called Deleted Mail when there already is one?"

Bad

Former Australian Computer Society president and state Liberal candidate for Sydney, Edward Mandla, likes to keep his supporters informed of speaking engagements and appearances around town at www.mandla.com.au. Recently he listed a keynote address at the MIS Magazine Summit that was to be held in Sydney in June. GBU isn't sure if it was due to lack of interest but the event was cancelled so we are a tad confused about who Mandla was actually speaking to . . .

Ugly

Desperate situations call for desperate measures. Unisys is offering a $US50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of missing desktop computers that belong to the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The computer contains personal information on 38,000 veterans. It went missing from the office of a subcontractor and the information is obviously valuable. In a separate incident, Chevron Corporation is searching for a password-protected laptop stolen on August 5 but no reward has been forthcoming to date. For petty thiefs the financial rewards could turn out to be a much better proposition than a few dusty old laptops.