Read at work

May 28, 2008 8:38 PM

Read at Work. How to read at work without being busted, and not in a "guide to" kind of way...
posted by jonathanstrange (49 comments total)

GET IT OFF ME GET IT OFF ME JESUS GOD NO NO NO NO...
posted by Kinbote at 8:41 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

Looks a bit suspicious on my Mac.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 8:43 PM on May 28 [10 favorites]

Oh, yeah.. Mac's wont get away with it so easily.. unless you run windows on your mac too.
posted by jonathanstrange at 8:45 PM on May 28

minus the apostrophe in "Macs"
posted by jonathanstrange at 8:46 PM on May 28

There's also Metasoft Wordfilter for all your hilarious snark word processing needs.
posted by Rhaomi at 8:47 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

Clever, but it seems altogether easier to just close one's office door.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 8:51 PM on May 28

now they need to make world of warcraft look like this.
posted by shmegegge at 8:52 PM on May 28 [7 favorites]

Cute. But e-mailing me the book would have been a lot easier and less conspicuous.

(Or hiding it in source code).
posted by Gary at 8:54 PM on May 28

It looked seamless on my Macbook. Not that that's a good thing.

The content's a bit lacking but the idea is really cute.
posted by loiseau at 8:57 PM on May 28

Whoa, did I say Macbook? I meant iBook.
posted by loiseau at 8:58 PM on May 28

Virgina Wolfe? As in, the author of "2 the litehouse"?
posted by Greg Nog at 8:58 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

I love that it says "PowerPont".
posted by jonathanstrange at 8:59 PM on May 28

I wonder if I can get the template for Animal Farm. I liked it.

But, seriously, just read magazines and put them into the middle of whatever professional journal makes sense.
posted by acoutu at 9:00 PM on May 28

shmegegge: "now they need to make world of warcraft look like this."

You're looking for Excel, then.

Microsoft Office: The only productivity suite designed to fit your non-productivity needs
posted by Rhaomi at 9:02 PM on May 28

I went to the recycle bin for trashy novels - but they aren't there.
posted by bigmusic at 9:05 PM on May 28 [6 favorites]

this is really amazing. nice.
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 9:05 PM on May 28

Looks perfectly good on my powerbook.
posted by rtha at 9:06 PM on May 28

Looks absolutely fantastic. Color me very impressed.

And I consider it a sad commentary on the predictability of the crowd 'round here that I predicted at least a half dozen snarky, bespectacled mac-users to snark their snarky little hearts out when I opened this thread. /golf clap
posted by Baby_Balrog at 9:10 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

NoScripted.
posted by Mblue at 9:12 PM on May 28

I would get busted at work for not doing work by not doing work. This could just as easily be a giant pink blow-up donkey that I ride in the hall.

BOSS: Thanks for the report, Jimmy! Give'r one for me!
posted by jimmythefish at 9:13 PM on May 28 [4 favorites]

Do corporate powerpoints really *look* like that? Yikes!
posted by porpoise at 9:16 PM on May 28

looks a little out of place on my COMMODORE
posted by TrialByMedia at 9:32 PM on May 28 [2 favorites]

Do corporate powerpoints really *look* like that? Yikes!

Pretty much. It can be slightly aggravating to sift through a forty page power point looking for the actual information.

Oddly, a lot of them are not intended to be used as "presentations" in any normal sense of the word.
posted by Mr. President Dr. Steve Elvis America at 9:46 PM on May 28

The best part is when you get a corporate powerpoint like that and then the whole meeting is someone reading the thing to you.
posted by winna at 9:54 PM on May 28 [5 favorites]

Finally, Tolstoy as it was intended.
posted by mazola at 10:01 PM on May 28 [4 favorites]

hee. i foresee pulling quite an evil prank on the spousal unit's macbook, tonight.
posted by squasha at 10:11 PM on May 28

I'm gonna buy a vowel. Is it slapmaeister whooie and his Bastard Toads?
posted by doctorschlock at 10:13 PM on May 28

... Pretty well executed, for what it is.
posted by ph00dz at 10:13 PM on May 28

Can someone help me understand what this is? I click on the XP username, then all I get is two colors divided by a diagonal line. It seems like Flash, but it doesn't make sense. BTW, I am running Vista.
posted by unwordy at 10:30 PM on May 28

If they had this 40 years ago, it would have saved this man so much trouble...
posted by champthom at 10:57 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Very cool. But wouldn't Word make more sense than this? I don't use PP at work, so it just looks like another webpage.
posted by zardoz at 11:26 PM on May 28

Yeah, you can do very cool things with flash. Check this one out.
posted by bargainhunter at 11:27 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

I prefer Ghostzilla.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:41 PM on May 28

Very cool, in a let's prank someone way. Not so cool in the actual application. Those powerpoints, whew! It's like trying to read the karaoke machine while drunk.
posted by librarylis at 11:46 PM on May 28 [1 favorite]

Awesome. I do love Animal Farm as a PowerPoint presentation, too bad we use keynote, and I'm sure I could just read anything as "source code" in TextMate anyway.
posted by sir_rubixalot at 11:56 PM on May 28

It's like trying to read the karaoke machine while drunk.

What other way does one read a karaoke machine?
posted by msalt at 1:18 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

I'd watch out for this guys. After I used it, my login name disappeared from my Widows BC login screen. Fortunately, some other user had theirs setup without a password, so I was still able to use my computer. All my documents were gone though, and Powerpont 2008 was really slow to open some presentations I found. Once they opened though, the content was all weird, as if it was written by people who didn't really know English very well.
posted by !Jim at 2:59 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Beautiful, thanks for posting
posted by krilli at 3:40 AM on May 29

I heard the Vista version of this is just three years away.
posted by puckupdate at 4:01 AM on May 29

I've always liked the Cuban approach to reading at work.
posted by jammy at 4:35 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Read at work, B.C.
posted by Mblue at 5:18 AM on May 29

Clever, but it seems altogether easier to just close one's office door.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:18 AM on May 29

I just attended a meeting where the layout from The Ice Palace was used to discuss the new PTO policy, which I am currently revising. Love. This.
posted by banannafish at 6:58 AM on May 29

This is excellent in many ways.
posted by stbalbach at 7:04 AM on May 29

I'm pretty sure it was Henry James, not T.S. Eliot, who wrote Portrait of a Lady.

/pedantic
posted by cereselle at 7:18 AM on May 29

So awesome. So beautiful. Love it.

And to those of you with your "offices" and your "doors" -- shouldn't you be too busy to read at work? Bastards. You probably have "windows," too, whatever those are.
posted by fiercecupcake at 8:57 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

I'm pretty sure it was Henry James, not T.S. Eliot, who wrote Portrait of a Lady.

NERRRRRRD!
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:22 AM on May 29

This is kind of cute... when I worked for Macromedia I used their Captivate software to capture myself working for half an hour, then just stuck that on a loop and had a nap.
though unusable due to the "powerPONT" format, a lovely application for Flash fullscreen...
posted by yoHighness at 9:41 AM on May 29

And to those of you with your "offices" and your "doors" -- shouldn't you be too busy to read at work? Bastards.

My dad used to close his office door and take naps. At the last job where I had an office, I would employ the Scotty Principle (tell them it will take way longer than it really does), do whatever I needed to do, and spend the rest of the time listening to music and fucking around on the web. Actually, come to think of it I did that when I had a cube too, but I was over in a nearly-unpopulated part of the building with just 3 other guys nearby.
posted by DecemberBoy at 1:41 PM on May 29