Geeky: Listening to music at work

"My boss told me the other day that I was spending in average 6.5 hours per day on YouTube according to the company's Internet statistics. But I'm only using YouTube to listen to background music while I work. Are they allowed to check what I'm doing online? What about privacy?

This is not an actual reader question. But I heard this story from a friend and decided to turn it into a fake reader question.

Secondly, I could start an analysis of the Swiss Data Protection Law, but I just don't feel like it at the moment. Me know, me am lazy ;-)

Thirdly, using YouTube extensibly at work doesn't make much sense to me. Whether your employer uses legal or illegal means to track your web traffic isn't the point. Anybody could walk by your desk five times a day and see that you're on YouTube.

Furthermore, streaming videos all day uses a lot of bandwidth and although many people still think that the Interwebs are for free, connecting to this cyber maze still costs a lot.

Besides, using YouTube to listen to music doesn't really make much sense to me. But that's just lil' ol' me...

So here's my geeky solution:

• buy a USB stick. The last one I bought had 16 GB and didn't cost that much anymore
• download CoolPlayer+ (a portable app) and copy it to the stick
• fill up the remaining space on your stick with your favorite mp3 songs

The beauty of portable apps is that you don't need to install the programs, you just copy them somewhere. Even if you don't have admin access to your work computer, you can use programs and it costs your company zilch in terms of bandwidth.

Alternatives:
Of course, you could just copy your mp3 files to the hard drive and use the pre-installed media player. But this wouldn't be geeky, now would it ;-)

@JT: Thank you, the Twitter message that you wrote 17 days ago and which I only saw today motivated me to write again! And your new site logo looks really cool!
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