Seedmore

By Kaitlin Madden, CareerBuilder Writer

There are few times of year when I look forward to my daily commute more than I do around Halloween. There’s just something about watching Marge Simpson check her BlackBerry on the subway or seeing a full-grown man walk into a downtown office building in a banana suit that is seriously entertaining.

But, in the course of my people-watching over the next few days, I also know there will be times when I feel seriously uncomfortable; feelings brought on by getups that will make me wonder, “Where does this lady work that she doesn’t have to wear pants?” or think, “Yikes. That is one brave man, right there.”

Because inevitably, when people are given the option to ditch business casual for a day and dress instead as whatever they want, there will be some who take it a little too far.

Halloween is fun, and if you have an office that is cool enough to celebrate it, then by all means, dress up! Just remember the golden rule of office revelry: “There is a time and a place for everything.”

Here, guidelines to help you figure out what’s work appropriate and what you should save for the weekend. (Because after high school, it’s not cool to be the girl who gets sent home to put more clothes on.)

1. Be a nurse, not a sexy nurse. It seems that the manufacturers of Halloween costumes for adult women follow the same predictable formula year after year: Take an occupation, animal or Disney princess and slap the word “sexy” in front of it … Ta da! But, even though it may require a little more effort to find a costume that’s not based on a foundation of underwear and fishnets, if you plan on dressing up for work, plan on putting in the extra time to find something full-coverage.

2. Avoid controversy. If there’s even a question in your mind that your costume might offend your co-workers or spark an argument, go a different route. Your friends might get a kick out of your Casey Anthony costume, but do you really want to listen to your co-workers argue about whether or not she’s guilty all day? Didn’t think so.

Some other popular-yet-controversial costumes for 2011 that will probably cause more of a headache than they’re worth at work? A Wall Street protestor, Osama Bin Laden, Amanda Knox and any member of the crowded cohort that includes Anthony Weiner and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

3. Don’t be a nuisance. If your office fully-embraces Halloween, chances are it won’t be the most productive day of the year. Still, there will probably be some work that needs to get done, so make sure your costume isn’t too distracting. If your getup has pieces that make noise, light up, blow bubbles, play music, etc., it’s best to leave these components home.

4. Keep your work environment in mind. If your office is small, fun and creative, you may be able to get away with more than if you work in a corporate environment or one where you’re required to interact with clients and customers all day. If you’re not sure what’s appropriate, ask co-workers what they plan on dressing up as, or what people were in years’ past.

Bottom line? Have fun, but use good judgment. If you have an inkling that your sexy, politically incorrect costume is not office appropriate, save it for the weekend, and choose something more neutral for 9-to-5. It can be your excuse to buy two costumes!

What other guidelines do you have for office costumes? Have you ever seen anyone go too far? Let us know in the comments section.

Kaitlin Madden is a writer and blogger for CareerBuilder.com and its job blog, The Work Buzz. She researches and writes about job search strategy, career management, hiring trends and workplace issues.

Which Tech Gadgets Will Be Phased Out This Decade?

Hindsight may always be 20-20, but you don’t need particularly great foresight to know many of the gadgets on today’s market won’t be around in 2020 given how quickly the tech industry keeps changing. In the first half of the 2000s, retailers were buzzing about the prospects of MP3 players and netbooks, but by the end of the decade, those products had largely been replaced by smartphones and tablets.

As tempting as it may be to imagine otherwise, some of the gadgets you may rely on most right now will likely suffer the same fate and be killed off or made obsolete by the end of this decade. Sure, you may still be able to find these products for sale in certain niche stores, but they will no longer be produced for a mass-market audience.

“You can still find and buy VCRs and there are people still using mainframes from 1992, so it’s not like this stuff disappears forever,” says Stephen Baker, an industry analyst at the NPD Group. Baker notes that the main reason retailers continue to market and sell outdated products is to cater to shoppers who buy them for nostalgia’s sake, but for all intents and purposes the market has left these products in the dust. So which popular products today will join the likes of VCRs, cassette players and transistor radios in the next few years? MainStreet asked five tech analysts to offer their thoughts on the gadgets that will largely be phased out by the end of this decade.

Standalone GPS Systems

The days of spending $200 or more on a standalone GPS device won’t last much longer, analysts say.

“Portable navigation devices like those sold by TomTom and Garmin will probably not be sold in 2020, just because mobile phones will have taken on that function themselves and because GPS systems will be standard equipment in cars,” says Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester, a market research firm. As a result, there won’t be much of a need to buy a product whose only function is to tell you directions.

If there is a demand for these GPS systems, it will likely come from a very specific segment of consumers.

“Maybe you could argue there will be a market for guys climbing Mount Everest or long-distance truckers or the military, but for the vast majority of consumers, standalone GPS systems will be irrelevant and redundant,” Baker says.

E-Readers

The e-reader has already undergone significant changes in its short history, evolving from a product with a keyboard to one with a touchscreen and more recently being integrated into a kind of a tablet-hybrid, but according to Golvin, the market for e-readers will mostly disappear by the end of the decade.

“The tablet will largely supplant the e-reader in the same way that the iPod increasingly gets displaced by smartphones,” Golvin says. “Tablets will take on the e-reader function of handling magazine, newspaper and book reading.” In essence, spending money on an e-reader that can only handle reading when tablets can do this and more will come to seem as useless as buying a GPS system that can only look up directions when other technology does this as well.

Just how small the e-reader market becomes may depend somewhat on advancements in display technology. One of the biggest incentives for consumers to buy a pure e-reader is to have an e-ink display (like reading from a book) rather than a backlit display (like reading from a computer screen), but according to Golvin, manufacturers are already working on ways to merge the two reading experiences and create a tablet that doubles as an authentic e-reader.

Even then, there may be still be some e-readers on the market at the beginning of next decade, but not many.

“It could be that by 2020 you can still buy a super cheap e-reader for $20, but by and large, the volume of sales will be so close to zero as to be indistinguishable, like CD players are now,” he says.

Feature Phones

Several of the products that are likely to be phased out will ultimately be the victim of advances to smartphones, and none more directly than feature phones.

Tim Bajarin, a technology columnist and principle analyst with Creative Strategies, predicts that 80% of all phones sold in 2015 will be smartphones and every phone sold in 2018 will be a smartphone. This rapid decline will come about thanks to a drop in prices for consumers and an increase in revenue opportunities for carriers.

“Even today, the money that is made is not on the phone itself but on the services,” Bajarin says, noting that carriers will opt to “fade out” their feature phone option in favor of smartphones with more services.

Low-End Digital Cameras

When Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S, smartphone competitors probably weren’t the only ones beginning to sweat. Digital camera makers also have much to be worried about. Apple’s newest phone has a killer 8-megapixel camera that takes in more light and records video at 1080p HD video. Until recently, those kind of specs were unique to digital cameras, but increasingly smartphones are taking over the market.

“Flip cameras went bye-bye and now low-end camera functions are being taken over by smartphones,” says Rob Enderle, principle analyst for the Enderle Group. Going forward, consumers will have less incentive to carry around a camera when they already have a phone in their pocket that takes quality pictures. “The point-and-shooters – and particularly the cameras that sell for under $200 – will eventually go away and be replaced by cellphones that do the same thing.”

On the other hand, Enderle predicts more expensive and high-tech cameras may have a brighter future, though not by much, as a smaller market of photo enthusiasts seek out professional-quality cameras that go above and beyond what’s offered on a phone.

DVD Players

DVD players are in the process of being phased out now by Blu-ray players and will likely be erased from the consumer landscape by the end of the decade.

“The DVD player should be replaced by digital delivery,” says Ian Olgeirson, a senior analyst at SNL Kagan, who points to streaming movie services like Netflix as being the future. “Blu-rays and whatever the next generation high-end movie format emerges could prolong the lifespan because of challenges around streaming, but eventually the disc is going to be phased out.”

The idea of placing a disc into a DVD player to watch a movie will eventually seem as outdated as placing a record on a turntable, which brings us to the next product on our list…

Recordable CDs and DVDs

Using CDs and DVDs to view and store content will soon be a thing of the past.

“CDs are clearly not going to make it over the next 10 years because everything will shift over to pure digital distribution, so all those shiny discs will be gone,” Bajarin says. This will be due in part to more streaming options for music and movies and a greater reliance on digital downloads, combined with more efficient storage options for consumers, including USB drives, external hard drives and of course the cloud.

“All a CD is is a medium for distribution of content … and within 10 years, you won’t need a physical transport medium,” Bajarin says.

Video Game Consoles

Popular video game systems such as the Wii, PlayStation and Xbox may still be in homes next decade, but they will look much different. Rather than buy a separate console, Enderle expects that consumers will instead buy smart televisions with a gaming system built into it, not to mention tablets and smartphones that will continue to ramp up their gaming options.

“It looks like analog game systems won’t make it until the end of the decade,” Enderle says. “You are already seeing the Wii have a tough time holding on to the market and PlayStation has been struggling for a while.”

The gaming systems that will succeed in the future will be those that manage to move away from being focused solely on video games and more on other entertainment options such as movies, evolving from a traditional game console into more of a set-top box.

Commander nearly forgot to display tribute to workers who had worked on program

HOUSTON — Chris Ferguson almost forgot to leave it on board.

Caught up in the moment of having just landed the space shuttle, ending NASA’s 30 year shuttle program after 135 flights, commander Ferguson followed his crew out of shuttle Atlantis and only then realized he had forgotten about the plaque.

“If I was as clear thinking as I wish I was right after landing, I would have put it right on there but I had to have someone run back and pull it out of my saddlebag and put it on there for me,” Ferguson said Friday, a day after landing, after his return home to Houston.

The small plaque, which was sized to fit perfectly over the center display screen in Atlantis’ cockpit, was already a bit of an “afterthought” by the STS-135 crew, one devised with the help of the astronauts’ simulator training team. Still it was the thought that counts.

“The inscription is from the heart,” said Ferguson.

“It was basically a tribute to the people who had worked on the space shuttle program since day one thanking them for their dedication,” Ferguson told collectSpace.com a few hours after landing, revealing the plaque’s existence for the first time, “to let them know how much we thought about the work that they do, from the astronauts, from the people who get to operate the vehicle that they maintain.”

“A lot of people think that the astronauts live in Florida and that we rub elbows with these folks every day. But we don’t, we live far away and sometimes it is a little bit of an effort to get out here and give them the thanks and the praise they deserve,” said Ferguson.

Keeping the dream alive
The blue plaque with its white writing, which was adorned with a gold-color rendition of the STS-135 crew’s mission emblem, was inscribed as follows:

“This plaque flew on the final Space Shuttle Mission in July, 2011. From the fortunate few who have served in space to the thousands who make spaceflight a reality, thank you for keeping the dream alive. Your passion for these amazing space ships will always stand as proof of what this country can do when it dares to be bold!”

The words repeated some of the same sentiments shared by Ferguson and his crewmates pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim from orbit. Numerous times throughout the nearly two-week flight, the astronauts called down to Mission Control to give their thanks to the many people on the ground who made the shuttle program a success.

The plaque was also among the small stash of mementos that the astronauts flew on Atlantis to mark the shuttle’s end. During the mission, the crew revealed banners that paid tribute to the shuttle workforce and to the city of Houston — presented after landing to the Kennedy Space Center and the mayor of Houston respectively — as well as placed a U.S. flag carried on the first shuttle mission in 1981 and a model of the shuttle autographed by program managers aboard the International Space Station.

Where the plaque stays, be it on Atlantis or somewhere else, will be up to those preparing the shuttle for its display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

“We didn’t want to make it permanent. We certainly didn’t want to deface Atlantis. We wanted to leave it up to the ground processing crew to decide what to do with what we left behind,” said Ferguson.

Keeping the dream alive
The blue plaque with its white writing, which was adorned with a gold-color rendition of the STS-135 crew’s mission emblem, was inscribed as follows:

“This plaque flew on the final Space Shuttle Mission in July, 2011. From the fortunate few who have served in space to the thousands who make spaceflight a reality, thank you for keeping the dream alive. Your passion for these amazing space ships will always stand as proof of what this country can do when it dares to be bold!”

The words repeated some of the same sentiments shared by Ferguson and his crewmates pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim from orbit. Numerous times throughout the nearly two-week flight, the astronauts called down to Mission Control to give their thanks to the many people on the ground who made the shuttle program a success.

The plaque was also among the small stash of mementos that the astronauts flew on Atlantis to mark the shuttle’s end. During the mission, the crew revealed banners that paid tribute to the shuttle workforce and to the city of Houston — presented after landing to the Kennedy Space Center and the mayor of Houston respectively — as well as placed a U.S. flag carried on the first shuttle mission in 1981 and a model of the shuttle autographed by program managers aboard the International Space Station.

Where the plaque stays, be it on Atlantis or somewhere else, will be up to those preparing the shuttle for its display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

“We didn’t want to make it permanent. We certainly didn’t want to deface Atlantis. We wanted to leave it up to the ground processing crew to decide what to do with what we left behind,” said Ferguson.

(The STS-135 plaque was not the first time a crew had left a parting message aboard a spacecraft. In fact, it wasn’t even the first time one was left on Atlantis. Continue reading at collectSpace.com.)