Plus: Industrial Waste Violations, Frugal McFly Shoes, Models as Miners and No BlackBerry in the White House.

Tech Change for the Campaign for Change
President-elect Barack Obama has been described as a tech-savvy guy who likes his gadgets. His entire presidential campaign was driven in large part by the Internet. And, like John F. Kennedy brought in the television presidency, some think we’re about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency, as Obama was hoping to bring at least some of that technology to the White House. For example, he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

Come the day that he is to be sworn in as president, though, he’s probably gonna have to give up his BlackBerry, a device that, like many professionals in recent years, has rarely been far from his side.

“[B]efore he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off,” says a recent New York Times feature. “In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.”

For a guy who hopes to change the country, he’s probably going to have a rough go of it in changing the way he operates day to day. It’s referred to as a CrackBerry for a reason.

Back to the Future II Shoes: $600
Gunpowder. The steam engine. The light bulb. Penicillin. The computer. The self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future II.

Halloween has passed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start planning for next year’s costume — or for your 2015 wardrobe. And for less than $600 at The Movie Shop. (via io9)

Waste of Tea Bags
The owner of a small scaffolding company in England was recently fined £300 for — wait for it — sandwich wrappers and tea bags.

As part of a nationwide law, British companies that produce any industrial waste must now have a proper license displayed at all times.

When a council official came into the small-biz owner’s small office and demanded to inspect his “industrial waste,” the owner thought he had no such waste to declare, the UK Telegraph reports.

But the state inspector disagreed, saying that used tea bags and sandwich cling-wrap qualified as industrial waste and wrote a $500 ticket for the violation.

Moreover, when the business owner mentioned that he took the trash home with him every night to dispose of it, the official said he’d need to save the waste up for a week and then pay a licensed waste collector to remove the rubbish.

Models for Miners
The clean-coal ad below was apparently part of General Electric’s Ecomagination campaign to make coal sexy.

Remember when coal mine(r)s were sexy?

Ridiculous Layoff Stories
Media site Gawker has lately been collecting layoff horror stories. Some particularly ridiculous/scary/ironic/absurd/ ones herewith:

• An employee was required to come in on a Saturday morning to get the boot.

• Another worker, at a big bank, was informed of the elimination of his entire division via Reuters.

• One employee, who worked in human resources, was asked to collate and staple the exit packages for a major reduction in force. A day after he’d completed assembling the packages, he was handed his own personal copy.

• Another employee, named Sylvia, discovered a document titled “SylviaFired.doc” that had been saved to the shared drive.

• Finally, because the boss of one worker was oh-so-upset about having to let the employee go, the firee ended up consoling the firer.

It’s a jungle out there, folks. Good luck, to both those still employed and those looking.

Cheers.