Fired blogger update

Got an e-mail over the weekend from Michael Hanscom, the Microsoft contract worker who was let go after posting on his personal weblog pictures he took of a shipment of Apple PowerMac G5s arriving on the Redmond campus. (While speaking to him for the story we published about the incident, I had asked him to keep me posted on his job search.) He wrote yesterday to say he landed a new job at a print/copy shop. See also his post on the subject.

While we're on the subject, most of the readers who e-mailed me after the story appeared said they believed Microsoft was well within its rights to do what it did in this case. Several pointed out that, at their places of work, merely snapping a photo of a loading dock or other sensitive area could get a person fired -- let alone posting the photo to a Web site. For the record, Hanscom acknowledged in a post to his blog that, while he might not have liked the way Microsoft handled the situation, what he did was a mistake.