My USB drive must leave the building

The hammer has come down. Wielded by my boss this time. I have been given a clean USB drive for work purposes, and I am to use it for portability of documents only. I am not permitted to have any executables on the drive whatsoever--to avoid temptation, I guess.

My personal USB drive has been kicked off the premises. I tried to clean it up to make it more acceptable, but that didn't make the cut with my boss. He never wants to hear about my personal drive ever again, and wants to assure IT that it will never touch my computer again (ha!).

This is okay. No big deal. But also a bit of a piss-off. I recently picked up an awesome high speed 2GB drive, and my new work drive is an old 512MB clunker. But that’s a big enough size for my files, and speed isn't a huge issue when executables aren't being launched, so I guess I'll survive. Ultimately the portability of my files was the reason I got into this whole game. I have important spreadsheets that I use at home and work, and keeping them synced was a problem until I decided to always use the same files on the same portable drive. Portable Apps and Portable Firefox came later. So I’m back to where I started.

I have mostly stuck to the rules so far, with the exception of YadaDisk, an encryption program for my files. IT is aware of this program, and they haven’t forbid its use yet, so I will continue to use it until they say stop.

My personal USB drive will also still make periodic (and secret) reappearances in my office, generally first thing in the morning, to deliver last night’s episode of whatever TV show I am watching that day at lunch (like Veronica Mars on Wednesday--or Thursday, depending on the download speed of the Tuesday night torrent). And then it will hide in my bag, a lonely USB drive, waiting to go home and run Firefox, because I have continued to run Portable Firefox at home.