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By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN And JOE LIGHT

In March, at the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner, Rep. Anthony Weiner made cracks about his surname.

“It’s part of me, it’s part of the campaign slogans,” he said. “Vote for Weiner. He’ll be frank. Vote for Weiner. He’s on a roll.” Although he’d been teased about it as a kid, the New York congressman said he’d learned to embrace his name.

A few months later that same name—which ranks 2,238 in frequency among U.S. surnames, according to U.S. Census data—became fodder for relentless jokes and headlines after Rep. Weiner admitted he’d sent women lewd photos of himself over the Internet. As the humbled congressman discovered, memorable names can be both a blessing and a curse.

When personal-injury lawyer Patricia Z. Boguslawski argued her first motion in court, the judge paused when he saw her name.

“He said, on the record, ‘Bogus law. Bogus law.’ I said, ‘Yes your honor, bogus law is in my name. However, the law that I am about to argue is not bogus,” Ms. Boguslawski recalls. The Teaneck, N.J.-based lawyer went on to win the motion.

In a controversial, widely cited 2002 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo found that people were more likely to choose professions with names that are similar to their own first names. Another study, out of Wayne State University, Detroit, found that medical doctors and lawyers were more likely to have last names that somehow evoked their professions. It was published last year in the journal “Names: A Journal of Onomastics.”

Frank Nuessel is a professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky, and editor of the “Names” journal. He coined the term “aptonyms.” These refer to names that mirror their holders’ professions, such as “Anita House” for a real-estate agent. Still, as a scholar of names, Mr. Nuessel says, “I really don’t believe in nominal determinism. Probably most of these tend to be accidental.”

“The possibility that a name really impacts big life decisions is an extraordinary claim and we need extraordinary evidence,” says Uri Simonsohn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of two forthcoming reports to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that dispute the findings of some previous name research.

While he didn’t base his career on his name, Austin, Texas-based urologist Richard Chopp, who goes by “Rick,” has managed to have some fun with it professionally.

Although he tries to be sensitive about emphasizing his name in marketing materials, patients who get a vasectomy at Dr. Chopp’s practice leave with a T-shirt that reads “I was ‘chopped’ at The Urology Team, P.A.” Dr. Chopp says he sometimes sees people wearing the shirts at the beach or at local festivals.

“I don’t take myself all that seriously,” he says, adding that people ask him four or five times per week if he changed his name once he entered the field. (He didn’t.)

Sex therapist Jacqueline Rose Hott, of Great Neck, N.Y., says patients often bring up her name to help break the ice. “We joke about it and then get down to business,” she says.

A family team of realtors in Weirton, W.V., with the optimistic-sounding name Greathouse, says it gets at least three calls per month from marketers offering to help advertise the family’s services.

“It’s really nonstop. The most common one is just to split the name up, ‘Buy a great house.’ I’ll go out to dinner and people will come up to me and ask if I’ve ever thought about a slogan,” says Cory Greathouse, whose mother and father are also realtors.

Scarsdale, N.Y., cardiologist Douglas Hart says his name had nothing to do with his chosen medical specialty.

In fact, he says, he has yet to hear a funny remark from patients who draw the connection between his name and profession—though he says some patients seem to randomly select him from a list of doctors provided by their HMO based on his name.

“I’ve been waiting 14 years for someone to say something clever. It never gets beyond, ‘Ah ha!’” he said.

Some people may find themselves inclined toward a particular profession because of their name.

Growing up, Sue Yoo, an in-house lawyer for Think Passenger Inc., a Los Angeles social media firm, never had dreams of becoming an attorney. “But when I was younger, people always said ‘Oh my god, that’s your name, you should totally become a lawyer,’” recalls Ms. Yoo. Perhaps “psychologically that helped me decide to go in that direction,” she says.

Although Ms. Yoo was sometimes teased about her name as a child, she now finds it helpful because few people forget it.

The marketing potential of her name, however, may be wasted at the moment. In her current job as in-house counsel, “I actually don’t litigate. I don’t sue anyone,” she says.

Will Wynn, the former mayor of Austin, Texas, who served from 2003 to 2009, has a name that some might say pre-determined his political success.

When Mr. Wynn decided to run for mayor, he assembled his campaign staff and offered to award $1,000 to any member of the team who could come up with a clever campaign slogan using his name in a manner that “I didn’t already hear in the second grade,” says Mr. Wynn.

“They came up with everything imaginable—’Will Wynn Will Win,’ ‘We All Will Win When Will Wynn Wins,’” that sort of thing. But I heard them all before,” Mr. Wynn recalled. “No one is more clever than a bunch of second-grade kids on the playground.”

No prize was awarded, but Mr. Wynn did win two terms as mayor.

Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman@wsj.com

Our lives are filled with sounds: the screeching brakes on a subway, a baby’s coo, a dog’s growl, the mechanical pop of a toaster. Experienced separately, they’re mundane background noise, but with innovative music apps for the iPhone and iPad, you can collect these sounds and string them together into musical masterpieces. Using your camera and microphone, these apps essentially turn your device into a sampling machine. After gathering material, software magic will meld it into fun beats at the fraction of a cost (and difficulty) of an electric guitar or drum machine. More than anything else, however, they’ll make you hear the world around you in a new way. The beeps your microwave emits? They aren’t just beeps—they’re material for an appliance version of Beethoven’s Fifth. Here are four of the best sound-toy apps.

Smule recently released MadPad.

MadPad

Smule is known for its music apps that magically turn your iPhone into a piano or T-Pain’s distinctive Auto-Tuned voice. The company’s recently released MadPad might be its most ambitious app. By making clips on the spot, you build a video soundboard of voices, tones and percussive noises to jam on like a beat maven. I recorded myself flicking and banging clutter around my desk—rustling paper for a crisp hi-hat, clattering DVD cases to make a punchy kick drum. As I tapped away, I watched my own hands (all five of them!) playing my work space like a marching band. You need a good sense of rhythm for MadPad, however. If you don’t, you’ll feel like the awkward guy on the dance floor. $1, available for iPhone and iPad; smule.com

VidRhythm

VidRhythm

This app from Harmonix, the makers of music game “Rock Band,” goes even further into novelty land. Think of VidRhythm as a modern, mobile version of the photo booths at malls and carnivals. You choose one of 20 ready-made songs as a template, from fun and bizarre originals to Beethoven’s Fifth. VidRhythm plays a Simon Says game with you, telling you exactly what to do or say in front of the camera, step by step. The result? A bonkers music video, in one of 10 hyper-kitsch styles, to the tune of that song. VidRhythm begs to be disobeyed: I mumbled gibberish when it told me to snap my fingers, and yelled “No!” when asked to sing a note. What’s delightful is that the app turns disobedience of its instructions into virtuoso magic. Especially when it’s in the form of a metal song framed in glittering pink-and-purple cat collage. Free, available for iPhone and iPad; vidrhythm.com

Sample your world and play it back with this Softoft Techech app.

Sir Sampleton

In this Softoft Techech app, you can sample your world and then play back the noises as notes on a keyboard. It may look like a plastic Casio toy, but it’s surprisingly powerful: Your slightest sounds create full octaves of crisp notes, and pressing a button gives you a randomized drumbeat to play against. $3, available for iPhone and iPad; softofttechech.com

Everyday Looper

Everyday Looper

Mancing Dolecules’s naturalistic, gesture-controlled app has no buttons. With any instrument—say, some desk clutter—you can use Everyday Looper to embellish layer upon layer of sound until you’re conducting a sample symphony in your palm. It’s the sort of tiny idea that balloons into new ways of thinking about composition, and it’s just a few taps and finger swipes within reach. $6, available for iPhone and iPad; mancingdolecules.com

—Ryan Kuo

By DIONNE SEARCEY

By now, many employees are uncomfortably aware that their every keystroke at work, from email on office computers to text messages on company phones, can be monitored legally by their employers.

What employees typically don’t expect is for the company to spy on them while on password-protected sites using nonwork computers. But even that privacy could be in jeopardy.

A case brewing in federal court in New Jersey pits bosses against two employees who were complaining about their workplace on an invite-only discussion group on MySpace.com, a social-networking site owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. The case tests whether a supervisor who managed to log into the forum — and then fired employees who badmouthed supervisors and customers there — had the right to do so.

Photo Illustration by The Wall Street Journal

The case has some legal and privacy experts concerned that companies are intruding into areas that their employees had considered off limits.

“The question is whether employees have a right to privacy in their non-work-created communications with each other. And I would think the answer is that they do,” said Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment expert and partner at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP in New York.

The legal landscape is murky. For the most part, employers don’t need a reason to fire nonunion workers. But state laws in California, New York and Connecticut protect employees who engage in lawful, off-duty activities from being fired or disciplined, according to a report prepared by attorneys at the firm Proskauer Rose LLP. While private conversations might be covered under those laws, none of the statutes specifically addresses social networking or blogging. Thus, privacy advocates expect to see more of these legal challenges.

In February, three police officers in Harrison, N.Y., were suspended after they allegedly made lewd remarks about the town mayor on a Facebook account. The officers mistakenly thought the remarks were protected with a password, but city officials viewed the page, said Harrison police chief David Hall. The remarks about Mayor Joan Walsh might have violated the officer’s code of conduct, he said.

Mr. Hall said the town board was considering firing the officers. The policemen have asked a federal judge in White Plains, N.Y., to limit the town of Harrison’s inquiry into the online postings, citing privacy concerns, said Donald Feerick, the officers’ attorney. Calls to Ms. Walsh weren’t returned.

The case in New Jersey centers on two employees of Houston’s restaurant in Hackensack, bartender Brian Pietrylo and waitress Doreen Marino, who in 2006 created and contributed to a forum about their workplace on MySpace.com. Mr. Pietrylo emailed invitations to co-workers, who then had to log in using a personal email address and a password.

“I just thought this would be a nice way to vent…without any eyes outside spying in on us. This group is entirely private,” Mr. Pietrylo wrote in his introduction to the forum, according to court filings.

On the forum, Mr. Pietrylo and Ms. Marino, who was his girlfriend, made fun of Houston’s decor and patrons, and made sexual jokes. They also made negative comments about their supervisors.

The supervisors were tipped off to the forum by Karen St. Jean, a restaurant hostess, who logged into her account at an after-hours gathering with a Houston’s manager to show him the site. They all had a laugh, Ms. St. Jean said in a court deposition, and she didn’t think any more about it.

But later, another supervisor called Ms. St. Jean into his office and asked her for her email and password to the forum. The login information was passed up the supervisory chain, where restaurant managers viewed the comments.

The following week, Mr. Pietrylo and Ms. Marino were fired. Houston’s managers have said in court filings that the pair’s online posts violated policies set out in an employee handbook, which include professionalism and a positive attitude. A lawyer for Hillstone Restaurant Group, which owns Houston’s, declined to comment.

In their lawsuit, Ms. Marino and Mr. Pietrylo claim that their managers illegally accessed their online communications in violation of federal wiretapping statutes and that the managers also violated their privacy under New Jersey law.

But the courts might not view online musings as private communication. “You can’t post something on the Internet and claim breach of privacy when someone sees it,” said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.

Ms. St. Jean said in a deposition she feared she would be fired if she didn’t give up her password, a twist in the case that Mr. Maltby says could sway a jury against the company.

Labor and legal experts say the outcome of many employee privacy cases hinges on workers’ expectations of their privacy rights — particularly whether they have been given notice that they are subject to monitoring. In the Houston’s case, the workers had no idea their online activities outside of work could be monitored, says their attorney, Fred J. Pisani. A trial is set for June 9.

Write to Dionne Searcey at dionne.searcey@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13

A youthful indiscretion haunts Jeffrey Hollender every time he visits Canada.

He gets detained for extra security screening because of an incident in 1978 where authorities arrested and deported the then 23-year-old American for operating an adult-education school in Toronto without a work permit. Yet the career setback—and the subsequent soul-searching—proved a springboard for his eventual success. He co-founded and ran Seventh Generation Inc., a leading maker of environmentally friendly household products based in Burlington, Vt.

Mr. Hollender is hardly unique. For Peter G. Peterson, the billionaire co-founder of Blackstone Group LP, a New York private-equity firm, it took an expulsion from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a stint as a department store employee to finally realize what he wanted to do. Myron E. Ullman III, chief executive of J.C. Penney Co., was a 30-year-old university business officer when he was involved in mishaps that landed his new boss in an emergency room twice in two weeks.

All three gleaned lessons from their early stumbles that helped them thrive later. Their experiences offer a road map to anyone discouraged by initial missteps. “Early setbacks represent a key developmental event that successful executives cite when they look back over their careers,” says Ellen Van Velsor, a senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C. The center has studied the role of setbacks in future success for decades.

To rebound from early mistakes, you need time to reflect constructively, as Mr. Hollender did. The college dropout had begun his nonprofit Skills Exchange in 1977. Classes ranged from sushi preparation to poetry writing. He didn’t obtain a work permit because “I was totally obsessed with work” to obtain the permanent Canadian residency status required. Mr. Hollender never equated his deportation with failure. “It caused me to begin to re-examine what really matters,” he says. He spent months in contemplation while cutting trees on a cousin’s ginseng farm in Vermont.

The entrepreneur next created a New York venture called Network for Learning, with offbeat classes such as “The Art of Flirting.” This time, however, he aimed to make money. “If you are going to invest your time, passion and energy, you should do it as a for-profit business,” Mr. Hollender says. Network for Learning quickly grew, attracting 60,000 students and turning a profit by its second fiscal year. Mr. Hollender sold the business to a Warner Communications unit for more than $2 million in 1985. Four years later, Mr. Hollender and partner Alan Newman raised money for a failing mail-order catalog that peddled environmental products. They renamed it Seventh Generation, where Mr. Hollender, 55, now is executive chairman.

Mr. Peterson’s early setbacks persuaded him to set higher ethical standards and heed his gut instincts. M.I.T. kicked him out in fall 1944 for plagiarizing another student’s term paper. He believed he didn’t cheat because he had revised it and added much of his own information. The humiliating expulsion made him realize he should avoid “self-serving rationalizations about questionable behavior.” He instead asked himself: “What would a person I admire greatly think about this behavior?” That’s why “I have somehow managed to stay out of trouble ever since,” he continues.

After graduation from Northwestern University in 1947, the marketing major was hired as an assistant toy buyer for a department store in Portland, Ore. He quit four months later because he hated retailing. “I had made a serious mistake,” he says.

During a three-day drive to Chicago, where his fiancée was going to school, he says he kept thinking: “What [do] I really enjoy doing?” He concluded his keen analytical ability qualified him for market research. He joined a small market-research firm, earning $50 a week. The concern promoted the junior analyst to executive vice president within two years. He later was an adman at McCann-Erickson, CEO of electronics maker Bell & Howell Co., President Richard Nixon’s commerce secretary and head of Lehman Brothers.

Mr. Peterson co-launched Blackstone in 1985. He says he insisted the firm do no equity research or hostile takeovers because he felt those activities unethically conflicted with clients’ interests. Otherwise, “you weren’t dealing straight with these people,” he says. The decision reflected his post-M.I.T. belief “in the need for honesty and integrity,” he adds.

For Mr. Ullman, twin injuries suffered by his supervisor propelled him to perform better on the job. He was chief business officer for University of Cincinnati when Henry Winkler became acting president in summer 1977. Weeks later, the two men and their wives decided to drive together to a football game.

Mr. Ullman was standing by his wife when she slammed the car door on his boss’s hand. Mr. Winkler says the bad bruise incapacitated him for two weeks. The day they resumed their regular racketball game, Mr. Ullman hit Mr. Winkler—who had ducked behind him—with his racket and gave him a black eye. “I am not sure I can survive working with you,” Mr. Winkler recalls joking at the time.

“I have a lot to prove that I am not a risk,” Mr. Ullman replied anxiously. As a result, “there’s no question I worked my butt off,” he says. “I earned his respect for other than my ability to hurt him.”

Mr. Ullman, now 63, says his recovery efforts deepened his ties with his boss. Mr. Winkler often helped by taking the heat when Mr. Ullman needed more budget funds or persuading colleagues to assist him. This taught Mr. Ullman, who held top jobs at several retailers before taking command of Penney in 2004, a powerful leadership lesson: “If a boss focuses on making colleagues successful, they have a better chance of succeeding.”

Mr. Winkler says Mr. Ullman proved he “was first rate.” The young administrator soon earned a vice presidency, thanks to lobbying by his boss.

Mr. Winkler was among “the most important mentors in my career,” concludes Mr. Ullman.

By JUNE FLETCHER

Q: In 2007, I inherited a four-bedroom home in Great Neck, N.Y., valued at $550,000. My only expenses are taxes and utilities, which total $10,000. I live out of state, but visit the home twice a year for a total of two weeks. Should I sell the home or rent it out?

—Location withheld

A: To answer this, you need to analyze both the functional and financial aspects of why you continue to own this home nearly three years after you inherited it.

Let’s look at the functional aspect first. Does this home have any future use for you, beyond its current function as a two-week annual getaway—perhaps as your retirement home, or family homestead that you might want to bequeath to your children?

If the answer is no, then make any needed repairs and put your home on the market as soon as possible to catch the spring selling season. Don’t delay, since low mortgage interest rates won’t last much longer, and tax credits for buyers will expire on April 30. You don’t say why you come to Great Neck for two weeks every year. But if it’s for any reason other than to maintain the home, it’s a false economy to pay $10,000 annually for taxes and utilities (as well as other incidentals you don’t mention, like insurance, lawn care, and repairs), when a two-week stay at a boutique hotel in Great Neck costs about $3,500—and you don’t have to clean the bathroom.

However, if the answer is yes, then renting out the home makes a great deal of sense and could provide you with a nice income. On Oodle.com, I found rents for four-bedroom Great Neck homes that ranged upwards of $2,750 a month. And though renters will subject the home to more wear and tear, having the home occupied and warm will help keep pipes from freezing in the winter, and the seals and gaskets on appliances and fixtures from drying out. It also will discourage intruders and animal and insect pests from moving in.

But before deciding to become a landlord, ask yourself whether you have the time, temperament and skills to manage from a distance. You’ll be dealing with clogged toilets, jammed garbage disposals, spills on carpets, cleaners and handymen. (A good rule of thumb: Budget between 1% and 2% of your home’s value to maintenance, depending on its age and condition.) You’ll also have extra costs for utilities, marketing, screening tenants and perhaps a local property manager.

As a landlord, you will have to keep excellent financial records to satisfy the Internal Revenue Service and take advantage of deductions. (See Topics 414 and 415 on www.irs.gov.) It can get complicated, so set up a financial spreadsheet or invest in some packaged software for landlords like Quicken Rental Property Manager to help you keep track of income and expenses.

Send questions and comments to June Fletcher at fletcher.june@gmail.com.