can someone explain to me how this works? my job looks through my cache?

They could, theoretically.

and they could see the exact picture i was looking at, or the address for it ...?

Different companies have different ways of monitoring their employees. Some software scans the hardrive for bad stuff, sometimes the IT guy will rummage through someone's comp and go to their cache and see where they've been(yes it has gifs of the pics you've been looking at and web addresses in your history) or, in what is the most devious IMO, companies install software on all work comps to take screenshots of what you're looking at every 15seconds, to make sure you're doing your job and not posting on some message board.
Fuckers, every last one of 'em.

both

and surfing message boards while you're being paid to work, isn't devious? *confused*

c_b is regretting his visits to the hot girls thread right about now.

haha. no, i've never gone in there at work. i'm always nervous big brother's watching. that's why i asked this question.

No, that's wasteful. Get it right.

Of course, if you have a cool system administrator, then you shouldn't worry too much. Just bring them many many free gifts. Just sayin'....

Best practice is to assume the worst, then risk it as you see fit.

you can clean out your cache though, yea?

locally yes, server not so much unless you're a network admin or something.

Because those dastardly network admins set things up so they make extra copies of EVERYTHING. aaaaaaah......RAID (redundancy) is a beautiful thing.

what about those anonymous proxy services, do they make a difference? or are they just to get around content blockers? just curious.

A proxy server I'm none too familiar with really. But I understand that it's like a secretary. You ask it to request things for you. And I believe it caches things.

What a cache essentially does is retain things in memory, so that next time you may request the same information your system doesn't have to work as hard. It recalls the bits that are stored, to make the info easier to load the next time around.
these things can be used both for you, and against you.

The problem with the internet, is that once you plug in, you're fair game no matter what you do. Understand? And resistance is futile.