Grrrrr.
…Grrrrr…
…oh, and in case I haven’t said recently: Grrrr.
As a good number of you already know, ’cause I’ve already told you: I cannot comment on your blogs during the work day. (I’ll detail some technical reasons for this at the end.) This post is to let you know that during those eight-ish hours of every weekday:
(1) If the main part of your blog’s address ends with wordpress.com, I can read it and comment there only via my BlackBerry. This is unchanged from recent months.
(2) If your blog’s address ends with blogspot.com, I can still read it during those hours. However, whether I can comment there at all then depends on two things:
(2a) If comments on your blog are entered on a completely separate page from where the posts are displayed, I can comment only via BlackBerry.
(2b) If comments must be entered on the same page as your posts, in a little box at the foot of the given post, I can’t even use my BlackBerry to enter them.
(3) If your blog’s address ends with things like livejournal.com or tumblr.com or ning.com or posterous.com or various other standard social-networking addresses, I can’t comment during work hours, probably at all.
(4) If your blog’s address ends with anything other than any of the above — that is, if you have your own domain name (as is true, e.g., with Seven-Imp — or with RAMH itself, for that matter), no change: I can both read and comment freely during work hours, just as I always have.
Note that the above supersedes any earlier email you may have gotten from me on this subject.
All of which means that you won’t see any sign from me that I’m actually still reading — and being engaged by — your writing on weekdays, unless I can post comments via BlackBerry… and maybe not even then. (If you monitor your site’s traffic, you will however still see my footprints in the damp ground outside, under the windows.)
To say that this drives me crazy really understates the case. I am, oh yes, annoyed. I am wroth. I am, indeed, mightily pissed off.
___________________
Back story — some technical, some not — to the above (feel free to skip):
My employer, like many others, worries about leaving the network door open to malicious or unsavory outsiders. It worries, further, that its employees may not be making good, productive use of their time during the work day. And since about, oh, 1998 or so, of course the greatest threat both to internal networks and to productivity come from the good old Internet.
Yes, true: the Internet can be a force for good, and it can be a terrifically useful resource. Still…
Enter a company, or at least a product, called W*bs*nse [key vowels masked]. It’s both a service and a software product, which monitors the traffic going out of an Internet connection and, depending on what it sees, decides what traffic it will allow to come back in, in response.
Let’s say an employee clicks on a link on a Web page. W*bs*nse examines that link to figure out if this seems to go to a potentially dangerous site, or to a known work-time distraction, or to a site in any of various other awful categories. If so, it prevents the employee from going there. In place of the desired page, the employee sees this dreadful block of text saying something to the effect, “BLOCKED BY W*BS*NSE” — and providing a reason. Among the categories I’ve seen blocked:
- malicious sites
- tasteless and p*rn sites
- social-networking and personal sites (includes Facebook, Twitter, and so on, as well as blogging sites)
- gaming and betting sites
- media downloading sites
- file sharing sites
Now, probably there are ways in which a W*bs*nse customer may fine-tune this for its own network. For example, it can probably build a so-called whitelist of sites known to be “okay,” even if the sites ostensibly fall into one of the other categories. (For instance, a blogger whose site is hosted at blogspot.com may cover various technical tips and tricks useful for solving work-related problems.)
But the default settings for W*bs*nse seem to provide at best a pretty blunt instrument. All pages ending in wordpress.com or blogger.com, for instance, are automatically blocked.
Aside: Yes, it blocks blogger.com pages — not those at blogspot.com. Blogs built using Blogger are hosted at the latter, which is why I can continue to read their posts. Until late this week, those separate commenting pages (case (2a) in the above list) likewise used to be hosted at blogspot.com, which is why I could comment there. Suddenly — thank you, Google! thank you, Blogger! — they’re on blogger.com, and suddenly I’m blocked altogether.
So then we come to the non-technical reasons why you may not see me at your place during the week…
My typical Monday through Friday goes like this:
- Wake up.
- Write for two hours(ish).
- Get ready for and go to day job.
- Day job.
- Come home.
- “Pooch time.”
- “Missus time,” including preparing and eating dinner, watching TV, and/or otherwise socializing.
- Get ready for bed.
- Sleep.
The only item in that list realistically available for things like reading and commenting on blogs is the first one. And until Seems to Fit is done, at least, even that’s off the table.
All of which is why I counted so heavily on being able to interact with y’all during the work day… at your hospitable venues, on topics of your choosing, not mine.
So yes, there’s the BlackBerry which I can still use for Facebook, Twitter, WordPress-hosted blogs, and category-(2b) Blogger blogs. But as anybody who’s used a BlackBerry for the Internet will tell you, it’s very cool but not exactly, y’know, a powerhouse. Not if you’ve got better things to do than twiddle your thumbs waiting for pages to load, anyhow.
P.S. Nowhere above do I say anything about being annoyed with my employer or its Internet-access policies. On the contrary, I understand exactly why they must do this (which, after all, isn’t aimed at me personally). I know how overloaded their I.T. staff is. And I know to how much public scrutiny we are (currently, and rightly) subject, as employees of a local government. I’m not being “censored.” My “rights” haven’t been “violated.”
It’s just…
…just…
…Grrrrr!
DarcKnyt says
I know, JES, I know. I understand, and could offer you a view into my own list of accounted-for hours. Please hold everything you said here as true for me too, toward you, and add to it an apology for not commenting when I actually can.
That time may go away here if I get the new writing (non-fic… *sigh*) projects I pitched.
fg says
Welcome to my world pre VPN. Boy, was I often thwarted and frustrated wrestling with proxies before.
(Hello from here, VPN less for the first time in months… hurray)
John says
fg: I know you’ve struggled with both proxies and even your current VPN. Now look at you — all loaded up with software you (for now) don’t need!
I thought the topic of VPNs and proxies might come up.
The employee policies-and-practices handbook at work has a whole section on use of employer resources (including Internet infrastructure), which lays out in general terms what may and may not be done with all kinds of valuable resources we as employees have access to. The general idea is that we are not to use those resources for anything which might harm the city’s ability to provide those resources in the first place. “Harm” isn’t limited to physical or other direct damage; it includes secondary forms — like if I ran a personal Web site which distributed illegal software, and used my work time to keep the site maintained, and was found out, the city could be held accountable for giving me the means to do so in the first place.
The disciplinary consequences depend on how severe the infraction is. It might be just a letter of reprimand. It might be suspension without pay for n days.
One of the offenses they threaten to discipline with outright dismissal is using VPNs, proxies, and similar techniques to bypass W*bs*nse’s blocking. Again, it’s hard for me to argue with this. (Something like I understand why it’s illegal for people other than locksmiths and police to be found in possession of tools used primarily by burglars. Sure, a given infraction might be innocent, but what are the odds?)
I mean, who knows — maybe if I used proxies, say, maybe I’d never be found out. But in any case, it’d be pretty hard to explain as anything other than a fairly blatant attempt to work around the policy… which every employee must sign, every year.
(On top of which, as I say, I understand why the policy’s in place. And I sympathize with the I.T. folks, who generally respect me, often include me in policy debates and decisions, and so on. They’ve been very generous, in excepting me from a variety of technical restrictions they place on users of the city’s network. I won’t abuse that trust. (Old-fashioned, I know.))
whaddayamean says
wow, you really write for two hours every morning? that’s AWESOME. i am very impressed.
John says
whaddayamean: “Writing” covers a lot of territory, including editing, kickstarting myself with never-to-be-printed writing exercises on slow mornings…
At one point in 2007, after I hadn’t written anything — fiction or non-fiction — for five years, it just hit me: Y’know, if you just go to bed earlier, you can get UP earlier and WRITE… Especially if what I was doing during that night-time chunk of time was watching TV.
All of which said, I’m better about getting up early than I am about going to bed early. I spend most of every day exhausted. :)
Ashleigh Burroughs says
So many many things to say:
1. Nice to know that I don’t have to worry about fixing my what-evers so that you can read/comment on The Burrow… I’ve been ignoring those emails for months (as you well know). I’m SO not a techy… have total respect for those I.T. guys (until they start adding programs I “just need to have”)….. glad to know that this is your issue and doesn’t have to be mine :0
2. Love your attitude. It’s why I love RAMH. You have opinions and aren’t afraid to voice them but you do it will respect. It’s an attitude to be emulated by much of the world. (see Swash Zone today, eg)
3. Do I need to know what a VNP is? Am I a bad person for not caring?
4. For a year before my “golden birthday” (my 27th natal anniversary on the 27th of the month) I got up at 4:45 am. My girlfriend picked me up at 5 and we drove to the gym, ran for miles through Chicago, ran back, showered and were at work by 7. I was exhausted and proud….. as you should be.
This was fun! No grrrrrrr for me at all :P
John says
a/b:
1. I would dearly love to make it somebody else’s issue. Alas. :)
2. Well, let’s say that I seldom post first drafts of RAMH entries. This gives me plenty of opportunities to neuter them. :)
3. A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. The general idea is that you pay for an Internet connection which has been set up and secured in such a way that you function, to all intents and purposes, as your own little Internet service provider (instead of rr.com, or cox.net, or comcast.com, verizon.com, and so on). This makes the technology very useful to people living overseas in regions where the government monitors, controls, and/or blocks Internet access.
If not knowing any of that extremely simplified explanation — or not understanding it — makes you a bad person, I think we’d all be surprised. Which is (haha) not to say that you’re necessarily not a bad person.
4. That sounds like a great schedule. I’d never ever choose to fill that block of time in exactly that way, but starting off the day with some solid routine seems to make the rest of the day turn gray and amorphous and, well, blobby.
So glad you’re enjoying yourself!
marta says
Since I’ve been sort of…blogdrifting lately, I’m not worried. I’ve no technical reason, I just am not getting myself to pages that I actually want to read.
Time is a factor. Energy.
On another note–since you happen to like folks of the pooch variety–in our house grrr means our girl dog when she wants to play. So we say things like, “It’s the grrr!” and “That’s a lot of grrr!” and “Show me some grrr!” and “Sweet, pretty grrr!”
Anyway. We are silly–of the human variety.