Note that the above supersedes any earlier email you may have gotten from me on this subject. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nAll 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.)<\/p>\n
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<\/em>.<\/p>\n___________________<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Back story — some technical, some not — to the above <\/strong>(feel free to skip)<\/em>:<\/strong><\/p>\nMy 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.<\/p>\n
Yes, true: the Internet can be a force for good, and it can be a terrifically useful resource. Still…<\/p>\n
Enter a company, or at least a product, called W*bs*nse [key vowels masked]<\/em><\/span>. 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<\/em>, in response.<\/p>\nLet’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:<\/p>\n
\n- malicious sites<\/li>\n
- tasteless and p*rn sites<\/li>\n
- social-networking and personal sites (includes Facebook, Twitter, and so on, as well as blogging sites)<\/li>\n
- gaming and betting sites<\/li>\n
- media downloading sites<\/li>\n
- file sharing sites<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\nBut 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.<\/p>\n
Aside:<\/strong> Yes, it blocks blogger<\/em>.com pages — not those at blogspot<\/em>.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.<\/p>\nSo then we come to the non<\/em>-technical reasons why you may not see me at your place during the week…<\/p>\nMy typical Monday through Friday goes like this:<\/p>\n
\n- Wake up.<\/li>\n
- Write for two hours(ish).<\/li>\n
- Get ready for and go to day job.<\/li>\n
- Day job.<\/li>\n
- Come home.<\/li>\n
- “Pooch time.”<\/li>\n
- “Missus time,” including preparing and eating dinner, watching TV, and\/or otherwise socializing.<\/li>\n
- Get ready for bed.<\/li>\n
- Sleep.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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<\/em> is done, at least, even that’s off the table.<\/p>\nAll of which is why I counted so heavily on being able to interact with y’all during the work day… at your<\/em> hospitable venues, on topics of your<\/em> choosing, not mine<\/em>.<\/p>\nSo 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>\n
P.S.<\/strong> 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.”<\/p>\nIt’s just…<\/p>\n
…just… <\/em><\/p>\n…Grrrrr!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,16,12,17,37,19,1224],"tags":[1779,1864,1922,2213],"class_list":{"0":"post-8022","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-themissus","8":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","9":"category-04_technology","10":"category-onlineworld","11":"category-internet","12":"category-phones-cellular-and-otherwise","13":"tag-blogger","14":"tag-wordpress","15":"tag-social-networking","16":"tag-productivity","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-25o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/edgarkennedy_sm.jpg?resize=200%2C252&ssl=1\" "\\"Edgar")
Grrrrr.<\/p>\n