31 July 2002

I've wanted to take this picture for months. Yesterday, I finally remembered to take my camera with me to the grocery store...

Yessireebob, you know what kind of class neighborhood we live in that our local shopping center has not one, but two dollar stores! Right next door to each other, even!

I may be looking at another wave of semi-isolation at work. My ssh connection to my account on Jeremy's machine crapped out around mid-afternoon. Some fiddling got me in to my Yeehaw account, but all afternoon, I got a "connection refused" messages from Confusticate.

Jeremy turned on a packet sniffer, and swore my connection request wasn't even getting to confusticate much less being refused by it. Which means it was being refused before I got there.

Which might well mean that they noticed a frequent, sustained connection to that IP address, and set up a block.

Except that I did get in for about two minutes around 3:30, so maybe not. I guess we'll see.

I should probably come up with some new ways of entertaining myself at work anyway. They're doing another internet use crackdown, and this time they may actually mean it.

Though I was sort of amused at the article in the company magazine. It came with a list of Dos and Don'ts, which left a lot of grey area. It looked sort of like this:

DO:
- Read and send work-related e-mail
- Use the web for work-related research
DON'T:
- Browse obscene or hateful sites
- Download illegal or "pirated" files or programs

That's not it exactly, but close enough. The "Don't" list didn't say anything against sending personal e-mail, or browsing sites that weren't work-related, but also not offensive. (Like, say, news sites.) Lots of grey area.

As much effort as they're putting into this, you'd think they'd just set up blocking software and have done with it.

--Liz