Saturday, April 13, 2013

The brave new information age?




By most measures I (and family) am/are connected… We live on the northern fringes of what is known as Silicon Valley… We have high speed internet (T-3 via fiber optic cable… very fast) with wifi at home… my phone can stream data and can be configured as a wifi hot spot… I have a lap top and an Ipad (some are android pads), so does the wife and daughter and many extra daughters and the son when home and others… visitors… we all are on line… here at the place we call home… This is the way of the modern world…

I have email accounts (more than one, maybe more than 5)  I have been blogging for 8 years… (I had a blog on Xanga, back in 2005, before Blogger…)  Of course, there is Facebook and Myspace (does anyone beyond stray musicians use Myspace anymore?) and Yahoo Groups…  and web sites… I had my first web site (now abandoned) “The Birth of California Narrow Gauge”  back in 1996.

I once was driving east, between Tucson and El Paso, on I-10 while a passenger, one of my extra daughters, was on line, on Ebay, buying a pair or Christian Louboutin shoes… (I have many women in my life, a wife, a daughter, extra daughters who visit often… all (at least many) seem to have shoes with red soles… (some of them many pairs…))

I have blogged from an alluvial fan in Death Valley, next to a camp fire, with a coyote a hundred yards off, lurking near…  On another occasion from a camping ground in Mesa Verde, next to a camp fire, from the Antarctic Peninsula, from Tasmania… I once made a reservation for a tour of our house museum, along the shores of San Francisco Bay (the museum) while on the shores of Lake Titicaca, while on vacation… On another occasion, I needed a weather report, while driving in the Nevada desert… Tina forwarded a report… another time, while in Utah, somewhere north of the Great Salt Lake… on a dirt road… a map might have been emailed… For the most part, I am never far from information…

The lovely Tina may in fact work for the god being which is Google… This doesn’t make us more connected, but gives us occasional insights to the community that facilitates our connectivity… I am not part of the industry, but like the coyote in Death Valley, I sniff about the edges…

So, the world, our world, is very connected, at least most of the time… 

Except at work… 

My work, not the lovely Tina’s work, which as expected is always very connected… At my work, the connections get difficult.

At work, (my work) our access to the big bad evil internet is restricted… We are scared of the internet, scared of staff wasting time on the internet… scared of unauthorized information being released via the internet… At work we are scared of the internet…
I can’t access my blog from work… or any other blog… When I try, a little box pops up and says

Content blocked by your organization
Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Blogs and Personal Sites.

But, the softwear that blocks blogs (and other internet evil) is capricious… It universally blocks anything from Blogger, but Word Press sites seem to sneak through…  (my blog sneaks through sometimes…but only if following a link instead of searching for it directly… the Websense system isn’t that smart)

So, at work, My blog, (and in theory) all blogs are blocked…  (much of the current information about other house museums is found on blogs… but that doesn’t matter, they are blocked) Most discussion boards are blocked…  Anything that might be naughty (booze, porn, etc, including sports and places to purchase tickets for sporting events)  is blocked (at least that is understandable… occasionally heavy handed, but understandable) 

But I can access Hulu, and stream full episodes of TV shows… From my work computer... because its logical… or not.  I know this because a staff member spoke of an episode of “Family Guy” (specifically “Joe’s Revenge”), where Peter visits a house museum… (the Pershing House in El Paso, it has a facebook page)  “Is that his table? Is that his bed?  Is that his window?... Wow”   (If you run a house museum this is really, sadly funny) So, since she mentioned it, I goggled it (we can google… we are not that backward) and the Hulu link showed up… and worked… because streaming full episodes of TV is sooo conducive to productive work…

In my employer’s defense, there are logical reasons for some of the sites blocked… as a government agency, they block file sharing sites… Dropbox for example, for fear that we might put a government document there, outside of controls about public access and record keeping laws…  For a long time Facebook was blocked, but then the City established Facebook pages for City in general, for the Police Department, for Economic Development and for the Water Park…  so now, we can look at Facebook from our work computers, and can now waste our time looking at pictures of cats.   Picasa Web was blocked, but was un-blocked at my request so it could be used to send photos to our architect…  Appeals are considered and exceptions may be granted for good reason (or good behavior)

Blogs on behalf of the government are a concern based on the possibility of public feedback and how those comments could be moderated, but also for what we, the employees might say in public… Even if the Navy has authorized a US Navy Destroyer to blog from deployment... we won't be... we just won't go there...

I should probably shut up now, and go look for pictures of cats…. and snarky quotes to re-post on this blog…

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