Where the hell have I been?

The short answer is that I’ve been doing my best to remain gainfully employed. In fact, while somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 folks lost their jobs, I managed to pick up some overtime. My employer even had a dozen or so layoffs, but they were primarily middle management. I’ve been there over 10 years (originally as a contractor) & they’ve always been ‘thick around the middle’ as they say. I’m confident that my department is safe since the ‘lights out’ datacenter is as much of a myth as the paperless office or unicorns. Even if we were cut back, there are newer folks that would likely get the axe first. Just like “Office Space”, I’ve mastered working just hard enough to keep my job but not enough to stand out.

The other contributing factor is that in an ongoing effort to sap the fun out of life conserve bandwidth & limit non-work distractions, the IT folks keep filtering more of the Internet. I’m relying on ‘the Cloud’ more & more for both information & as memory extension & the most recent blocks have really hampered me. I understand blocking YouTube & the other video/streaming media sites, but miss my Digg, Slashdot, Ars Technica, et al. The death blow was blocking Evernote – the best thing since sticky notes. I know I can still access all this stuff on my phone, but that’s slow & tedious. The real kicker is that most of the time the blocking page lists the category as ‘computer/Internet’ which I think covers just about everything online. Dontcha think?

I’m currently testing a VPN solution, but until I find a reliable workaround, I’m stuck with good ol’ sneakernet for now. I also need to get this Twitter thing rolling.

On a positive note, all that time at work means I’ve had a chance to watch some movies so I’ll have some reviews forthcoming. I’ve also watched most of Babylon 5 again.