Blogspot Blocked!

As most of you know, I have a Real Job. As Real Jobs go, it's a pretty sweet deal -- good pay, awesome benefits, a Real Office with a Window and A Door, casual environment, and close to home. And occasionally there's even an interesting project to work on.It's so sweet that I've been in a state of constant anxiety about losing it since June of 2005, when 1/3 of our staff was laid off. This anxiety persists despite the fact that the office politics (or "personalities", as we prefer to call it at work) are such that on any given day, it's either like reliving my childhood with a critical parent for whom nothing I do is good enough and who likes "the pretty one" better; or else it's like reliving high school, where the Kool Kidz hang out together and I'm in the courtyard again in the poncho and hand-embroidered bluejeans writing brooding poetry and wondering why I'm always an outcast. All told, though, despite my constant battles with my own baggage to cope with some of the political crap, it's a good deal.

But this week brought a major trauma: The elves in the network room have now rigged Websense to block all Blogspot-domain sites. Sites that use Blogger and syndicate it through dedicated domains are OK, but Blogger is blocked. This means that not only can I not blog during the day (not that I do anyway, at least not since they started monitoring traffic), but I can't even read other blogs that use the Blogspot service. Now I know how all the people who squawked when they started blocking fantasy sports and stock trading sites felt.

Good thing I have that new notebook. I may have to start spending my lunch hours at Starbuck's. It also means that it's getting to be time to move to a dedicated domain.