Archive for May, 2005

I just wrote a very long, detailed explanation of my IT woes taking place at dialysis, only to have it vanish when firefox decided to crash. After a bit of research I learned of the great “Recover Post” function, but it obviously didn’t work. AHHHHHHH!
Shall I go into it again? Will anyone even read it?
OK…

I’ll give you the truncated version:

I’m 28, and in “ESRD” which means End Stage Renal Disease. Don’t worry, it sounds a lot worse than it is. I had a kidney transplant in 2000, but it failed in 2002, and I have been on dialysis ever since. This means I go to a clinic that smells funny, get two huge needles put into my arm, and try to sit still for 4 hours.
Of course this seems like a drag, but with a laptop it can be a lot of fun.
That is… until the IT guys had to display their cyber-courage.

It used to be that there were three chairs in the clinic with Ethernet ports. The two of us who use them of course requested to always be in one of those chairs. This made things slightly more difficult in terms of scheduling. We of course are both IT guys, and recommended that they put in a wireless AP to allow us access from any chair. They thought it was a security risk (?) and said “no”. Well, after over a year of prodding, they finally put one in, and disconnected the Ethernet ports.
That sounds great right?
No.
Now we have “websense” monitoring what we look at, and traffic is limited to port 80. For those less tech-savvy, this means we can only view a limited number of web pages (those not filtered out by websense). No email, no IM, no FTP … none of the normally used services. They do this in the name of security, but what they have done is effectively made my time there useless. Why do I need an Internet connection if I can’t send/receive email, work on web-sites, or even log into a secure site like Netflix? I can’t do anything “productive”, and so essentially have no need for the connection now.
To make matters worse, their IT department acts like typical IT goons, and seems to think this level of filtering is necessary for their network security.
Awesome…
Oh wait… their “secure” network is WIDE OPEN, without any MAC filtering or even WEP enabled.
So any Joe Schmoe on the street can use their WLAN, but we the patients can’t even receive email?
Just seems weird to me.
After numerous Emails with their IT department nothing has gotten better. They’re always “working on it”, as if changing these settings is a grueling, time consuming process.
So now I’ve had to learn the black arts of bypassing security to be able to FTP, IM, and browse the Internet.
I think I basically have things working the way I need them to be, but still can’t get past the websense (or whatever filtering software they’re using). This means I can’t post to my blog.
Silly, as the point of this is to help me pass the time I’m sitting in the chair.
Well, I guess I’ll post from other places, and pretend I’m sitting on dialysis at the time.

So my cousin who’s been traveling the world for the last several months decided to take my wife and I out for a Weekend Adventure. With this cousin you never know what that might mean. She’s the type who might have you dress up for a night on the town only to do some extreme ironing. So in 1 hour we’re meeting for our adventure. It sounds like it will be pretty tame, involving any three of the following: fire, mountains, food, and “drinks”.
Needless to say, we’re very excited for tonight’s adventure, and perhaps I will take a few pictures to share with all of you. Now don’t get too excited, I’m sure there won’t actually be any extreme ironing, or skydiving with bulldogs in tuxedos, but I’ll let you know.