Well, that was irritating

They loaded a new blocklist into the firewalls at work last week, blocking LiveJournal. I ignored it for a day or two; they've blocked it before a couple of times then unblocked it later. I assumed that someone with some say decided that LJ was acceptable within this organization.

The block didn't go away so I went to my old buddy PHProxy. Well, they decided that my domain "hauntedfrog.com" was a "personal site" and blocked it too. So I installed it on miastro.com, and that worked. Except PHProxy was never all that good.

I looked around and tried bblocked which is basically the same thing. The latest version, 5.6.3, just wasn't working for me; cookie logins didn't fly so I could view public only and couldn't post. After looking through their forums for a bit some people said previous versions worked. I tried 5.6.2, and here I am.

It's still not perfect, the page title as I post here is "404 Error" but it seems to be working so I'll take it.

In all I only put a couple of hours into it. Honestly I'd probably go along with their blocks if they weren't so hypocritical. In particular, I'd like to see the business case for why we have never blocked ESPN.com, though it's clear to anyone that more time gets wasted there (particularly in March) than probably half the rest of the web.

Summer trim

...doesn't appear to have all that much effect. I had my higher pressure, skinny tires on this morning, two 460 gram tires instead of a 680 and a 1000 (that's 760 less grams now), and though they felt great, nice and smooth and quiet, my commute time was still 45 minutes, pretty much exactly what it was with heavy studded tires and snow on the ground.

I think the temperature (23*F) and the fact that I morphed partially back into a couch potato over the last few weeks had a lot more to do with it. My legs actually got a bit tired, and I was almost short of breath at one point. Well, I'm sure that in a couple of weeks I'll be back in trim and the mornings will be warmer, and I'll be closer to the normal 35 minute commute time.