Yes lucky bloggers - it's time for another patented Wendy Rant. You can thank the ALA and ACLU for losing the easiest legal argument on the planet and the Supreme Court for being a bunch of dottering old fools.
The massive power outage that has blanketed the East and Midwest really didn't effect my happy neck of the woods directly. However, the problems in Detroit are making my head hurt here at work. First, our dial-up access users can not get online because our server is housed - guess where - near Detroit. However, that's not what currently has my panties in a bunch.
Because of the Supreme Court ruling saying libraries have to filter or lose their federal funding, my library system is currently testing out filters. How this works is through what is known as a "proxy server." Well the power outages have also knocked out power to our proxy server - also housed off site - which means no Internet on public terminals. See, in order to filter the Internet, the URL has to go through the proxy server first. No proxy server means that the URL cannot get verified - therefore it won't load.
So why haven't I gone around and taken all the filters off yet. Well we have 7 locations and both of our technical guru people are on vacation. Since this problem will likely be fixed sometime this weekend, my boss isn't real keen on me clocking in hundreds of miles to dismantle filters we'd have to put back on the computers on Monday.
Sounds confusing doesn't it?
However, in the grand scheme of things is could be worse. After all, we do have electricity, air conditioning, fans, and reading lights. Those poor saps in Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Syracuse, NYC and various other locales have it much worse. After all - we all got along fine without the Internet in our lives before - we can certainly live without it for a day or two now.
Still it just rubs me raw to think if not for the filters everything except our dial-up problems would be nonexistent.
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