cellio | work follies

Today at work I found myself wondering: if I close a bug against a component that no longer exists, should I mark it "won't fix" or "works for me"? (I opted for the latter, so that the people who get email about a three-year-old bug might at least get a smile.)

I am not allowed to access my personal email at work. (Also lots of other things, alas.) I subscribe to several technical mailing lists using my home (that is, permanent) address, but I'd like to be able to access the lists at work. So I have begun a campaign of public folders with linked email addresses that I can subscribe to lists. This was, apparently, a novel idea in my 50-year-old, 70,000-employee company -- go figure. But for once, the corporate side of the machinery worked. No, what I'm having trouble with now is the other end. Some of these lists are hosted by Yahoo; unlike with Majordomo and some others, in order to subscribe to a Yahoo list you need to either send mail from the subscribing address (which I can't do, as it's not a real account -- and forgery is surely against corporate policy even in a good cause) or create a Yahoo profile. I already have a Yahoo profile that I don't want to interfere with, so I set out to create a new one.

I tried to be honest and up-front; for "name" I entered something like "$company email forwarder" ("forwarder" is a perfectly good surname, I say), and for "date of birth" I listed the date of acquisition. This netted me a message that you must be at least two years old to have a Yahoo profile. Ok, I changed the date to the founding date of the original company (the one that got bought), at which point Yahoo told me I had to get a parent to complete the registration for me. Ok, fine -- I entered a suitably-distant date. But Yahoo, having already flagged this as a child's account, wouldn't let me change that. Fine -- I could start over. Nope -- anything I did from that point on, even in a different browser, got the "your parent needs to enter a valid credit-card number" treatment. (I guess a credit card establishes person-hood in their eyes.) Yahoo apparently logged my IP address as suspicious. (I wonder how long that'll last. Mind, I'm a little startled to find that our corporate masters allowed me to reach the account-creation page at Yahoo to begin with.) Oh well. So I sent email to the owner of the first list of interest asking for a direct subscription; we'll see if that works.

I now regularly use three different browsers at work -- Firefox for most things for the extensions, Mozilla for when I need "file:///" links to work (yes, tried the Firefox fix and it didn't), and IE for talking to certain corporate web sites. I still find it ironic that a security-conscious company requires IE -- and sometimes IE with the security settings turned all the way down.

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I use IE for timecards. For the rest, I've moved to Seamonkey (the updated Mozilla, for it has the security updates, but is still the suite). I haven't moved to Firefox, simply because I don't need the extensions, and I'm not sure it would pick up my CAC card and certificate stuff from Seamonkey.

I had similar issues when I tried to set up the baby's livejournal. I should have figured it would give me grief and just fudged the birthyear, but it wouldn't let me go back and change it. I can't remember if they asked for a credit card or what. I even tried asking the help team to change it, explaining that it was about an infant but it would be an adult using it, but I ended up having to delete it and starting over. You'd think they'd be more worried about 13 year olds than newborns seeing age-inappropriate content. ;)

As far as LJ, I think it's just finding a way to be safe under COPPA, so I'd blame the politicians.

I'm finding an increasing number of websites that are screened here at work. The list literally grows daily, a political cartoon site that I was able to view yesterday is blocked as of today. I figure it's only a matter of time before LJ gets blocked.

However, I do have one other solution to getting to the sites. I was lucky enough to be issued both a desktop and laptop computer. (The desktop has the crunching power to format tech manuals, the laptop is for use in the field.)

The laptop has a modem, and it's a moment's work to disconnect that RJ-45 jack from the phone and plug it into the computer...

Did you try emptying your cache? I doubt Yahoo logs IP addresses; more likely there's a temporary internet file or cookie somewhere. It's worth a shot.

On the off chance you don't already know how: In IE, go to Tool > Internet Options and select "Delete Files" and then "Delete Cookies." If you haven't done it in a while, it could take a couple of minutes.

You should actually empty your cache occasionally anyway. I found that out when I couldn't install some software because of my cache being too full.

I did try flushing the caches (memory and disk), but that didn't help. When I was still blocked after changing to a different browser I began to suspect that the block was at Yahoo's end. I didn't try again today to see if it timed out; I'll check that tomorrow. (I haven't heard back from the list owner yet.)

If I had a laptop things might be easier, yes. :-) Though I think the company laptops also do not have modems. And the wireless network cards have some special security mumbo-jumbo on them -- so maybe having a laptop wouldn't make it any easier to get onto outside networks. (Policy forbids doing such things while connected to the corporate network, which is entirely reasonable. I don't know how easy it is to disconnect from the network, walk over to the other company's side of the building where the internet is unfettered, and connect.)

Wireless networking at work is locked down tight like everything else (Macintosh laptop users don't even have approved wireless cards, making our laptops moot). Your only recourse for outside networking is to either physically drag your computer to Le Barb and hook up there (not an option for you, I know), or befriend a sysadmin on the other side of Checkpoint Charlie and have him/her enter your modem's MAC address into their allowed list, etc.

On another note: it sucks that what thwarted you in the first place was your effort to do the honorable and well-meaning thing in establshing your Yahoo profile with such scrupulous honesty. Most people wouldn't have been so decent in the first place. You're due some karma points. :)

Thanks for the wireless information. That gives me data about the efficacy of getting a cheap personal laptop.

Yahoo eventually let me in again and I created a profile, with a still-obvious name and my own birthdate. That way it matches the actual person behind the ID, though I suppose I could cease to be the owner of the work mailing list in the future and Yahoo probably doesn't let you edit birth dates on a profile. Oh well; we can burn that bridge when we come to it. :-)

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