The workaround

When you've lived a life of few (read that as 'no' if you must) accomplishments, you take what you can get. Right now, I've managed to solve an annoying little quandary that's been plaguing me these last two days, and I'm very smugly pleased with myself.

See, there's this website I found that has been a perfect time-waster at work. The corporate firewall that keeps me out of all my webmail accounts and off anything that has the word 'blog', or 'games', or, you know, anything remotely like 'fun', in its URL, doesn't seem to mind this particular site. The site itself is one I mentioned a few entries down; the blogger is an excellent, funny, entertaining writer, his chosen subject matter is stuff I'm mostly interested in (I tend to skim pretty fast past his entries on baseball and/or getting really really hammered and going to sporting events, but that's at most 30% of his material), and he's got extensive archives going back to 2003, so, I figured as long as I had access to his site, I wouldn't run out of reading material I could safely tuck into a corner of my computer screen to kill time between calls with for weeks or months.

However, yesterday his site was unavailable; apparently, he's having a server issue. This was a bummer to me all day long, as I kept going punching in his URL in hopes that the problem had been resolved, and, well, no soap. That lack of soap has continued unto this very day, which is very aggravating.

However, while looking around to see if another one time favorite blogger, Billmon, has started up blogging again anywhere (he hasn't) I came across a reference to this wonderful thing called The Wayback Machine, which, basically, archives the entire frickin Internet.

So, I went over there and punched in this guy's URL and... yep... they've got extensive archives of his archives.

So, I have time killing material in the corner of my computer screen once again.

I understand, working through to this solution doesn't exactly qualify me for MENSA, but, hey, self actualization sometimes comes in very small packages.

UPDATE: Annoyingly, the firewall at work seems to have a learning curve, as some of the sites that originally were not blocked by it when I first started this assignment are coming up blocked by it now. Eventually this will probably happen to not only this particular blog (assuming the server ever comes back online) but to the Wayback Machine, as well... which is just frickin' ANNOYING. But sufficient unto the day the evil thereof, etc, etc.