20 Oct, 2008, blueneko wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
With the MudMagic game listing portal now gone, I cannot MU* from work, which means I actually have to work, and that is making me a sad monkey. Due to my firewall situation, I am struggling to find a connection.

Do we know if the game portal with the MudMagic java client is going to crop up anywhere else? I cannot download anything at work with any success. I have no telnet. MudConnector won't work. I have tried /everything/ I can think of. MudBrower.com connects me, but it drops connection and/or freezes about every 5 minutes. I need some sort of nifty web-based java thingy of goodness. Wundermu* won't work either because I have the oldest version of Java known to man on my work computer. NO, I can't update it either. Ahhhh!

I will offer chocolate coins and warm wishes to anyone who can assist me. I am code retarded, so I might be missing an easy fix, but in all my travels only the embedded MudMagic java client on their site would work for me.

Yours Truly,

Sad Monkey Blueneko
20 Oct, 2008, Zeno wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Use a normal proxy?

MUSHclient + proxy.
20 Oct, 2008, Guest wrote in the 3rd comment:
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Not to sound like a nanny state type, but I suspect your boss would enjoy it more if you, you know, worked while at work? :)
20 Oct, 2008, Kratos wrote in the 4th comment:
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well you can always use a hyper terminal connection. It works just like a client and a telnet. Or you can also use a java terminal client.
20 Oct, 2008, The_Fury wrote in the 5th comment:
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Samson said:
Not to sound like a nanny state type, but I suspect your boss would enjoy it more if you, you know, worked while at work? :)


LOL, as an employer, that was the first thing that came to mind when i read the first post of this thread. Getting caught goofing off at work is a sure fire way to find yourself without a job and with the world slipping into recession, you don't want to give your employer any reason to add you to the staff cut backs that are bound to happen.
22 Oct, 2008, Guest wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Exactly my feeling The_Fury. I'm not an employer and my first thought was "gee, they'd probably can me for this" :)

A lot of IT departments don't take kindly to evading the company firewall. Even for otherwise legitimate purposes. Gaming on company time hardly qualifies as legitimate to all but the most laid back employers. And I'd love to find one of those :/
22 Oct, 2008, Vassi wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
Samson said:
Exactly my feeling The_Fury. I'm not an employer and my first thought was "gee, they'd probably can me for this" :)

A lot of IT departments don't take kindly to evading the company firewall. Even for otherwise legitimate purposes. Gaming on company time hardly qualifies as legitimate to all but the most laid back employers. And I'd love to find one of those :/


Where as mine lets you have your laptop on your desk and sets up a separate wireless router on the floor - clear of the proxy and firewall - so that you don't do stuff "on the network". It was really weird at first, but I've gotten a hell of a lot of coding done on my side project that I wouldn't necessarily get to after work.

Granted, I work at an IT help desk where we're extremely busy in spurts (Especially if a Citrix server falls over) but there's long stretches in some days - especially fridays - where it's like sitting around for an hour at a time. Burn out is pretty high, it's actually an ingenious solution as i've worked at several call-center environments before and having the outlet really helps.

It's a little weird, though, I get a about two hours a day off the phone to work on other dev projects (I'm angling into the dev shop, but everyone starts on the help desk - especially everyone's without formal degrees) Sometimes I get to work with ASP.NET, Javascript\CSS\HTML, PHP and Python all in one day, sometimes it gets confusing =\
22 Oct, 2008, elanthis wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
LOL, as an employer, that was the first thing that came to mind when i read the first post of this thread. Getting caught goofing off at work is a sure fire way to find yourself without a job and with the world slipping into recession, you don't want to give your employer any reason to add you to the staff cut backs that are bound to happen.


Man, you guys need to get government IT jobs. At my old job we'd spend time watching movies, my boss would play Ever Quest, and I'd work on various personal projects (including AweMUD). Government doesn't go out of business, government doesn't shrink, government doesn't let people go (even the truly incompetent ones). Plus, if you're actually good at what you do (like my ex-boss and I), then you're mostly just there to be on call – nothing ever broke, so we rarely ever had any actual work to do.

Of course, the other option is to be self employed – like I am now – which is almost as good. Granted, these days I actually do have a stack of real work to get done every day, but the hours are totally flexible. If I feel like taking a huge break in the middle of the day to work on personal stuff (or just goof around), nobody can stop me. :)
22 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Dot-bomb jobs were nice for that too. Unfortunately, they went away… but while it lasted, it was fun to use the 119-inch conference room wall and 1024x768 projector to play X-Tension, or watch some DVD's in the afternoon.
22 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
My company places no restrictions on network/firewalls other than "use your judgment". The result is that you don't feel like you're being nannied, and you can waste time when it is productive to do so. Everybody needs the occasional break, after all, and from their perspective it means we're happier to stay 8, 9, 10, 11, … hours at the office. So in some sense everybody wins.

The problem is that it kind of spoils you. I have many friends – and I realize that it is the norm anyhow – who've done internships at companies that have draconian restrictions on ports you can connect to, and even what sites you can visit. After having had the opposite treatment, the thought of that is repulsive…

quixadhal said:
Dot-bomb jobs were nice for that too. Unfortunately, they went away… but while it lasted, it was fun to use the 119-inch conference room wall and 1024x768 projector to play X-Tension, or watch some DVD's in the afternoon.

And on the other hand, it was/is pretty much expected that in a startup environment, you spend 11+ hours every day at the office, and maybe even come in on Saturday since you have nothing else to do. People don't always realize that the perks come with an implicit cost, even though the perks might outweigh the cost.
22 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
Yep, unfortunately, when your start-up is purchased by a company on the west coast that's doing the "pufferfish" dance (buying everyone they can to make themselves LOOK like a big enough fish for an even bigger company to buy) with venture capital, your product often gets shelved and you find yourself with a branch office full of idle employees who aren't ALLOWED to do anything productive.

Given the state of the economy, I suspect those days are finally gone for good, and that's not a bad thing. It was fun while it lasted though. :)
22 Oct, 2008, Guest wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Vassi said:
Granted, I work at an IT help desk where we're extremely busy in spurts (Especially if a Citrix server falls over) but there's long stretches in some days - especially fridays - where it's like sitting around for an hour at a time. Burn out is pretty high, it's actually an ingenious solution as i've worked at several call-center environments before and having the outlet really helps.


I worked help desk too. Same sort of stuff I'd wager even, since we had some Citrix apps ourselves. Monday was the busy day, Friday we may as well have all been playing WoW or whatever. But no. Not according to the management. If we weren't doing company work 100% of the time for some reason, then we were wasting company time and would get written up for it. That meant no internet surfing except for job related functions. No connecting to your servers to make sure your pet projects are still functioning. No IM sessions. No telnet. Very aggressive proxy filtering, etc. And that was just us in IT, who had "elevated" access to the domain.

In fact in IT we spent a great deal more time inventing new ways to restrict access than we did in solving people's actual problems. Which ironically enough were often caused by those same draconian restrictions. Yes. Burnout rates were quite high. Morale was very very low. And the busy work projects turned the place into a glorified telemarketing operation with their insane automatic kiosk ticketing system. It made many people very very unhappy. The smart ones all left. I just wish I'd left before they fired me for essentially burning out and getting fed up with their ridiculousness.

Another bit of irony of course is that the manager I used to work for seems to no longer be employed there. Word has it from people I still know there that she got canned for an ethics violation. I wonder if that little birdie at corporate actually did something with the two reports I filed :)
22 Oct, 2008, Igabod wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
[edit to correct faulty information]

check out this thread for some help. it mentions using the flash client on mudgamers.com to connect to muds listed there, and if your particular mud isnt listed then you can look here for the actual flash client, i'm not sure what needs to be done to get to your mud with that but i think that was discussed in the thread i mentioned earlier. hope this helps. i myself have tons of free time at my job and since i'm the manager (aka the only person with access to the cameras) i can do whatever i want. there's not really much that can be done on the 11pm to 7am shift but thats why i chose it :)
22 Oct, 2008, Dean wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
I had a job at a local community IT center once, basically a place that offered computer access to the local community, ran cheap IT classes and so forth. At the start it was strict, I couldn't go anywhere near a game or MUD. After a while though they loosened up and decided that, instead of me sitting half out of my mind all day waiting for something to do they'd let me play games, seeing as the only things I really had to do was ensure that the computers were running smoothly, be there incase a "customer" needed help or sit in on a class.

In the end the administrator of the place even asked me to write up a short course on computer games that I could run there. Shame due to lack of government funding it closed down, fun times. :devil:
22 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
I've worked at shops at both ends of the spectrum, my own experiences indicate to me that, generally, if they're blocking outbound ports then they don't want you to "get around" them.
22 Oct, 2008, David Haley wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
That almost goes without saying, right :wink:

Picture the IT guy saying: "Nah, we blocked them, but it's perfectly fine to trick the blocking system to get around the blocks!"
22 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
Unfortunately, it seems that almost is the operative word there… :wink:
22 Oct, 2008, quixadhal wrote in the 18th comment:
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An awful lot of what goes on in the corporate minefields boils down to who's accountable at the end of the day. The corporate policy may well say "No gaming, no non-work-related internet use", and the local sysadmin might well say "Ok, I read you the policy, now don't let me catch you using the proxy on port 8173."

The fact is, if the sysadmin doesn't enforce a policy, you'll be "allowed" to get around such things until someone higher up notices, at which point the sysadmin will claim it was a mistake in the firewall configuration (if he's nice), or that you must have hacked your way around it (if he's annoyed). In either case, the joy ride will be over AND your office will be on the watch list.

I think draconian rules only serve to make employees less productive, as their morale hits the floor AND they're discouraged from trying to solve problems by using the community. I know when I was doing perl work, being able to use perlmonks, and IM with other people who used perl or PostgreSQL really helped.

But, unless you're the boss, you don't get to set the rules. You can try to convince them to change their policies, but you can also try to blow a 30' bubble with Baseball card gum. Good luck!
28 Oct, 2008, blueneko wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Goodness! The various responses to this thread spoke volumes about the individual posters.

Since no one knows where I work or what I do, I will let the mystery remain. And do feel free to tell me how to spend my down time at work. :biggrin:

P.S. November is National Novel Writing Month. Think I should write another one at work? :rolleyes:
29 Oct, 2008, Conner wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
blueneko said:
Goodness! The various responses to this thread spoke volumes about the individual posters.

Since no one knows where I work or what I do, I will let the mystery remain. And do feel free to tell me how to spend my down time at work. :biggrin:

P.S. November is National Novel Writing Month. Think I should write another one at work? :rolleyes:

Don't make the mistake of thinking that every response was in some way directed at/to you..
As for November, if your employer is cool with that, and/or requires of it of you, then yes, by all means, do so! :wink:
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