Left Lane Ends

My cousin was in town last night as he made his rounds around the country to install a new networking device at several of his company’s remote locations. We got into some networking ‘talk’ (or jargon, for those looking up the technical reference) and I mentioned that networking is all about CONTROL. He smiled, nodded his head and said, ‘yep, I LOVE control!’ It’s neither good nor bad - just the nature of networking. The more you can control your network, the better off you are.

So, that leads me to my sad morning. I knew it was coming… but I still pushed on until the last minutes that it could hold its breath… Networking has been discussing a ‘new product’ - very secret, very hush-hush - that will give them more control over the network. I won’t even say the name of it (it’s pretty hard to even research on the internet - doable, but hard) for fear of being repremanded. I’m sure you can picture my complete and utter joy at this news.

Firefox has officially been blocked district-wide. It is an apparent danger to society and therefore must be shut down. I first punched my left palm and growled when I jumped over to IE and didn’t have my tabs. (we can’t install the new version for compatibility reasons.) I will miss my tabs sorely. I vaguly remember the days of right clicking to ‘open in new window’ in IE and feel a dull, angry burning in my stomach knowing I will have to go back to that. My second palm-punch/growl-combo came when I realized I lost my built in spell check that was SUCH a great feature in Firefox 2.0. You see, I know when I misspell a word and I LIKE the fact that I get to recognize the words that I misspell on a regular basis. I look FORWARD to those little red dots under my misspelled words! I even LEARN from them and force myself to learn correct spellings of those words… so much for THAT. I now have to copy this whole freakin’ post into Google Docs (cause I SURE as heck ain’t gonna us MS WORD on this sad day!!! $#%#$()%*#$) just to check my spelling, and I’ll have to update my Wordpress Blog to the latest version to get the new spell checker. *sigh* The final time I ‘went inside to my angry place’ was my realization that I no longer had my wonderfully integrated bookmark tool - de.licio.us. I have scrapped bookmarking and need to get myself setup to most effectivley us de.licio.us within IE. I know, I know… It’s a few extra clicks - BUT THOSE CLICKS ADD UP, dangit!

Oh, Firefox… you are out there, but I can not access you. Miguel Guhlin says in a recent post:

Why should we continue to invest millions of dollars in school technology if it has already been established that schools aren’t changing? Wouldn’t it be better to accept schools as they are–institutions as flawed as the people who spend significant amounts of time in them, trying to justify those hours by any reason/research possible? Of course, the answer is really about whether any of us can change who we are, how we think for the children we serve.

I know it isn’t a ‘big deal’. I know I can use another browser. Something just doesn’t feel right, though. I’m feeling like I can’t get off the highway these days… Is it worth trying? Is it even possible?

~ I miss you, Firefox…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under blocking, open source, edtech, 1:1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.