Oh my goodness. It feels like forever since I've done this. And yes, I do have a good explanation :P
Okay on my computer, my parents installed this horrible little program called K9 Web Protect. If any of you have heard of this and/or have this on your PC I pity you. If you haven't heard of it its basically web protection on steroids. Does Barry Bonds ring any bells?
Steroids, for all you smoke signal using, buggy driving, jukebox listening, one-tooth-in-mouth-grinning, cow-hugging, off-the-grid-living homeschoolers, are the drugs that athletes use to enhance their strength and stamina so they can preform better. Totally illegal.
Anyway I have this program on my computer, and for some reason it was blocking blogs. Mine included. When I asked my parents to unblock it, they were like, "Oh darn. we forgot the password." So that's how I was blog-less for like four months. Finally today, I asked my mom again, and she miraculously remembered the passcode. Fishy, right? Nah I don't think they did it on purpose, though there are times I wonder.... :)
So, since I couldn't really write down everything that's happened to me in the past couple months, I'm going to do a couple posts in a couple of days. Even though school is starting tomorrow. I won't get into that though till a couple posts down the road. Okay lets see....cool things that happened to me during that past while....? I suppose I'll simply start with the first thing that went down after track.
LIFEGUARDING!!!!!!
Ahhhhhhh shoot me now! Not with guns, of course cause that would be mean *sad face*. No it wasn't that bad. Really. I know almost everyone I talk to about lifeguarding thinks that lifeguards are lazier then Barack Obama's dog BO. Or even lazier then the Prez' himself. In all truth though, we save lives. And get amazing free tans. And get to swim for free. And get paid a LOT to sit in the sun watching annoying little children disobey the rules. That was pretty much my life for two months. Oh and there was that whole 'saving lives' part that I wasn't too crazy about. I mean, come on. How badly do those dang pool rats need to be saved? Not bad enough for me to get off my warm guard-chair, jump in the cold water, and be cold the rest of the day.
Okay okay, I'm probably giving lifeguards a bad name. We actually do save kids, and we are the best people to watch your children have fun in the water. Though it is very frustrating sometimes. Like the times when the same kid does the same thing for the hundredth time that you have told him not to do hundreds of times! Gaaaahhhhh! And then you're blowing your whistle like every ten seconds, and when you do, all of the kids save the bad ones look at you. Despite this though, it is a good job. I worked with some insanely awesome people, and I got payed decently well. Plus, I taught swim lessons.
Awwwwwe yeah! There's just something about kids being scared the first week, and then by the last day they are going off the high dive that just makes you glad you're their teacher. I think its just the whole thing of helping them to be a good swimmer. Maybe not 'good' per say, but at least safe :P. I don't know that may have been a bit too philosophical. I did have a great time though, and I'm planning on working their again next year. Oh, I forgot to say that the pool I worked at is the Aberdeen Aquatic Center. We have a fifty meter eight lane lap pool, two diving boards, a play feature in a zero depth pool, a lazy river, two body slides, and one tube slide. It's pretty great, and we make lots of moola which is all that matters right?
So if you're ever in SD and you're passing through Aberdeen, you should check it out. Cause I may just save your poor drowning self :D. Alright, I'll leave here. I'll probably post again tomorrow or sometime with something awesome. Don't chew too much cud my HomeSheep! Till next time~
Okay on my computer, my parents installed this horrible little program called K9 Web Protect. If any of you have heard of this and/or have this on your PC I pity you. If you haven't heard of it its basically web protection on steroids. Does Barry Bonds ring any bells?
Steroids, for all you smoke signal using, buggy driving, jukebox listening, one-tooth-in-mouth-grinning, cow-hugging, off-the-grid-living homeschoolers, are the drugs that athletes use to enhance their strength and stamina so they can preform better. Totally illegal.
Anyway I have this program on my computer, and for some reason it was blocking blogs. Mine included. When I asked my parents to unblock it, they were like, "Oh darn. we forgot the password." So that's how I was blog-less for like four months. Finally today, I asked my mom again, and she miraculously remembered the passcode. Fishy, right? Nah I don't think they did it on purpose, though there are times I wonder.... :)
So, since I couldn't really write down everything that's happened to me in the past couple months, I'm going to do a couple posts in a couple of days. Even though school is starting tomorrow. I won't get into that though till a couple posts down the road. Okay lets see....cool things that happened to me during that past while....? I suppose I'll simply start with the first thing that went down after track.
LIFEGUARDING!!!!!!
Ahhhhhhh shoot me now! Not with guns, of course cause that would be mean *sad face*. No it wasn't that bad. Really. I know almost everyone I talk to about lifeguarding thinks that lifeguards are lazier then Barack Obama's dog BO. Or even lazier then the Prez' himself. In all truth though, we save lives. And get amazing free tans. And get to swim for free. And get paid a LOT to sit in the sun watching annoying little children disobey the rules. That was pretty much my life for two months. Oh and there was that whole 'saving lives' part that I wasn't too crazy about. I mean, come on. How badly do those dang pool rats need to be saved? Not bad enough for me to get off my warm guard-chair, jump in the cold water, and be cold the rest of the day.
Okay okay, I'm probably giving lifeguards a bad name. We actually do save kids, and we are the best people to watch your children have fun in the water. Though it is very frustrating sometimes. Like the times when the same kid does the same thing for the hundredth time that you have told him not to do hundreds of times! Gaaaahhhhh! And then you're blowing your whistle like every ten seconds, and when you do, all of the kids save the bad ones look at you. Despite this though, it is a good job. I worked with some insanely awesome people, and I got payed decently well. Plus, I taught swim lessons.
Awwwwwe yeah! There's just something about kids being scared the first week, and then by the last day they are going off the high dive that just makes you glad you're their teacher. I think its just the whole thing of helping them to be a good swimmer. Maybe not 'good' per say, but at least safe :P. I don't know that may have been a bit too philosophical. I did have a great time though, and I'm planning on working their again next year. Oh, I forgot to say that the pool I worked at is the Aberdeen Aquatic Center. We have a fifty meter eight lane lap pool, two diving boards, a play feature in a zero depth pool, a lazy river, two body slides, and one tube slide. It's pretty great, and we make lots of moola which is all that matters right?
So if you're ever in SD and you're passing through Aberdeen, you should check it out. Cause I may just save your poor drowning self :D. Alright, I'll leave here. I'll probably post again tomorrow or sometime with something awesome. Don't chew too much cud my HomeSheep! Till next time~
oh dude - you're too funny.
ReplyDeleteAh, my man, fear not! I totally sympathize with your dark plight, as I once had to endure the same wretched disturbance of an even worse filter.
ReplyDeleteThe crazy part? I found the solution to defeating by doing a Google search...on a filtered computer. The filter was too stupid to block a search on how to kill it! And I discovered more ways to get around it, like loading up a live Linux distro off of a CD or USB drive. I chose not to kill it and rarely used the Linux distro method because of one little feature: the filter gave daily activity reports. A complete blank from me would have been a big indicator something weird was going on.
It wasn't that I was trying to access the salacious parts of the internet. I was just plain annoyed that I couldn't use the internet like a normal person because of all the sites it blocked. To make things worse, I was experiencing a growing interest in computers, technology, and how they worked because I was starting to become the computer geek that I am. The filter just got in the way, because anything I did to my computer usually made it freak out, think I was trying to circumvent it, and deny ALL internet access. I secretly suspected too that it was bloated and made our already crappy internet connection slower than ever, meaning I was just plain miserable on the internet. (When I finally got it off, I found out I was right.)
Perhaps the worst part was how conflicted I felt. On one hand, I respected my dad, understood his reasons for the filter, and genuinely wanted to respect his authority in this matter. On the other hand, the filter was just inhibiting my desire to learn about and experiment on computers, which was a perfectly fine desire with nothing wrong about it. Not to mention the daily frustration that it brought to me and my sister, since we couldn't access a lot of legitimate sites. Negotiating on the matter was proving fruitless, because I don't think my dad understood HOW the filter worked; he just left it on the default obviously-too-restrictive settings. (Most people think of them like blacklists; it only blocks the bad stuff. Most filters however work more like a whitelist; they block EVERYTHING unless you allow something.)
Finally though, I hit upon a solution to satisfy my tortured soul of the matter. I realized that my dad was effectively paying $50 a year for a filter service that was essentially worthless at filtering me and my sister (she too was tired of its slow, bloated self and truly dumb filtering). So I just flat-out told him that he was wasting money because I could circumvent it any time I wanted to because I knew too much about computers. Talk about an easy fix.
Good thing too. That filter program/service has some new features. Versions for Mac, iOS, and Android. Some sort of filtering system that filters ALL internet connected devices on a single network. Uh.
Just remember, the biggest reason why filters are useless is because with technology there is ALWAYS a way to bypass something. There will never be such a thing as a foolproof, hackproof system.
Wow sounds like you had an ordeal :P . I don't really like the protection a whole lot but I don't think its bad enough for me to go against my parents. I suppose all situations are different though. I'm glad you got your freedom in the end :)
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you back in the blogosphere! Hey so maybe lifeguarding isn't the best job in the world but it definitely has its merits - and you can't argue with lots of moolah :-) Looking forward to your next posts!
ReplyDelete