Am I imagining things...

...or is the Johnson County Library's Wi-Fi actually getting better, albeit only slightly?


I stopped in at the Corinth branch today to return a CD and decided while I was there to fire up the laptop to see if there'd been any change in the last few months. Lo and behold, one of the websites I use to gauge the degree of overblocking a user might find on a filtered connection is coming straight through. (Never mind what the URL is; that's for me to know and those whose locations I may evaluate in the future to worry about. I will tell you this, however; it is NOT a pornsite, and neither are any of the others I employ for this purpose.) Not only that, but some of the dumber things this network's filtering used to do seem to have fallen by the wayside.

And while I'm at it, I need to make a bit of a clarification and perhaps offer an apology to the library for something I wrote last March. I laid my inability to access some features on TV Guide's website to the library's filter, and this may not have been the case. Although i did get the blockpage message in the online listings grid, I later found out that the grid was having problems at that time displaying properly in certain browsers-Firefox, which I use exclusively on the Web, among them. Anyway, the site, which TV Guide has only recently fixed, now works perfectly with no blocking messages.

That said, however, I'm still a bit miffed that JCL is continuing to block access to Usenet, and Spybot users should continue to limit their use of this network, since you still can't update Spybot on it. Hope springs eternal, though. Maybe what I'm sure were a legion of complaints over that nonsensical filtering finally started to have an effect. If we keep at it over these other issues, we could get where we need to with this thing.

By the way, Corinth was the one unwired JCL location I hadn't visited since they were lit up. And I'm sorry, but I've got to start beating up on these nice folks again. This is easily the most laptop-unfriendly library I've been in with the possible exception of KCMO's Sugar Creek branch. When I say there are absolutely no power outlets to be had, I mean it. I'm already on my second battery, so don't come without a spare. Also, pay attention to the access point you connect to. (Memo to JCL's IT director: SSIDs are case-sensitive, or did you know that? Also, if you can give me one good reason why you need more than one, I'd love to share it with my readers. I wonder if you have any idea how much frustration this causes someone moving between locations?) There are two, wireless.jocolibrary and wireless.jocolibrary2. The second one doesn't work for some reason.

And one final update: The filter seems to be getting a little smarter, but it's still dumb. No sooner did I get this post up than I ran into another of the same silly overblocks for which this network is notorious, replete with one of the hopelessly geeky explanations that makes DansGuardian so endearing. Maybe all this is just wishful thinking on my part.