Turned in a Help Desk ticket at the office to see if they could diagnose my PC’s woes, i.e., that no application but IE can get out to the Internet.<\/p>\n
Okay, so I used to work the Help Desk (and still do, in a private capacity), so I have a great deal sympathy for HD techies and the kinds of flaky problems they deal with on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
But when I note, very clearly, multiple times, that all applications except IE cannot access the Internet<\/em>, demonstrating same, and ennumerating as examples Yahoo Instant Messenger and Firefox — then focusing on Firefox’s settings, and deleting all the cache and temp files therein, really truly does not constitute useful diagnostics.\u00a0 Nor is suggesting uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox a very good idea.\u00a0 And let’s not go to the “we might have to try rebuilding the machine” bullshit.<\/p>\n So after about 20 minutes, the conclusion is that maybe it’s a network thing, a firewall thing, etc. (um, yeah, I think I suggested that about two minutes after you entered), but he’s not aware of any crackdown on all apps except IE, but there might be.\u00a0 Which is plausible, but which I’d like some confirmation of and discussion regarding (since I can point to a legitimate business reason for YIM, at the very least).<\/p>\n So he’s going to ask around and see if he can find out if there’s some firewall issue that he’s not aware of, and maybe forward the ticket to the network guys.\u00a0We’ll see if that helps things any.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"