Bad firewall, bad

Friday morning I get up and decide to update my blogs with information about Thanksgiving here. Hmm... none of the sites I want to access will load. Weird. I can get onto AIM though, so I complain about my problem to my friend and speculate that since I'm on dialup in a DSL world that chances are all them little school kiddies out of school at 8am Friday morning are online catching up on their surfing and playing. She points out it is more likely the shoppers hitting online sales early for Black Friday. Dratted East Coasters!

So I resign myself to not surfing the sites I want to and check the few I can access, which are not really worth checking out for more than a couple minutes, and kick back to work on my website and chatter on AIM.

This morning I cheerfully log in and go looking for websites. Oh look! Google! YES!! -- dratit, it loaded but now I can't get anywhere on it. ::pouts:: My admin site at PlatonicSolid.info loads up good. Everything working beautifully there apparently. But will my new website load? nooo. :-/ drats.

I'm sulking and pouting and generally annoyed and wondering why I'm still having trouble when I get this weird thought about it and wonder if it's not a more locally based problem. Is my firewall program getting fussy like it has over my Outlook e-mail in the past? (Got so tired of Outlook never working when I wanted it to that I switched to Thunderbird.) Off I go to open the firewall and tell it to stop all its devious little protective tactics for a few minutes and let me look at something. And yup! You know it - there *IS* a world online and my computer had just decided that it was too scary for me to venture out into. Bad firewall, bad!

So, I looked at a few of the sites I had been told I was denied getting to then went back and turned the firewall back on and it seems to have figured out now that it is not necessary to keep me locked up in the safe confines of Windows, I can be let out into the big scary world to play.

::shaking head:: this is where we're headed with these computers you know. Intelligent machines that determine for us if it's safe to venture outside or if we should stay indoors and be kept safe from possible harm. One day we'll all be locked away in our houses protected from potential threats by our computers that will decide for us what we can see and where we can go.

Great backdrop there for a science fiction novel if nothing else, too bad it's close to being science fact.