I’ve had a few com­ments from peo­ple that Inno­cent Bystander “just ain’t right” in Inter­net Explorer. Which doesn’t sur­prise me really, given the issues I’ve had with the browser before before.

I had a bit of time to spare at work, so I thought I’d check out the prob­lem. See what’s going on. I typed in the address, hit Enter and got this screen:

Yep, my site has been blocked by the inter­net fil­ter and I’m will­ing to bet that this tag is the culprit.

I could remove the offend­ing tag, but what hap­pens if that wasn’t it? What if it’s some­thing else on the site thats grab­bing the filter’s atten­tion? Do I remove the offend­ing item (be it tag, post or image) again? And if that doesn’t fix it? How far would I got to ensure my site gets around the filter?

I could keep ask­ing these ques­tions, going deeper and deeper into the rab­bit hole, but that way lies crazi­ness. Self-censoring really isn’t an option. Inno­cent Bystander is my own per­sonal web­site when I’m work­ing on my own per­sonal web­site. The best thing to do, I think, is just to keep post­ing as I am now and damn the filters.

Really, they’re the ones miss­ing out.

Of course there is still that prob­lem with my site and IE. But I guess I can just blow the dust off Inter­net Explorer on the home com­puter and tool around there. Leav­ing my work life and sexy blog separate.

Day One — Mon­day

I arrived at the new job at 10am, after being told to come in some time after 9:30, and was intro­duced to the cowork­ers and shown my desk. I barely had enough time to drop my bag before I was into a meet­ing. That must be a record there. The meet­ing was a great way for me to dis­cover just how much is actu­ally done there.

After that I was given a stack of guide­lines an man­u­als to flip through. Once I was done I started play­ing around with the var­i­ous CMS they use while I waited for the super­vi­sor to fin­ish a con­ver­sa­tion. I asked her what I should be doing next, her response was to play around with the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems. Score one for initiative!

Day Two — Tues­day

When I walked in to the office I was greeted with a “Happy Day Two!” It’s the lit­tle things, really.

I was given two tasks: brush up on the department’s style guide; and have a look at the intranet. They couldn’t find the style guide, so I sug­gested I look for it when I was on the intranet. There’s that ini­tia­tive again. I ended up find­ing two guides in a com­pleted unre­lated sys­tem and spent the next few hours pour­ing through the 27 page Visual Guide and 112 page Pub­lish­ing Guide.

After that I was given a few pieces of con­tent work that I threw myself into. Hav­ing just about con­quered the CMS on Day One, this task was no prob­lem for me. After that it was back into the reading.

At lunchtime noticed some­thing very cool. Tues­day means boxes of fresh fruit are deliv­ered and dis­trib­uted to var­i­ous caches around the office. Apples, pear, bananas and oranges. I won­der if the sum­mer months will bring extra variety?

Day Three — Wednes­day

Not much to report here (at least accord­ing to my notes). I arrived a few min­utes after 9am, but was only beaten to the office by one other guy. Yep, I’m still in the pub­lic service.

Cor­po­rate induc­tion at 10am. The pre­sen­ter men­tioned how cool it was that we got free fruit every week. I had to agree.

Once back at my desk I was given enough work to last me until the end of the day. While work­ing my way through them I even man­aged to break the CMS. I was then told that it con­tains a lot of bugs and not to be wor­ried when things like that happen.

Day Four — Thurs­day

Today marked an aus­pi­cious occa­sion: the first time I’d worn a suit to work.

If I was going to be craft­ing HTML by hand, I needed some­thing bet­ter than Notepad, so installed Fire­fox and Crim­son Edit on my machine. I’m sur­prised it took this long actu­ally. So far I’ve man­aged to resist the urge to install an RSS feed reader and an IM client though.

Due to issues with the CMS I unin­stalled IE7 and reverted back to IE6 on my cowork­ers advice. Hey, if I was break­ing the SOE, I might as well go all out. Really, it’s the IT department’s fault for leav­ing the machines so open.

I started my pro­fes­sional writ­ing career today, with three arti­cles that will appear in the intranet and weekly ebul­letin. Hav­ing a bit of time to spare before the end of the day I mocked up a rough HTML page show­ing how the intranet ver­sion would look.

Also today I realised I was not the nerdi­est guy in the office. The shocks just keep coming.

Day Five — Fri­day

Ah Fri­day. Where nor­mally I’d push the bound­aries of the casual dress pol­icy, I instead decided to arrive in full suited regalia — sans tie.

More com­plex con­tent tasks were given to me today, though I’m quickly learn­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of the CMS. Some very inter­est­ing bugs have emerged!

I was also shown how to cre­ate sta­tis­ti­cal reports for the sites today. I had over 50 reports to run, but ended up pro­duc­ing them so quickly the ana­lyt­ics guy called bull­shit when I told him I was done. He had to see it to believe it.

After spend­ing the first four days admir­ing the view out my 31st floor win­dow I finally cracked and brought my cam­era to work to snap off a few shots. These will appear on Flickr once I’ve cleaned them up a bit. Reflec­tions are a bitch.

I had a lot of fun this week, and that’s not just the hon­ey­moon period talk­ing. There’s a lot of work com­ing my way in the future that I look for­ward to: con­tent changes for sub­do­mains I never touched on, new projects and new con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems to play around with. Oh yes, I think I’m going to like it here.

While the par­ents were away on hol­i­day I called up the com­pany my car was insured through, hop­ing to get the insur­ance trans­fered into my name and update a few other details. No wor­ries, they said, we’ll send you out some (read: many) forms to fill in.When the pile arrived, I spied a note on the top of page one advis­ing that only the owner of the vehi­cle can apply for insur­ance. Given that Dad is the owner of my car (due to other insurance-related fun) I filed away the forms with the expec­ta­tion that I’d go through them again when Dad was back home. Then, of course, I promptly for­got about them.

On Mon­day Dad called to say that he’d received a let­ter from the insur­ance com­pany say­ing that my pol­icy had been can­celled due to a non-payment. This was strange news, given that my insur­ance was direct deb­ited from my account for the last seven years and required exactly zero input from me. I told Dad of my plan to move the insur­ance into my name and, after a bit of trou­bleshoot­ing, we fig­ured out that not long after they sent out the trans­fer forms they can­celled the pol­icy. Because thats what you do to help your cus­tomers. You delete them from your system.

Luck­ily for me Dad was on the case almost straight away and by Tues­day night I was cov­ered under a new pol­icy with a new com­pany. Rat­ing One for life, yo.

Just think­ing about those few weeks where I drove around unin­sured makes my skin crawl. It’s hard enough deal­ing with my own insur­ance cov­er­age. I’d hate to have been at the mercy of some­one else’s insur­ance com­pany, had our cars attempted some ama­teur panel beating.