Views from Medina Road

Lawrence Person posted a note late Sunday on Slashdot about his Ghost in the Shell review, resulting in a predictable huge spike in traffic to Locus Online on Monday: 23,010 visits, from 24569 distinct Internet addresses. 14,101 of the total entered the site at Lawrence's review, and 13,845 of them left the site from that page. (I hope some of them clicked the banner ad while they were there!)

Meanwhile, the effects of the sale of my day job employer by one large aerospace concern to another large aerospace concern last Summer have finally reached the desktops of me and my fellow employees; this past week our PCs were 'transitioned' (via simply swapping out the hard drives) to a new standard platform installation, which includes MS Office 2003, different e-mail addresses, and greater restrictions on web access. The change in e-mail has meant that a few people have gotten confusing bounce responses when sending e-mail to me at online@locusmag.com, because I'd had those e-mails auto-forwarded to my old work address. Apologies; it should be cleared up by now.

The greater restrictions on web access are a matter of corporate philosophy, I suppose. The old company prohibited only obvious porn sites, as far as I knew; the new one prohibits web-based email pages (AOL, Yahoo, etc.), sites about games, and 'personal storage' sites, just to mention the ones I've come across already. Nothing critical to anything I'd do in support of the website... not that I, cough cough.