New Haven Independent

Posted by: Edward_H | February 17, 2009 11:46 AM

This is common practice in the real world. This should have been done long ago.

Posted by: k | February 17, 2009 11:53 AM

Should have been done long time ago. How can someone be mad that they took games away.These are the people that need to be laid off or better yet fired.Next they will fight to have it in the union contract that they can play games on work time.It is amazing that the city employees such idiots with a shitty work ethic.You didnt need a firewall just send a memo that states "New policy,work or get fired" To those who were playing games on work time I hope you all lose your jobs and your unions cant do shit about it.

Posted by: 2nd Amendment | February 17, 2009 12:07 PM

Hmmm...I wonder if King John is going to disable online access to the Independent...y'know-kind of like Mushroom Management: keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em sh*t.

Posted by: anon | February 17, 2009 12:46 PM

Why does this matter when the city doesn't do public performance reviews anyways?

Posted by: robn | February 17, 2009 12:56 PM

but Bejewalled can sharply hone the spatial/mathmatical skills of city employees and should therefore be considered job training

Posted by: Garth Chouteau | February 17, 2009 1:24 PM

It's worth noting that Bejeweled is the ONLY video game scientificaly proven to reduce stress:http://www.popcap.com/press/release.php?pid=393

AND it's among the games that tens of millions of white collar workers say they play at work regularly, with surprising mental and physical health benefits: http://www.popcap.com/press/release.php?pid=227

You can limit people's access to 'fun' during work hours, but unless you lock them in a windowless box, they WILL take time out to decompress a few times a day...consider this: the worker who goes out for smoke breaks 5 times a day is not only 'losing productivity' based on the strictest definition of the word, that worker will also cost taxpayers considerably more money down the road in medical expenses.

Garth Chouteau
Communications Director, PopCap Games

Posted by: New Spanish Haven | February 17, 2009 2:50 PM

Jeez Garth, that sure is a self-serving public interest posting on your part.... I'm not surprised that you would choose the side of the unproductive worker that plays games during normal business hours, regardless of whether on lunch or on break.....

I'm sure your statistical studies looked at whether these folks strictly limit their time to only the free hours that they consider to be theirs even though it's the taxpayers monies that are paying for their free-ride to the internet.

Posted by: b | February 17, 2009 5:30 PM

Perhaps by portraying city workers a lazy, videogame playing do-nothings, the mayor is hoping to lessen any criticism of the 241 layoffs he is about to enact. That strategy will doubtless work with people like "k", above, who view any and every public servant as a waste of taxpayer money, even though k obviously knows little of how government works, much less how to spell or keep a civil tongue.

Posted by: robn | February 17, 2009 5:35 PM

Garth,

Lot of things have been scientifically proven to reduce stress, like video games, alchohol consumption and sex. Its just that we don't want city employees doing any of those things on city time....or on city desks....yechh! sorry couldn't help myself.

Posted by: Hood Rebel | February 17, 2009 6:28 PM

Why pay for expensive firewalls that an astute 11-year old can go around.

Let the employees play, surf or whatever, monitor it then dock the pay of the perpetrators. That would at least pay the City back the money that these idle employees wasted.

Posted by: grey | February 17, 2009 6:39 PM

Anyone on who posts on here in criticism of anyone spending work time by doing other things is a hypocrite and an undignified liar. Nobody likes the straight-laced party-pooper at the office. It's my guess that you don't find yourselves being invited by your coworkers to too many happy hours. I can't help but notice that most of these comments were posted before 5 pm. Hell, I'm at work right now typing this. Shirk with pride my fellow hard-working Americans, you deserve it!

Posted by: V | February 17, 2009 7:39 PM

I never play games at work. I'm too busy busting my ass. All these lazy turds need to start earning their taxpayer-provided paychecks.

Posted by: The Truth | February 17, 2009 8:17 PM

This sure does look like a hit at the unions the day after the deadline for concessions. Johnny Boy looks stupid doing it. He has had years to get this under control. I think he is a closet Bejeweled nerd. Can you use FOI to get records off all the web sites he has visited Paul?

Posted by: robn | February 17, 2009 9:19 PM

GREY,

Decent point except that playing Bejewalled is worthless self-gratification whereas the NHI is worthwhile and informative. Touche mon frere.

Posted by: M | February 17, 2009 11:38 PM

Great! Video games are one thing, but the city doesn't realize that, by blocking streaming video and radio, they take away learning experiences for students. It's tough to teach a second language when you can't show them news videos from around the world and/or let them listen to the radio from a different country. Not all students have the ability to do this at home.

Posted by: Sarah28 | February 18, 2009 12:18 AM

" "They took away my games," harrumphed one worker last week. She said she resorted to reading the Independent instead. "

This is one city worker with nerves (or should I say, chutzpah), the size of watermelon!

She still has a J-O-B !!!

Posted by: DAFeder | February 18, 2009 12:42 PM

"Illegal move" featured in the graphic. Hilarious!

David

Posted by: robn | February 18, 2009 1:05 PM

Why not undo the firewall, but then periodically print out and post in the atrium of city hall, users and websites visited . I'm sure we'd see boatloads of amusing URLs. Kind of like a fresh, 21st century version of the Scarlett Letter.

Posted by: Streever | February 18, 2009 1:39 PM

Was it really a necessary move to block streaming radio?

What about employees who want to listen to NPR during the day?

The mayor was just on Where We Live. Seems like it'd be useful for City Hall employees to be able to hear it while they work. Does the tech person at City Hall believe that people are incapable of listening to radio & working?

Who cares about Bejewelled? this is a standard policy at workplaces.

The only thing really surprising is blocking streaming radio. Totally ridiculous. Perhaps the IT department wants employees to only listen to CDs, or, to have to buy a radio to listen to radio while working.

What's next? Find a way to shield the building against radio waves & start persecuting employees who dare to bring in an FM radio? Come on people :).

What about Facebook? it's a tool that City Hall is using for the mayoral campaign, events they are organizing, & a variety of other things. It's trivial and a waste of time to treat your employees like little kids who have to be kept out of a cookie box.

Maybe the IT department should spend a little productive time on the website?

It's a backwards, archaic mess of code & a morass of text devoid of usability, clear design, or proper architecture. It's unusable & not updateable by City Hall staff in an easy manner.

Seems that the priorities are a little backwards.

Posted by: Streever | February 18, 2009 1:41 PM

p.s. Want to play Bejewelled at work? or listen to streaming radio? Or do your job, & use facebook to coordinate volunteers for the next Street Smarts festival or other events?

just connect via a proxy: here is a list of free ones.
http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml

You can also pay for access to a proxy which is a lot more reliable.

Good luck. If you're looking for other ways to get around the restrictions, simply check what the citizens of China do. Their government limits internet access--also blocking NPR and American media--but the listening audience from China is still quite high. If the whole nation of China can't manage to stop it, I don't think the people in City Hall's IT department will be able to either.

Posted by: Hood Rebel | February 18, 2009 8:43 PM

To Streever:
You make good points. Upon further reflection this action by City Hall does seem extreme.

But I bet a student from Sheridan can figure their way around, over, or under a commercial firewall.

Posted by: Streever | February 18, 2009 9:06 PM

I agree with you, Hood Rebel :) I fondly remember installing "Doom" on the computers at my high school because, hey, they tried to make it difficult, why not? It was fairly easy & before you know it we had a room full of people playing the first networked FPS video game...

I've heard from City Hall employees that the issue was a bandwidth one. That makes a little sense, but why not just impose throttled bandwidth per user? Not that hard, especially if you're running a good linux router setup.

My cellphone gets in online radio, crystal clear, via cell towers. I think the real issue is viruses running rampant.

City Hall could save boatloads of money if they ran any of the very mature linux distros--immune to viruses, use Sun Office to have documents which anyone can read, & you don't need to buy 1000 licenses for Windows XP which is definitely not cheap. Heck, you could just have everyone using terminals instead of personal PCs.

This stuff isn't rocket science, & it's very cheap to implement.

Posted by: robn | February 19, 2009 9:05 AM

I think Streever just hit upon something....Is the city buying machines pre-loaded with Microsoft or running open source?

Posted by: New Spanish Haven | February 19, 2009 10:52 AM

Streever & Robn,

I can just imagine the issues that would arise from asking municipal employees to learn something new i.e. SUSE Linux OS and OpenOffice (it's not in their job description) to lessen the City's Software costs. How many of them are having/had problems with WIN95 or WinXP? How many would push for a reclassification or better yet, just stop doing their job. You may think I'm kidding but I'm not. These union employees have NO IDEA what it's like to have a real job in the real world....

Posted by: Been Called Worse | February 19, 2009 8:55 PM

Espousing grand ideas like "switch to free linux" is a great way to kill time on a message board, speculating about all the licensing fees it would save.

The reality of the situation is nowhere near as straightfoward.

Sure, you can find emulators easy enough to tie in to the midrange systems the city uses, but consider that 95% (thats # is a guess, not fact, but damn close) of the vendors the city deals with are Windows/SQL Server on the backend and Windows desktop clients on the user machines makes it much more problematic.

Sure if it was a random word document here and there, no biggie. Understand that enterprise-wide city manangement software is in all practicality a niche market. MAYBE you will find a suitable web based app that can work as needed and interface with all the other pieces of the puzzle, but the back end is usually IIS, not apache, not mysql, not a 'nary lamp setup in sight. So your insight into the situation is fairly limited.

Now imagine having to re-design the workflow and processes that frontline, mid-level and upper management use in order to input/output data and make decisions based on.... All that change has a cost associated with it. A rather high one at that. We're not talking a handful of users. And some of the apps are fairly mission critical.

Even the transition cost in switching to OO on the desktop. In a closed environment it works alright. Exchanging data with other municipalities and companies becomes problamatic. You support the end user who's spreadsheet isn't calculating correcting because the excel version they recieved has a macro or VB code inserted it in. Now calculate the cost of supporting that from a help desk POV. On average it wil take a user 40 hrs to fuly transition from say Word to the OO equivalent. Without even addressing the "fear of change" issues, and there would be alot, calculate those 40hrs per user. Citywide.

I can go on. This is just an off the top of my head list in the spirit of debate.

All unnecessary traffic (streaming radio, games, etc) is additional overhead on the network, a potential security exploit, and increases the overall line item budgeted for bandwidth. And again, refer to the above mentioned help desk costs when one of the installed games copies over a system file and now the document imaging software hangs.

Open source has been used in various situations to great success. I am by NO means against it. But I am against grand statements that simplify the issue at hand beyond any coherent discussion of the topic.

Posted by: JN | February 20, 2009 10:55 AM

The city hall website SUCKS. Who cares about bejeweled, I'm more upset that our tax money is going toward that useless piece of crap.