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		<header>
			<h1>The school blocks <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr>!</h1>
			<p>Day 00465: Tuesday, 2016 June 14</p>
		</header>
<p>
	Alyssa sent me out to run errands this morning.
	I needed to get photographs printed for Vanessa, buy playing cards for Vanessa, and pick up salad for Alyssa.
	It seemed like an easy enough task, though I quickly found that my bicycle brakes had stopped working! It was raining, and it seems that my brakes fail to have any effect when wet.
	Riding down the hill into town was not at all pleasant! Just to travel at a somewhat-safe speed, I dragged one of my feet on the pavement.
	While that suceeded in slowing my desent, it couldn&apos;t have been good for my already-tattered shoes.
	The rain stopped after I picked up the playing cards, so I stopped for breakfast to give the brakes time to dry off.
	With my brakes functioning again, I headed to the next location.
	I still had errands, so I only ate part of my breakfast, saving the rest for later.
</p>
<p>
	The photography center of the store required that I insert the <abbr title="Secure Digital">SD</abbr> card in a provided computer, choose the photographs to print, then enter some information about myself.
	A first and last name were required, along with a telephone number.
	An email address was optional.
	I of course entered my first and last name along with my email address, leaving the telephone number field blank.
	The machine demanded that I add a telephone number, so I went to go get help from one of the employees.
	I suspected that a bogus telephone number could be used, but the more attention that is drawn to this type of problem, the more likely it has a chance of getting fixed.
	The employee quickly dismissed the problem, just entering a <a href="tel:+16666666666">telephone number consisting of ten sixes</a>.
	The machine complained about this, stating that the telephone number must be valid! They tried entering a couple other random numbers before they found one that the machine would accept.
	Once a number was accepted, the computer complained that my real email address was invalid! They just deleted my email address from the form, and the machine accepted the submission.
	While the photographs seemed to be printed almost right away, they people running the photography center required that I wait an hour before I retrieved them.
	With nothing better to do for an hour, I sat down and finished my food.
</p>
<p>
	On the way home, I found a black and silver ring, too small to fit on even my smallest finger.
	It wasn&apos;t overly-fancy, it might have been tungsten or titanium.
	It was the perfect size for my mother though, so I gave it to them.
</p>
<p>
	Alyssa, Vanessa, Cyrus, our mother, and I worked in our mother&apos;s classroom again today, but there wasn&apos;t much that we could get done.
	Our mother was the only one that knew what needed to be done, but was too frazzled to delegate well.
	They mentioned that their school computer doesn&apos;t output sound any more, so I tried to debug that issue while I waited for actual instructions on how to help.
	Testing revealed that the problem wasn&apos;t the speakers, as the speakers worked with my mobile and my headphones didn&apos;t work with the computer.
	The computer had an option to troubleshoot sound problems, but it required the administrative password, so I got nowhere.
	Stupid Windows.
	Why would one need administrative approval to alter sound settings? Sound settings should be on a per-account basis, so administrative action shouldn&apos;t be involved.
	I&apos;m not going to try to debug administrative problems on Windows and didn&apos;t have the password anyway, so I gave up.
</p>
<p>
	Our mother officially put in their resignation today.
	They were crying.
	Not only is it difficult to leave a job, but also, they don&apos;t have their new job found yet.
	They&apos;re worried for the future, but need to get out of this awful place.
	The people in this small and poverty-stricken town are awful to each other and to our mother.
	Our mother also wants to get back into the valley and live closer to relatives.
</p>
<p>
	Mary-Margaret, one of the kindergarten teachers, asked Cyrus and me if we&apos;d burn photographs onto <abbr title="compact disc">CD</abbr>s for them, so we agreed to do it.
	Getting our mother&apos;s classroom cleaned out was our main priority, but there were too many bodies and not enough labor; we wouldn&apos;t be missed.
	Mary-Margaret wasn&apos;t quite ready for us, though word that there were people willing to help got out quickly.
	Another teacher (one that I don&apos;t know) approached us and asked us to take down everything from their bulletin board.
	We completed that task, then were soon re-approached by Mary-Margaret, who was now ready.
	For some reason, Cyrus stayed behind, so I headed to the computer lab with Mary-Margaret alone.
	Once there, we found that there were too many photographs to store on the &quot;<abbr title="compact disc">CD</abbr>s&quot;, which turned out to be <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s, so Mary-Margaret went through and deleted some.
	Some were just unneeded, but others were outright duplicates, added accidentally.
	We found that we only had one <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>, so we were going to test the burning process with it before Mary-Margaret went out to buy more <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s, but that <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> turned out to already be written to.
	Furthermore, it seems that most of the computers in the computer lab lack optical drives for some reason.
	Of the about forty-eight computers available, only four have <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> drives!
</p>
<p>
	Mary-Margaret and Cyrus went out to buy food and <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s for burning.
	They brought back pizza and a vegetable tray.
	I was hungry, but decided to complete my <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>-burning task before eating.
</p>
<p>
	With blank <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s in hand, I headed back to the computer lab and tried to insert a blank <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> into each of the four machines to burn multiple <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s in parallel.
	One of the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> drives wouldn&apos;t open though, leaving me with only three machines to work with.
	Stupidly, I tried burning the first <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> directly from files on the <abbr title="Universal Serial Bus">USB</abbr> drive containing the photographs instead of copying the files to the machine first.
	As such, I wasn&apos;t able to start the next burning until the first completed.
	This turned out to be for the best though, as the Windows computers in the computer lab were being idiotic as Windows computers always do.
	This time, the burning process was split into two parts.
	In the first part, the files were indexed and prepared for burning, regardless of whether they fit on the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> or not.
	Upon manually starting the second step (which took a while to even figure out how to do), the computer would actually perform the check to see if the files would fit, like it already should have done when adding the files to the queue.
	It turned out that there were still too many photographs to start the burn, as while Mary-Margaret had gotten the total file sizes below four point seven gigabytes, the actual file system size on the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> is smaller than that.
	I&apos;m not sure if this is because of data in the file system that takes up space but isn&apos;t used for files themselves or if the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>&apos;s advertised size is measured incorrectly; hardware manufacturers often use a smaller unit that they claim are &quot;gigabytes&quot;, just to make their products look better than they actually are.
	In either case, I went through the remaining photographs myself, deleting the duplicates that Mary-Margaret had missed (they quit looking for duplicates once the total size was believed to be small enough), and the size was brought down within the limits of what would fit.
	This time, I did copy the files to each of the three machines, then started the burning process.
</p>

<p>
	Between changing out <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s and restarting the burning process, I tried to get the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> labels created.
	The label package said that there was a label template online, so I tried downloading that.
	I ran into several problems along the way.
	First, I needed some privacy.
	I wasn&apos;t doing anything that I wasn&apos;t supposed to, but I won&apos;t browse the Web without <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr>.
	I tried to reach the <a href="https://torproject.org./"><abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Project</a> website, but the school blocks access to that! I knew about the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Project&apos;s mirror on <a href="https://github.com/TheTorProject/gettorbrowser">GitHub</a> for people that can&apos;t reach the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Project website directly, so I went there.
	The thing about the GitHub mirror is that it&apos;s next to impossible to block without blocking all of GitHub.
	Due to GitHub&apos;s use of <abbr title="Transport Layer Security">TLS</abbr>, most blocking software won&apos;t even see what pages are requested, and those that do will cause &quot;bad certificate&quot; errors, so all decent websites don&apos;t work as well.
	Once I had the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Browser Bundle downloaded, I found that the school computer blocked its installation.
	I assumed that it was an issue of modification of system directories, though that later turned out not to be the case.
	The install was successful when I had it install in the downloads directory instead of the default location though.
	Next, I found that the school network also blocks the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> network itself! This was my first opportunity to work with <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> bridges in an environment where their use was actually warranted.
	The setup was surprisingly easy.
	I thought that I&apos;d need to look up some bridges from a bridge information distribution system on the Web, but the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Browser Bundle did everything automatically once I told it that a bridge was needed.
	The next issue was the website that actually held the template.
	It required a name and email address be given in order to download the template needed to make use of the product that had already been paid for! If the template was at least under a free license, I&apos;d have been more than happy to supply these, but as it were, I didn&apos;t want this company having any of my email addresses.
	I&apos;d only be using the template on behalf of Mary-Margaret.
	I wasn&apos;t sure if the template would be sent via email or if the email address would be verified, so I used an <a href="https://fakena.me./">identity generator</a>, which worked out nicely.
	However, the site wanted to send me a Windows executable file instead of the actual template! What a mess.
	You can never trust Windows executable files on a Windows machine.
	At a loss as to what to do and about to give up on the labels, I spotted a pair of radio buttons on the page.
	It seems that by default, the website tries to trick you into installing a toolbar when downloading the template! Clicking on the other radio button, the download link changed instead to one pointing at the template and the template alone: a DOC file.
	There was no way that I was going to work on Microsoft Office, so my next step was to download <a href="apt:libreoffice">LibreOffice</a>.
	That download took <strong>*forever*</strong>.
	By the time I had it downloaded, it was almost time to go.
	Strangely, the LibreOffice website asks for a donation, but requires that one fill out a <abbr title="Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart">CAPTCHA</abbr> before one can comply.
	<abbr title="Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart">CAPTCHA</abbr>s are annoying, I&apos;m certainly not going to donate if I can&apos;t do so without solving one.
	When I tried to install LibreOffice, the installation unexpectedly worked.
	I figured it&apos;d fail just like the initial <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Browser Bundle installation.
	Does that mean that the school specifically blocks installations into the default directory used by the <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> Browser Bundle in an effort to prevent <abbr title="The Onion Router">Tor</abbr> use? I&apos;m not sure what else the issue would be.
	After the installation, my mother came in and said that it was time to leave.
	I gave Mary-Margaret back the twenty-eight burnt <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr>s that they wanted along with all the remaining blanks.
	While I didn&apos;t get the labels done, the <abbr title="digital versatile disc">DVD</abbr> burning was complete.
</p>
<p>
	I headed back to the classroom so we could gather up our stuff and head out, and I found that the vegetable tray was completely finished off.
	Everyone had finished it off, leaving only pizza.
	Sadly, I missed out on getting anything to eat, but once we finished unloading at home, I was able to make a salad.
	Strangely, the landscapers that were supposed to come today never showed.
	I mean, we weren&apos;t around to see them, but there&apos;s also no sign that anything has been done.
	I wonder if they were called off for some reason.
</p>
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