Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Banned from Scooby's

On my arrival in Dumaguete, one of the first things I did,once I was situated, rested and recovered from the jet lag, was to locate an Internet cafe.Being a typical American, I opted for the most convenient way. I'd planned on spending time on Perdices St. shopping at Super Lee's and taking photos of "down town" so the easiest way was to use the Scooby's next to Chow King. Rather than checking out several Internet cafes as I should have done, I always returned to the same place whenever I needed to go online.

I have to admit, the cafe is nice enough.It's clean, air-conditioned and you can get food downstairs if you get hungry surfing the web.

Now, however much I may have liked the place at first, it looks as if my days at Scooby's have come to an end. I'm inclined to use Mozilla Firefox as my browser of choice. One afternoon while online, I had the idea to go the "Tools" section in the browser and change the homepage for that particular PC to my www.dumaguetecity.net/ website. The idea seemed so good that I decided to do the same on three different computers in the cafe.

On the Monday following Easter, I returned to Scooby's to check my email and do a bit of blogging. Much to my surprise, when I tried to open my website, I could only get an "website under construction" page.My first thought was that there was some kind of problem with my web server. It just so happened that a friend in the US was online at the same time and I asked him to view the website from his location. Everything was OK from there.

I tried Internet Explorer. Same result. I tied another PC. No change. It came to me that, perhaps, the management of Scooby's had blocked the website because of my having altered the browser settings earlier.

To see if this might be it, I walked down to Business Atrium on Silliman Ave. I had no problem what so ever getting to the site from there PCs. I wanted further proof so I went around the corner to a different Scooby's location to find that I could not access the site there. Obviously, I was right. Scooby's had blocked access to the website from their servers.

Oh well.

I've always been one to "make lemonade whenever I'm given lemons". While I'm in Dumaguete I'll go to different Internet cafes and feature these cafes on the website when I return home.

2 comments:

Corey said...

I've seen that under construction page several times over the months through my ISP, so I'm guessing Scooby's didn't blacklist you. It would seem that you'd get a "404 File Not Found" or "Server Not Found" error instead of that construction page if your domain was somehow blocked.

Besides, it would make more sense for them to filter out an offensive or inappropriate site, instead of an informational site about Dumaguete. If the management actually checks the browser settings at the end of each day they might decide to reset the homepage, but blacklisting seems a bit over the top.

Odd that you'd pull up that construciton page at another location, though. Maybe you can try again a bit later.

Hope things are going well there. Gotten some nice rain here today, but my parents up in Michigan had snow ;)

Robert Simms said...

you could be right. I'll check out scooby's again before I leave for home.I'm in an internet cafe in Sibulan right now.