PS - as far as accessing blocked sites goes, there are usually several ways around it but I would generally not recommend using them in a working environment unless your HR/IT Acceptable use policy is extremely lax, plus unless you know the setup there's always a chance that it will stil be monitored.
I'm in the middle of a project at work to do exactly this by decrypting and analysing any encrypted netwrok traffic that previously would have bypassed our proxy servers. Initially there won't be any blocking or messages but there are likely to be some very irate managers in the imminent future.