I use SSH all the time, i used to use it at school until the network admin ( which i personaly know), threatened me with a suspension, which I got anyway for doing other hacking. I use it at home to do commands on my haxxd xbox, and with my webservers.
you can do just about any command using ssh it is in my opinion the best way to get around firewalls and other blocking services. kinda a hassle some times changing settings on things to use the ssh but its all worth it in the end. if you would like to just use a http proxy a good one is http://proxy.metrohaxxd.com