I’m riding to NYC for the JoCo show and taking the BoltBus which has wifi access. It technically does connect, but I also tried using my iPhone 3G tethering through PDANet. Here are the speedtest.net results.
BoltBus
iPhone 3G tethering
There’s a college girl behind me who has been going on for at least an hour on her cell with a friend about how she doesn’t like the way the jeans she bought last year look anymore, so she needs new ones. She’s not taking clues from the people around that we really don’t care. … ahh, someone just said it directly. Thank you.
At work, we have shiny new laptops. Yeah! …. except that they’re locked down and audited. Lame. Even if I carry my laptop with me and use it off-hours, all my surfing and installations are still restricted and subject to company policy and review. Bummer.
Using the instructions at pendrivelinux.com, I quickly set up a persistentUbuntu installation. It lives on my 8gig pico drive and just uses the laptop resources to run without writing anything to the laptop harddrive. It found all the drivers and was online and usable immediately after booting. It even has built-in drivers for my new Wacom tablet that works perfectly with GIMP. The default LiveCD setup is not secure, so I disabled the default no-login user and created my own account and added remote login and a few other customizations like auto-mounting to my home file server via SSH. Now, I can just put this tiny USB drive into any PC and boot into my own interface.
I went a step further to protect my browsing security and set up Squid proxy using my home Ubuntu server so that all my web traffic will be directly between my machines as far as any local firewall can tell. Using that, I can access anything that my personal server can access and do so without being restricted by local network blacklisting.
My latest addition to this setup was to use the Dropbox service to give me direct, local access to all my recent or frequently used files AND give me a persistent Firefox profile across all my machines (PC, Mac, and Ubuntu). That part is pretty cool. This synchronizes my plugins, cookies, passwords and sessions. I close Firefox at home, then I open it to the same tabs at work, preserving session logins.
Aight, I should either be doing homework or doing something about my geek addiction.
I found this site through a tekzilla tip. This couple makes simple introductory video guides to concepts like RSS, Wikis, and Zombies. I like their style. They win.
i’m sitting at my desk at work, going through my OS. it occurred to me that i continually go through “waves” of refreshing my computers with a clean start … to building my options with tools and interesting applications … and trying out new file management methods … until, eventually, i have an annoyingly cluttered mess, and i need to refresh again.
looks just like what happens in my room.
i imagine that it possibly happened in some of my past relationships too. (ponder ponder)
so, my thought branched to something i consciously decided several years ago when considering my personal state and what i wanted in life. i determined that i lacked one thing i needed more than anything else, confidence. my personality was “nice” but lame without confidence, and that disabled my interactions with others. i wanted to be recognized with more respect, to have the attitude that could get me whatever else i wanted. ……. fast forward, and i have it, and it’s good for me even if i may occasionally come across as an asshole.
then, now what? … what’s the next step that i choose and begin to build? i looked through my files again and my cluttered room and my hobbies and my many unpolished skills, and i instantly knew i needed focus. i know a little about alot, and i’m all for that, but i’m deciding to shift now towards fewer, more concentrated paths. what are these going to be? i have an idea, and i’m watching with all of this in mind. this will be the end of this cycle of the wave. clean out and refresh.
