Patience

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

We're all familiar with that quote, and while it's a pretty decent argument for taking that first step, it doesn't really address the step after that, and the thousands to follow.

I started blogging in 2003, I think.  I started on Wordpress and learned a lot playing around with PHP and embeddable code.  In October of 2005 I added  Google Adsense code.

Blogging is something that you have to want to do, or get paid to do.  You have to have the desire to share your opinion or knowledge with other people, and you can't be disappointed when you don't have thousands coming to your site.

Looking at my Adsense stats, I think it's safe to say I've achieved that.  As of today I have $95.00 in my account and I've never received a payout, having never hit the $100 limit.

I lost interest.  What I was saying was mostly for my friends so I constructed a complex internal system where technology related stuff went to Google+, jokes went to Facebook, and more inflammatory stuff went on the blog.

Eventually I stopped posting to the blog, because frankly I didn't care to be inflammatory any more.  I had bigger, more personal fish to fry.  (I have a theory on activism that I may expand on later) And I've sort of given up on Facebook.  The occasional post I miss from friends and acquaintances usually isn't important enough to worry about, and the important ones I hear about anyway.  Sorry to be a social media leach y'all.

And now Google is trying to integrate more of their services.  My blogger profile is associated with my G+ profile, and posts and comments can cross-post.  That makes it harder to "segregate" the parts of my personality, and easier to reach more eyes.

So why is this called "Patience?"  Because between Google and I, we've been waiting for $100 to change hands for almost 8 years.  Google profits were down to only $3.35bn this year, so I'd better get it while I still can.

Dusting and Cleaning

It's been about a year since the last time I posted here.  A year that's brought a lot of change.

I have some longer stuff in my head that really doesn't fit on G+, although it's nice that there's an automatic share feature now.

There's some tech stuff, and some house stuff, and maybe even some career stuff, but I'm hoping I can organize my thoughts and hone my focus.  And maybe share something cool from time to time.

Welcome back, time to move forward.

Ed vs the WOW Router

In the ongoing saga of Ed vs the WOW Router, I've learned that necessity is the mother of invention.

Getting access to a network from the outside isn't easy.  For obvious reasons, it's not supposed to be.  But there are a couple of tricks, and of course, your mileage may vary.


The technical difficulties in this case are that the WOW router can't maintain a static DHCP assignment for my home "server".  When the lease runs out, or the system reboots, it gets a new IP address.  This means that port redirects are pretty much useless, so standard methods (vpn server, RDP) won't work. Also, the virtual server and port forwarding don't seem to be consistent.


Hosted solutions seem to be the only answer.  

LogMeIn seems to be a nice solution, and it works well from a browser outside the network.  Once the server application is installed on my server I can connect and RDP through a browser by logging into the site.  The service itself is free for non-commercial use, but the Android client is expensive at $29.99.


Teamviewer is another popular choice.  Just like LogMeIn, there's a desktop server application, and once everything is configured web access is easy.  The Android app is free, but kind of klunky and it doesn't work well at all with a keyboard and mouse on my tablet. It's so bad, in fact, that it might be a deal breaker.


The last option I'm looking at is NeoRouter Mesh.  Unlike the others, there's no web component, but it does provide a good vpn option and a portable client.  The client will allow you to launch RDP or VNC clients after it's established a vpn connection.  The downside is that it's not completely free, at $1 per license per month.  I'm not sure that over the long term I can justify that.


Stay tuned...

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: an article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers | The American Scholar

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”

Tired of being insulted

I've grown tired of being insulted by people who assume that I agree with them.

Tired of being demeaned by people who don't think contrary opinions are only held by "evil" people.

Tired of watching complicated issues being reduced to arguments that fit in a tweet or on a bumper sticker.

New York's recent passing of a Gay Marriage proposal has been causing me to grind my teeth as both sides fire snarky barbs across the internet on Twitter.

Between the Evil Homosexuals and the Evil Christians I don't know if there's anyone left to talk to.  Is there any room for a person who thinks that people should be allowed to be happy, to have comparable rights to comfort their loved ones, but who understands the pain of having a sacrament defiled?

Am I evil because I don't think that a 2700 page health care bill with more loopholes than a stitching class is the right way to reform health care?  Am I evil because I resent the constant encroachment of government into my choices?

Apparently, because I've been told that I'm evil and heartless for holding that opinion.  I'd be open to having my mind changed if every discussion didn't start with my intelligence being demeaned.

Am I a racist because objective facts tell me that there are dangerous places to go?  Detroit is considered a "black" city, and has one of the highest crime rates in the nation.  If I were black, I don't think I'd hitch my identity to the city until it became a place I could be proud of.  Pride should be something you have "because of," not "in spite of."

I'm not specifically religious, nor am I against religion.  Nonetheless, because of that I've been accused of hating God.  I've also been accused of being anti-atheist.  I suppose it's more proof that "with us or against us" is a sentiment held on both sides of the aisle.

And of course the running joke with the one person who understands that is that I'm a "fence sitting libertarian."  So at least there's one person I can talk to.

I am who I am, and if I'm a majority of one, so be it.  Just don't expect me to sit here and listen to your vile vilification, don't expect me to agree with your demonization of people I don't agree with, and don't assume that because I don't hold your viewpoint I hold the diametrically opposed view.

Screw you and your pigeonhole.  If you're not capable of seeing outside your little world of boxes that's not my problem.  I'm only atypical from your point of view, and until you can understand that you can not understand me.

It's more important for me to respect myself than to respect your opinion of me.

"Rights Are Curtailed for Terror Suspects" - ProfessorBainbridge.com

Good thing we got rid of that George Bush guy.

A film maker walks into Flint

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