Personal

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” This year alone I have been in 12 countries and accumulated over 500k miles of travel and want to share my tips and tricks to make us better citizens of the globe. I want to provide some tips from my many days on the road. It is my hope this transforms you from clueless tourist to world citizen. **Learn the basic language – **The quickest and easiest way to make connections with people is to approach them with their native tongue. You will be surprised after being a few places how easy it is to pickup “Hello and Goodbye” and “Please and Thank You” ...

Microsoft Lync is prevalent through the corporate world. Honestly its a pretty decent product on a Windows machine. On Linux and Mac though it is really a half-baked product of varying working status. On Mac the official client burns through your battery due to requiring the Nvidia graphics card on my Retina Pro?? I am a big fan on Pidgin (or Adium on the Mac) and have been struggling to get Lync support working on Mac/Linux using this client. Today I was finally able to connect. ...

TL;DR – Sometimes the smallest laptop isn’t the best option for a traveler. If you live on one machine then maybe sucking up the weight for power isn’t a bad idea. If you have a tablet then there is no question My apologies to my blog readers for two things: That my blog has not been updated in N+1 more months than it should have That it has taken a very travel oriented slant as of late I blame both on starting an international engineering firm, but it has forced me to change my habits (what do you mean I don’t have time to blog on only 4 hours of sleep!?!) and learn to get smarter with my travel. ...

It is highly infuriating to be a security person and have your own house knocked down. This was the case if you visited my site as of late and found broken links and spam spewed across it. This was not due to my own security mishaps. This website is: Scanned daily by WSD Security script Multifactor authenticated with a Yubikey for all logins and edits Weekly backup sent to offsite Strong passwords across the board Check for updates weekly and subscribe to security lists As we say in the security world if you lock the doors, but leave the windows open your security is not that strong. Hence was the case with my hosted site here. I locked the doors, but dreamhost left wide-open the windows. I have been a paying customer since 2007 and will now be looking for a new host. Here is the hack below: ...

Contents 1 Home Screen: 2 Productivity: 3 Finance: 4 Travel: 5 Transportation: 6 Personal: 7 Share this: I think I was one of the first to carry around a smartphone. I remember the marriage of a phone and PDA made me so excited and to see that technology in a single device…phew…love. The Treo 180 was severely limited, but it brought to the world an idea that phones were for more than phone calls. Fast forward a decade and now I can run the entire company from a smart phone. Out of all the travel gadgets I carry, my smart phone is the one most necessary. I wanted to run through my favorite apps that make it happen. ...