Memos from June 2007

Caught Taking Off My Pants?

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Today start­ed off weird. I was at the bus stop wait­ing for my bus to go to the City, when I sud­den­ly hear a loud voice com­ing from behind me:

“HEY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

I was caught off guard as I sud­den­ly turned towards the source. With a quick glance, I sud­den­ly saw this old man in front of his house (which is next to the bus stop). I quick­ly gave a look around if it was me he was talk­ing to. I also think I did a quick Taxi mono­logue (“You talkin’ to me…?”).

I then respond­ed in a dumb­found­ed man­ner:

“Excuse me?” He replies with the same ques­tion. “Good morn­ing. I’m wait­ing for the bus…(?)”

While say­ing that, I was tak­ing a look below me. “I have my pants on for sure,” I said to myself. Then, the fol­low­ing ensued:

  • old man: “Wait­ing for the bus…? I just saw you tak­ing your pants off.”
  • me: “What??? No, just wait­ing for my bus haha” *crackin’ up inside*
  • old man: “Well… I thought I saw you tak­ing off your pants.”
  • me: “Haha… It’s too ear­ly in the week for that” *smil­ing to light­en things up*
  • old man: “Too ear­ly in the week? Not for my week(!)”

I think he was still some­what pissed off. I did­n’t real­ly pay atten­tion as I was still crackin’ up inside, and not try­ing to show it.

Mean­while, after catch­ing the bus, I took a moment to rem­i­nisce. Before he came out gun-sling­ing out of his house, I remem­ber putting my keys in my back­pack. Now, there was a faux rock thing that cov­ers those power/cable/phone out­lets on the pave­ment. I know that I have put my back­pack down in front of me, on top of that faux rock. I… just hap­pen to be fac­ing his house while doing it. That, and he prob­a­bly heard me zip-up my back­pack haha.

The thing that both­er me is, he prob­a­bly was observ­ing me the whole time even before I zipped up my bag. Damn, what a crazy morn­ing and a crazy dude.

From my mind to yours, when wait­ing for a bus: make sure to look out for crazy home bod­ies; be under­stand­ing if they all of sud­den prowl at you for no rea­son at all; and be ready for a great laugh—though it seems very weird HA!

How Not to Use Default Gateway on VPN (PPTP) in Mac OSX

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Well, after search­ing for hours and hours, I have final­ly found a solu­tion to a small but trou­ble­some prob­lem. The prob­lem (if you call it that) occurs when I tried con­nect­ing to my work’s VPN. Rather than not using my work’s gate­way when con­nect­ed, OSX does this by default. Hence, you can see and hit your inter­nal IPs but not resolve the rest of the inter­net.

In Win­dows XP, this may be dis­abled via the fol­low­ing:

  1. Open Net­work Con­nec­tions
  2. Under Vir­tu­al Pri­vate Net­work, open the Prop­er­ties of your con­nec­tion
  3. Click and open Prop­er­ties for “Inter­net Pro­to­cal (TCP/IP)”
  4. Click on Advanced
  5. Dis­able “Use default gate­way on remote net­work”
  6. Hit OK, OK, and then you’re done

Although it’s easy in Win­dows XP, I could­n’t fig­ure it out for OSX. I searched and search to final­ly get this arti­cle from macosx­hints, Avoid Cre­at­ing PPTP Default Routes. The hints at the very bot­tom of the com­ments helped some­what, but did­n’t get me to view my inter­nal IPs—which was the reverse of the orig­i­nal prob­lem. Luck­i­ly, with a lit­tle bit more search, I land­ed on this arti­cle page by Chris­t­ian Stock­er on Chang­ing default routes on OSX on VPN. Though it was the same as the pre­vi­ous page from macosx­hints, I saw this short and sweet reply which hap­pen to have fixed every­thing:

lon­nie @ 22.08.2006 19:22 CEST
Inter­net Con­nect 1.4.2 has

Con­nect Menu -> Options…

|X| Send all traf­fic over VPN con­nec­tion

Uncheck­ing should do the same.

I hope this arti­cle could be of help, and save those who are look­ing for the same solu­tion san­i­ty and time.

Top 2007 WWDC Stories

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If you aren’t sub­scribed to any Apple/­Mac-relat­ed newslet­ters, here’s a cou­ple of aster­isks to add to Apple’s his­to­ry and/or time­line (dur­ing this WWDC 2007 next door, from Macworld newsletter):