brentashley

My laptop case has always been a bit of a Mary Poppins bag – I can pull all manner of surprising things from its depths to solve problems here and there – I carry an ethernet hub I modified for battery power, for instance, which comes in handy in contracting situations where there are no extra LAN connections. Be prepared, I always say, with enough bits and pieces to glue together what you might need on a whim.

So i’m in downtown Toronto, driving from one appointment to the next, and thinking about a third place to visit, but I don’t know the address – it’s in Outlook on my home PC. Damn. My wife isn’t home to check it for me, so I gotta think of something else.

So I pull into an alley at Queen St. and Spadina where I know I can get a wireless signal, get my laptop out of the trunk, fire it up, insert the 802.11b card, and walk towards the street. Halfway up the alley I get a signal so I squat against this drainpipe where I can still see my car, ssh into my home linux box, start a tunnelled vnc session from my laptop over ssh/wireless/internet/sshd/homenetwork to my Win box at home, run Outlook, get the info. Check my mail and news aggregator for good measure.

People are walking by without a second thought to this guy squatting with his laptop in an alley. All in a day’s work, you know.