{"id":1204,"date":"2016-02-29T03:27:59","date_gmt":"2016-02-29T10:27:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/?p=1204"},"modified":"2016-04-17T04:04:12","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T11:04:12","slug":"getting-paid-sobriety-coins-to-go-back-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/getting-paid-sobriety-coins-to-go-back-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting paid sobriety coins to go back to work"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew I needed to get back to work weeks before my sabbatical was\u00c2\u00a0up. I don’t know how it happened, but I do remember when I realized\u00c2\u00a0it. It happened similarly to a cocaine addict’s sobriety relapse. \u00c2\u00a0One day he’s being bestowed a 10 year sobriety coin, and the next he’s\u00c2\u00a0doing coke lines off of a stripper’s back– not knowing exactly how or\u00c2\u00a0why it happened, but for a brief moment, realizing that– boy does it\u00c2\u00a0feel good.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A few weeks before my leave was up, my sister shipped my laptop to\u00c2\u00a0Hong Kong. Not wanting to leave things to the last minute, I wanted\u00c2\u00a0to make sure everything was in order, and that I wouldn’t be caught in\u00c2\u00a0an airport on the first day of work, with a broken operating system or\u00c2\u00a0an invalid SSL certificate (you can’t watch YouTube with the latter
\n:)).<\/p>\n

Opening the laptop box was not entirely dissimilar to a child on\u00c2\u00a0Christmas day. I smiled, and then ripped the wrapping apart. \u00c2\u00a0Mind\u00c2\u00a0you, this is not a new laptop, something which should have clued me to\u00c2\u00a0my addiction. I turned it on, and spent the next few hours amazed at\u00c2\u00a0how much better Facebook and email looked on a bigger screen. I\u00c2\u00a0occupied myself with bigger pixels for a while, but eventually retired\u00c2\u00a0to my third nap of the day, as any self respecting sabbaticalee is\u00c2\u00a0prone to doing.<\/p>\n

I put the laptop away for a few days, but it wasn’t until I took my\u00c2\u00a0next flight to Laos that I realized I had “problems”. I spent the few\u00c2\u00a0hours before my flight departed playing around with unsecured WiFi\u00c2\u00a0access points and noticing that most allow ‘ping’ requests to servers\u00c2\u00a0on the other side of the world, even though normal TCP\/IP traffic is not allowed (read “web traffic”). That’s like realizing that UPS\u00c2\u00a0won’t ship your bike for free, but that if you pack bike components in\u00c2\u00a0small and different enough boxes, put them at the UPS door, they’ll\u00c2\u00a0deliver them for free without complaining. Ok, that’s not exactly how\u00c2\u00a0it goes, but I bet all my non-nerd friends think they know what we’re\u00c2\u00a0talking about now :).<\/p>\n

So, right before I boarded the plane I bought “The TCP\/IP Guide: A\u00c2\u00a0comprehensive, illustrated IP reference” for my Kindle. Which at 1600\u00c2\u00a0pages, I will add, is a gargantuan piece of verbose crap. Seriously\u00c2\u00a0folks, have all the technical editors died or\u00c2\u00a0left the planet? Why\u00c2\u00a0are we allowing authors to write 1600 pages of anecdotes, useless\u00c2\u00a0diagrams, and verbosity explaining the obvious? Are we paying authors\u00c2\u00a0by the page now? Anyways, in my defense I only bought this nonsense\u00c2\u00a0because Stevens of TCP\/IP fame is either dead, not writing, or hasn’t\u00c2\u00a0bothered to release his TCP\/IP bibles electronically.<\/p>\n

Fast forward 6 hours of brushing up on stuff I thought I’d never\u00c2\u00a0see again, and I turned off the Kindle, concluding that yes, I bet I\u00c2\u00a0could tunnel TCP\/IP packets in an ICMP envelope: I could put all my\u00c2\u00a0bike parts in small (different) boxes and UPS would deliver them free\u00c2\u00a0of charge. \u00c2\u00a0At this point I had the bright idea that I would use the\u00c2\u00a0remainder of my leave of absence to design such a tool. The clever\u00c2\u00a0reader will note that had I actually known anything about TCP\/IP, or\u00c2\u00a0had access to the internet, I would have realized that at least 3\u00c2\u00a0people have written such tools.<\/p>\n

At this point, I’m nodding and congratulating myself on such\u00c2\u00a0cleverness, never stopping to think of the stupidity of my venture. I\u00c2\u00a0would be designing a morally suspect, though legal, tool that would\u00c2\u00a0save me (maybe) $20 a year in free airport and coffee shop internet,\u00c2\u00a0while using up the remaining time of my sabbatical from a company\u00c2\u00a0which pays me handsomely for working on precisely such interesting\u00c2\u00a0projects. Yes, I would be working for free, not seeing Laos, in\u00c2\u00a0exchange for designing tools that have already been designed. I\u00c2\u00a0should’ve just called my boss and asked to come back: “Hi Matt, I\u00c2\u00a0have this great idea for a useless tool you could pay me for… oh\u00c2\u00a0yeah, I’m in Laos but I’m not seeing any of the UNESCO World Heritage\u00c2\u00a0Sites. Hello? Matt? <click>”.<\/p>\n

But no, I didn’t realize I had problems yet. It wasn’t until my\u00c2\u00a0second day in Laos, that I realized I hadn’t seen anything, and was\u00c2\u00a0only leaving the hotel at night to search for pizza, Twinkies, and\u00c2\u00a0Coke (the cola type, not the stripper type). For the record, you\u00c2\u00a0can’t find Twinkies in Luang Prabang, and Digital Ocean<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0will rent you\u00c2\u00a0an outward facing Linux server to experiment for 16 cents a day. \u00c2\u00a0Woo hoo to the latter!<\/p>\n

Frustratingly, the last few weeks have been spent picking technical\u00c2\u00a0fights on Facebook, hacking hotel security mechanisms, and voluntarily\u00c2\u00a0asking strangers in cafes if I can help them with their PHP code. \u00c2\u00a0This, and the fact that I traded seeing elephants in Laos for experimenting with outward facing Linux servers in a hotel room with no windows,\u00c2\u00a0are\u00c2\u00a0a few of the many reasons that I think I’m\u00c2\u00a0ready to go back to work!<\/p>\n

Bring it on!<\/p>\n

\"No<\/a>
No one’s going to tell me how cold to keep my room!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew I needed to get back to work weeks before my sabbatical was\u00c2\u00a0up. I don’t know how it happened, but I do remember when I realized\u00c2\u00a0it. It happened similarly to a cocaine addict’s sobriety relapse. \u00c2\u00a0One day he’s being bestowed a 10 year sobriety coin, and the next he’s\u00c2\u00a0doing coke lines off of a … Continue reading Getting paid sobriety coins to go back to work<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1204"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1274,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1204\/revisions\/1274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quesejoda.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}