Almost-Free Pandora in Canada Using a CentOS-Based VPN
One of the things I miss about living in the USA was the ability to listen to music using Pandora. So when I got back to Canada, the only way I could actually do that was by setting up an SSH tunnel to my web server in the USA and accessing the Pandora site through my browser. It's simple enough for people that can always use SSH for situations like these, but what if you're not always at your computer when you're listening to music through Pandora, say, through your iPhone? Well, that's where it gets a little tricky...
Two busy, but fun two weeks (and TWiT!)
I've been less involved with my own personal projects and Unbounds work these past few weeks since they've been pretty eventful with other stuff.
Two weekends ago, I was in LA with my roommate Craig, my work colleague Mitchell, and his buddy Mike. Basically spent the weekend doing the usual touristy stuff. We visited LA, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Santa Monica. We did a lot of stuff in such a small amount of time, but it was definitely a lot of fun and totally worth it.
The week after this, I received some Tropo swag for my last blog post - thanks guys!
Last weekend, my parents were in town. They did the touristy stuff on their own for a few days while I worked. We drove around the Bay together, took some great shots, and even went up and then down Lombard Street (which was both terrifying and a lot of fun at the same time).
This weekend, in particular, was pretty busy. Friday night, I was lucky enough to get a ticket to watch Harry Potter 7: Part 1. It was an awesome movie and I can't wait for Part 2! Yesterday, I took a drive down to the Gilroy Premium Outlets for some shopping and then met up with my buddy Adam and his roommate Tarek for an awesome Korean BBQ dinner at Ohgane (highly recommended!). Today, I was an audience member on episode 275 of TWiT. Joey Robert and I booked seats for this show back in September not knowing who would be on, so we were pretty excited when we found out Kevin Rose was going to be a guest on the show. Leo Laporte and the gang were awesome, and his staff were very hospitable. I thought it was pretty cool to be introduced on the show and then take pictures with both Leo and Kevin. Thanks guys for an amazing time!
I'll probably be coding a bit more this week and next, up until my trip to Las Vegas, so I'll probably come up with something a bit more interesting to blog about by then. In any case, check out some pictures of these past two weeks after the break!
An Introduction to @Tropo
Tropo is a Cloud API for voice, SMS, and IM. It's kind of similar to Asterisk wherein you can use it to build your own digital PBX by writing up some simple code. But really, it's more than that. Because it not only supports voice, but SMS and IM as well, the integration possibilities for this API are endless. Need to send out voice and text alerts to people? You can do that with Tropo. Need to have conference calls with other people? You can do that with Tropo. Need a support hotline with automatic call queueing, call recording, on-call games, text-to-speech and speech recognition support, and a way for customers to pay by phone? I think you get my point by now.
My MacBook Pro Got an Unexpected Shower
At the beginning of last weekend, I was sitting at my desk with a bottle of water while watching some TV shows. As one of the shows ended, I reached for my mouse and accidentally knocked that bottle over onto my (nearly) three-year-old MacBook Pro. BIG WHOOPS. My first instinct was to unplug it from everything and shut it off immediately, followed by taking the battery out. Next, I flipped it over to drain out the water that had just fallen on the keyboard and started to dry it out on a towel.
First ever blog post!
Well here I was with a shiny new domain, ihavesnacks.com, wondering what to do. So I asked myself, "Hmmmmm... What's the one thing I haven't done on the Internets yet?"
"BLOG!"
And here I am.
If you're wondering what the origin is of this domain name, let me give you a quick background. "I have snacks!" was one of the best lines said (in my opinion, anyways) in the last Engineering Play (EngPlay) at the University of Waterloo, in which I played three characters: Mgrauchuchuk (the Barbarian God who said the line), a Blue-Footed Booby (a bird), and an Internet Spammer (pretty obvious one here).