A bad analogy can frame an entire conversation improperly. This is one of those “anecdotes from a middle-aged man posts.” So take it with a grain of salt. A number of years ago I worked in the risk management team for an insurance company that sold long term care (LTC) insurance. LTC insurance is a private product that covers home health care and nursing home care if the policyholder is unable to take care of themselves on their own.
In a previous post I discussed my frustrations with trying to get Dropbox or Spideroak to perform BOTH encrypted remote backup and AND fast two way file syncing. This is the detail of how I set up for two machines, both Ubuntu 10.10, to perform two way sync where a file change on either machine will result in that change being replicated on the other machine. I initially tried running Unison on BOTH my laptop and the server and had the server Unison set to sync with my laptop back through an SSH reverse proxy.
I do some work from home, some work from an office in Chicago and some work on the road. It’s not uncommon for me to want to tunnel all my web traffic through a VPN tunnel. In one of my previous blog posts I alluded to using Amazon EC2 as a way to get around your corporate IT mind control voyeurs service providers. This tunneling method is one of the 5 or so ways I have used EC2 to set up a tunnel.
One of my primary uses for R is to build stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. It’s not uncommon for each of my simulations to take 20 seconds or more to complete (if you’re doing the math, that’s 55 hours for 10K sims or, approximately 453 games of solitaire) . Initially I ran my sims in R running on an Oracle VirtualBox (Oracle now owns Virtualbox! gasp ) running Ubuntu.
The alternative title of this blog post is “How to get your sorry ass fired by violating your internal IT policies.” So keep that in mind as you read this. I say lots of silly crap. Twitter allows me the pleasure of sharing this blather with the world. I was a little surprised that of all the things I have said over the last few months the above Tweet received the most discussion.