Remote Access to my network. OK I have started this past weekend on a simple adventure. I want to be able to see the files on my home machine from my desk at my office. And I want to do so securely – IE I don’t want the rest of the planet to be able to easily monkey with my files.

I considered a lot of different solutions – writing a custom website to frontend my files, using pc anywhere, using the winxp remote desktop feature, putting my file server at home in the dmz of my firewall. I had a recent good experience with the Win XP VPN client tho, it is substantially easier to use than previous versions and it is included in Win XP. And with a VPN I can keep my file server behind my firewall, and I can put the VPN server behind my firewall. And I happened to have an underutilized Win2k server box so I decided to turn it into a VPN server using the included VPN software.

So in I dove. I will save you all the details. Along the way I had to add another net card, reconfig my firewall to pass traffic through to the vpn server, and configure a vpn server on the win2k box. There are a lot of moving parts involved. As of this moment, I am now reformatting my WIn2k box and reinstalling the server on it, as in my first attempt I ended up with an unbootable win2k server. There are a lot of conflicting docs on the Microsoft Technet site about how to set this up right. The user interface is pretty daunting.

Once I have it working I will post my steps and advice up here. But for now I am deep in the bowels of Win2k Server Setup…

Update. Server Set up. SP2 installed. Currently installing all security patches.

Educational Update. Liz and I had a great college tour this week. We started at the UW visiting their honors program, where Liz was able to sit in on an ecology class. The honors staff was super nice and accomodating and the UW is a great hometown choice.

Then down to Southern Cal for a whirlwind tour through Oxy, Pomona and the rest of the Claremont schools, Pepperdine, and Cal Tech.

Liz liked Pomona. We had a great tour led by a young man in the freshman class – we saw all the dorms, the dining areas, some of the classrooms. Very small classes, nice dorms, beautiful Mission+Georgian architecture (my analysis – I am sure real architects would describe differently), a strong sciences program, an extensive outdoors program. And a small school but with the facilities of a larger university since it is part of the Claremont consortium. And Claremont is a pleasant suburban setting and very close to Ontario airport.

Caltech is also a beautiful campus but we didn’t have a chance to visit classes. But worth applying to, obviously a great sciences tradition.

Pepperdine and Oxy are also both great schools. Beautiful albeit very different settings – Pepperdine in Malibu has just a stupendous view. Oxy may be a little weaker on the sciences, though it has a good program and all the people we met were great. Pepperdine has some great new science facilities including a really cool marine biology lab. We met the Natural Sciences department head while at Pepperdine and she was very nice, setting us up with a lab tour with one of the biology professors. All these schools were super friendly and accomodating.

Liz did very well on her SATs, particularly her math, so she feels like she has a great chance of getting in most of these schools, so we feel very good about her choices. We are going to try to slip down and see classes and dorms at Reed in a couple weeks as a point of comparison. That will give Liz all the data she needs to decide over the summer the set of schools to which she applies (I am clearly not an English major, I am sure I could have structured that sentence better).

John has his own exciting academic news. His teachers recommended last week that he skip ahead next year to 8th grade math along with 4 other of his classmates. He is very excited about this, this means he will take Algebra next year, Geometry in 8th grade, and then move into Honors/AP Algebra II, Precal, Calculus, etc in high school. Liz also skipped ahead a year in math during high school and it has helped her a lot in terms of SAT scores, etc. So this seems like a great move (and much better than trying to skip an entire grade which we think can put certain kids at a social disadvantage sometimes).

This week John is not in school but is on what is called “Project Week”. His project this year is Filipino Culture and he is spending the week at various locations around Seattle learning about the subject. This wasn’t his first choice of project! But one of his friends is on the team with him, and they get to eat lots of good food, so I am sure they will have fun. The weather is beautiful here today so being out and about in the city won’t be a burden.

Seattle Tech News. Just discovered «< seattle 24x7: explore your iland »>

For my website. Cool graphics and anims, some free, some not, from turbosquid.

Outlining. I need to update Radio and try this out. O’Reilly Network: Jon Udell: Instant Outlining, Instant Gratification

Halloween gadget. I have to get some of these …BUTTKICKER

802.11 blog. Another good one – net stumbler dot com

Jet Charter Service. For the future – Netjets, Flexjet, Flight options, Marquis Jet, ebizjet.

Wildseed. My favorite startup – latest news about them – Wildseed Ltd. News. Ooh update – check out the Forbes article.

Educational Stuff. Heading out on some college tours next week. University of Washington Honors Program is first on our list, heading there next Wednesday. Then to Occidental Thursday, Claremont and Pepperdine Friday, Caltech and UCLA Saturday, with maybe a stop at USC sometime.

On the home front, recently bought and installed Mathematica after wanting to for years. Kind of necessary as I help the kids with high school math homework – it is getting tougher and tougher for me to keep up. Mathematica is great, going to take me a year to really dig into it.

Halloween Lighting Idea. This will let me run my DMX signals over ethernet…cool! ENTTEC, We bring you DMX. This also will run DMX over ethernet. there are a lot of these. webprc01. Yet another – Audio Visual Lighting - ELC DMX Products.

Eisner: DaveNet : Eisner made over $700 million in 5 years

I got interested in who Michael Eisner is. It didn’t take much time to find out, for example, via Forbes, that he made over $700 million in five years. At the same time he argues the financial interest of creative people. So which creative people will speak for Eisner’s position? They are conspicuously silent. How much money flowed to them while he was making all that money?

W.bloggar. I’m trying out w.bloggar as my posting interface. Kind of cool. Posts OK. Publishing doesn’t seem to work tho.

Is that a web server in your pocket? From my buddy Adrian Smith – “Ahh, the pieces are coming together for my web-browsable doohickies - ? just saved me weeks of dev time ! http://www.siteplayer.com/ Pretty neat little webserver on a 1? sq board for $30. Doesn?t run ASP scripts but you can poke variables into the web page it creates. Now need to find an 802.11 version !”

I want to bundle one of these with a battery and an 802.11 card so that I can carry my blog on my person as I walk around. Why? I don’t know, it just seems cool.

In the shorter term I guess I can just make my Pocket PC a web server…the toshiba e570 comes recommended as the best 802.11 pocketpc…

Fictional Characters. From NPR, the 100 best of the last century. I’m embarrassed about how few of these titles I have read. Equally impressive is paul maritz’s book collection -- i am embarrassed about my own massmarket reading habits.