Connecting the MacBook to the Edgerouter VPN

Today I fixed a problem that has vexed me for some time. Reading through the search pages, it seems it has vexed quite a few others, as well. I thought I’d share my solution to this problem so that others might benefit.

What’s the problem? I’ve setup a VPN server on my Ubiquiti Edgerouter-X. The VPN works great with my Windows clients, but I’ve not been able to get my MacBook or iPhone to connect. Until today. The problem turned out to be quite simple, though it took a bit of reading to figure it out.

Making Progress … Slowly

There has been a lot going on the last few months. I have been struggling to get my dissertation done. The biggest obstacle has been locating participants for a qualitative study. I finally got responses to my recruiting efforts and have been able to interview 7 people. That’s not a great response, but is better than nothing (which is what I had in the past!)

and allows me to move forward. Did I say I was excited?

Moving to a Self-Hosted Bookmarking Service

There’s a hint that bookmarks are going away. Services like Delicious that used to provide great web-based book marking services have closed down. In their place are the likes of Instapaper and Pinboard and the like that break stuff into different types. Instapaper to store sites that you want to read later, Pinterest for images you like, and so forth. That doesn’t work well for me, though. I want everything in one place. That’s also why I decided to try a

Is Education Relevant

One of the questions with which I have wrestled for a while now is the question of what it means to be ‘educated’.  The problem, of course, is that there is no one definition and that, I think, creates much of the problem in evaluating educational programs.  The state of Georgia recently put on the ballot a bill that would create an “Opportunity School District”. In an effort to address “failing” schools, the state proposed taking them over and doing whatever is necessary to ‘improve’ outcomes.  As I pondered the proposal, one of the questions that I continually confronted was what does it mean for school to “fail”? Who determines this? And, on what is it based?  Advertisements for the plan suggested that “only 12% of third graders in our failings schools are reading on grade-level.” That, of course, raised other questions for me.  For example, how does this compare to third graders in those schools that are not considered to be failing? What does it mean to read on grade level?  Recognizing that people learn at different rates and that skills such as reading are commonly dependent on external factors such as how much reading goes on in the home, is the standard even appropriate? These and several other questions brought me back around to the question of what it means to be educated.

Learning the Challenges of Jekyll

So a few days ago I decided to use Jekyll to generate a static website to host all – well, most – of my writing. Jekyll, I’ve learned, is a different beast from most applications used for these purposes. I’ve found several themes that I really liked, but they all had some sort of quirks that made them less easy to use. I’m finding, though, that “easy to use” and “Jekyll” probably don’t belong in the same sentence. Each of the themes I’ve looked at require slightly different structures, use categories differently, and just generally appear rather finicky. I’m sure for people that have played with it for quite a while, these quirks are just part of the landscape. For people like me, who haven’t really spent much time with the software, it’s a challenge.