Science Fiction and the Polymath

Throughout my junior high years I was a huge science fiction fan. One of my favorite authors of the time was Isaac Asimov. I was quite surprised to learn that Asimov not only wrote science fiction but had also penned books, short stories, and essays that ranged from religion (Guide to the Bible), chemistry (he was educated as a biochemist), engineering, and the list goes on. This realization intially confused me. How could a science fiction writer be so bold as to write on so many different topics? How could he know enough in each of those fields to qualify himself to write books on them? It would be many years before I encountered the term “polymath”, but surely Asimov earned the title.

Me? A Manager? Not so Much

For the past year or so my manager has been after me to move into a management role. I managed to avoid doing so until fairly recently, using my work on my doctorate as an excuse for not really having the time to take on all the work of learning the role, learning the courses I would manage and so forth. Recently, however, I was approached again and, having all-but completed my degree, really didn’t have a good reason for

The Power of Curiosity

I have always been a curious person. I’m the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even as a very small child I was curious. My mother used to tell the story of the time when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old and came in crying because my eyes were filled with sand. I had apparently held a toy over my head and looked up as the sand fell out because I wanted to see what it looked like from that angle.

Nextcloud, OnlyOffice, and the Like

Every once in a while I get this notion that I need to move my data off of sites like Dropbox, OneDrive, and so forth. When I do, I start playing around with self-hosted services such as NextCloud, OwnCloud, and so forth. I’m currently in one of those cycles and have been playing around a good bit with Nextcloud.

I’ve even coupled it with OnlyOffice so that I can edit documents in the

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.