Justin McCandless

This article is about the process I went through setting up Tinyproxy on my Ubuntu machine in the US, so that I could use it as a proxy server while abroad to access blocked sites. There are a lot of other reasons you might want to set this up, but I use it to listen to Pandora while I'm in Peru and allow friends in China to use facebook. Tinyproxy is a much smaller and more lightweight version of proxy software like Squid.

Mozilla's newsletter just came out a few hours ago, and (in addition to online shopping tips) they're informing their readers about the US Congress's Stop Piracy Act.  Right at the top they call the bill "bad for you and the internet - terrible, in fact".  They go on to list a couple of ways the bill will affect the average Firefox user and to show what they can do to help.

Imagick is a PHP wrapper for the Image Magick library.  It lets you use PHP to edit images on the fly.  I'm working on a Pictures section of this website, and I found it useful to resize a images as users request them, without having to use GIMP to create a bunch of different sized images and then uploading them all.   This install method uses PEAR and assumes you already have Apache and PHP up and running.

I recently celebrated my birthday here in Peru, my first time celebrating it abroad. Actually it wasn’t quite as homesick as it sounds though fortunately. I definitely missed my family and everyone back home, but a bunch of my friends here made it really fun. At work I definitely felt appreciated. As is custom in our office, everyone I work with came up to me and personally told me happy birthday and shook my hand at some point throughout the day.

The other weekend I was able to travel again so I need to write about it! This trip was with a bunch of our interns here to Ica in the desert south of Lima. We stayed in a small town outside Ica called Huacachina, which is honestly like an oasis in the middle of sand dunes. We got to see a vineyard, go out on the dunes, and take a boat to some islands full of birds called Las Islas Ballestas.

I just talked about the day I spent volunteering through work in the previous post, but I wanted to talk about some more cultural stuff from the day as well (since I am in another country). One of the main things I wanted to mention was just the difference in how my workmates treated the underprivileged kids compared to how I feel like it would go in the US. Firstly, they seemed to be just showering the kids in positive reinforcement.

Telefonica has a big volunteering program here, and my boss invited me to participate in an event where we act as “big brothers/sisters” to some elementary school kids for an afternoon. I always enjoy stuff like that, so I signed up and spent the day volunteering last Friday. We decorated our cafeteria like crazy and welcomed all the kids there with some free food and a quick announcement when they got off their school bus.

It has been my goal to work abroad after gradaution since I started thinking about what I would do after graduation. I spent awhile looking for a good internship abroad during my senior year and after graduation, where I could develop my technical skills, learn about business in another country, and have the cultural and language immersion that you can only get abroad. I would have been happy to go almost anywhere in the world, but month or so after graduation I found myself with this offer from Telefonica in Lima, not too far from where I did my first internship in Ecuador.

I recently went on a trip to the mountains for my first Peruvian holiday, so I figured I might as well skip the introduction stuff and make my first post from Peru about that. It was Peruvian independence day on July 28th, so we had a 4 day weekend and most of us interns planned a trip to Huaraz, a town in the Andes north-east of Lima. First I'll start with Chavín, an archaeological site we got to see ( Wikipedia article ).

After far too long, I've finally had enough time to sit down and work on bringing this blog back to life. It's been a tough last year of university and I haven't had much time to work on this, but now that I don't have homework to eat up every second of my life I've been able to work a bit on some more stuff for fun. The blog is in the most basic form possible right now.