Early Morning in Cochrane

This morning, Tammy wanted to get to Cochrane before 7 AM. Last week, she went to see Dr. Sadiq and (as usual) the doctor wanted Tammy to get some bloodwork done. The problem was, it was difficult for Tammy to get an appointment that was early in the morning. One of the tests required fasting, and she didn’t fancy teaching for the day on an empty stomach. So she resolved to go to Cochrane urgent care, where there is drop-in. We got there for door opening, and still were about 15th in line.

It didn’t take that long. I took my MacBook Air along and started work while Tammy stood in line and then waited for her turn. She was done a little after eight, so we dropped into Sunny Side Up for breakfast. Tammy had their classic benny and I had French toast. The food and coffee was good. A nice way to spend a bit of time on a Friday morning.

Now she’s marking tests and I’m getting back to work.

On a technical level, I ran a successful test while waiting this morning. Last night, I set up a virtual private network (VPN) for our home network. It’s part of the Unifi networking system that I’ve set up. The basic idea is that when I’m out and about, I can connect to the VPN with my phone, iPad or laptop and have a secure connection to the home network, and all of my web traffic flows to my house first and then out to the Internet. I wanted to be able do this when I was in Palm Springs but hadn’t set it up until now. The advantages:

• Security: nothing like connecting to an unsecured airport or hotel WiFi to give you the cold sweats. VPN connection encrypts everything.
• Locality: my Internet traffic is routed through my house, so I can connect to Canadian sites without being blocked.
• Access: I can connect to things like the Synology NAS even when I’m on the road.

I set it up last night, and this morning I connected to the AHS public WiFi. A quick click of the VPN connection toggle and it worked. I was able to do my work, connecting to Microsoft 365, listening to Apple Music and searching for reference information on the Web, all encrypted.