Firewalls, ISPs, Socks, Proxies and Ports

My computer has a DUI charge for MSN, so please contact me through my email. Seriously, I have spent my entire free afternoon trying to bypass the fortiguard that the retarded management has put on this building. Its essentially something that stops everything that I need. For example, torrents and msn. Youtube, chun's blog, and bbc are all inaccessible.

Frickin great. The upside is that now I am versed in net geek lingo.

And of course, I cannot talk to D because I have no msn. Its been 4 days and it feels like a month. I am trying my best to be incredibly cheery considering the stockmarket forecast , and the past two weeks, is well, as upbeat as the aftermath of 9/11. The goverments of the world are dumping gold reserves into the markets. I am not happy.

Interesting things a-happening the last two days though. I moved out of 50 John [the rosemont suites] to 200 victoria [pantages hotel] because I simply missed D too much and being in the room alone wasn't helping. However, on the second day of my stay, in the middle of my tea, a man walks into my room with the keys in his hand.

SO. I whip out my contract. AND. He whips out his.

Considering the percentage of time I am buff in private per day, it was fortituous that I was actually fully clothed [the hotel was next to the eaton center. heh heh] . In the end we found out the owner had pre-booked him for the room that his agent had released to me. So i end up moving back into the old place because ironically, i prefer it to the hotel. Also because I spewed venom at the agent and got 150 bucks back. That took two days of collaborating , because well, principle. I decided to give the room up for 50 John, resulting in him paying for my extension and I for his hotel room. Fair is fair.

Towards the mystery man, he is literally this dude here : Turialai Wafa . So now I have a job offer in Afghanistan , in Kandahar.

Interesting. Interesting indeed. I wonder if D would like to live in Afghanistan.

An Afghan follows his heart
GRAEME SMITH Globe and Mail (Canada) January 2, 2007
Most young men in Afghanistan can only dream of Turialai Wafa's lifestyle. He survived the collapse of his society, saw stinking corpses in the streets, and got away. About to turn 35, he has a comfortable life in North America: a high-flying job based in Washington and an apartment in Toronto.

Nothing can force him to return to Afghanistan. His business degree, his status as a permanent resident of Canada and his flawless English leave him free to work almost anywhere.

At least, that's what his friends keep telling him, just before they repeat the question Mr. Wafa has heard many times in recent months: Why throw himself back into Afghanistan?

"One friend told me, 'Okay, you want a medal? I'll buy you a medal, but please, don't go back,' " Mr. Wafa said.

But as he prepares to leave his job as an information officer at the World Bank and take a new role as a senior official in Kandahar's provincial government, Mr. Wafa seems almost impatient for the challenge.

Starting January, he will assume two difficult roles. As the chief administrative officer for Kandahar province, Mr. Wafa will lead a shakeup of the stuffy, bureaucratic administrative systems that make Kandahar's government notorious for corruption and inefficiency. At the same time, he will be responsible for co-ordinating the foreign assistance that so often gets wasted when good intentions crash into the reality of Kandahar.

He comes with the kind of credentials that Westerners respect, having spent more than a decade working for the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. His authority among Afghans, however, will probably depend more on his political connections, and the fact that he's a cousin of the governor, Asadullah Khalid.

Another thing that will be essential for his success in Kandahar, he said, is strong support from Canada.

"I can understand why most people in Canada feel as though they're blindly following the United States into war in Afghanistan," he said on the phone from Washington. "It's their right to interpret the situation like that.

"But this is only looking at the surface of the water, and it's not even the true picture of the surface."

The only honest argument in favour of removing Canada's troops, or reducing their role, is that Canadians can't stomach the casualties, Mr. Wafa said. The other argument, that the foreign troops' presence isn't helpful, only serves to conveniently obscure the likely consequence of a pullout: If the foreign troops leave, the country would fall into bloody chaos.

The conflict in Afghanistan could again become a "forgotten war."

"The whole nation will become the hostage of a bunch of people with designs to use the land as a perfect breeding ground for very evil and terrorist activities."

He continued: "We need the help. If the Canadians pulled out, it would be such a heartbreaker. All the blood, all the effort would be for nothing. It is all about the justification of casualties as opposed to the cause and morality of the whole campaign."

The idea of Afghanistan falling apart isn't an abstract fear for a man who already watched it happen. Born on a cold winter day in January, 1972, Mr. Wafa was raised in an educated middle-class family, and did part of his schooling in India, where his father served as a diplomat.

The city of Kabul that he knew as a teenager is hard to imagine today, a cosmopolitan centre where thousands of students flocked to the private English school he and his two brothers founded.

"When I was going to Kabul University, a skirt or a miniskirt was pretty much normal clothing for the girls," he said. "It was an open society.

"That was something we took for granted. And out of the blue, the whole thing stopped."

What Mr. Wafa calls the "dark ages" of his country started with the overthrow of president Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, as the government was swallowed by the rising disorder that followed the withdrawal of Soviet forces and the neglect by the rest of the world.

His home in Kabul ended up on the front line between warring factions, and the family of six fled to Pakistan with only $100 in their pockets.

"That was the first time I saw dead bodies piled on top of each other, used as trenches, and dogs eating the corpses," Mr. Wafa said.

The brothers re-established their language school, first in Peshawar and then Islamabad, and Mr. Wafa soon got his first job at a United Nations office as a computer specialist.

He started making visits back into Afghanistan, forced by the Taliban regime to apply for a visa for his own country as he travelled on a UN laissez-passer permit.

Mr. Wafa said he set up Afghanistan's first Internet connection in 1999, trying to hide a four-metre satellite antenna in the backyard of a UNDP compound so that the Taliban wouldn't find it suspicious.

At one point, he said, the Taliban declared they would allow the UN to keep its computers, but they would seize and destroy the "televisions" that sat atop the computers, not realizing that the monitors were required.

"You can't imagine the level of ignorance and stupidity we endured," he said.

Despite years of fighting the ignorance and barbarism in his country, Mr. Wafa said he never thought of abandoning the place altogether. If anything, he said, the depth of Afghanistan's need makes it a more compelling place to work.

"I love the country," he said. "I feel a deep sense of compassion for it. When you have a family member who is weak, you help them. That's where the need is, so that's where you must go."