Warning: This will probably be the most disjointed blog post that I’ve ever put together in my life.

In my early 20′s I joined the leagues of men and women that sell for a living. I knew enough to know that that I didn’t know enough to really be successful. I raided the public library in Falls Church, Virginia where the Northern Virginia Board of Realtors had donated tons of audiobooks related to sales and marketing. I started with Zig Ziglar, Tom Peters, Hank Trisler, Brian Tracy and others. I was instant hooked on the audiobook / self help concept and listened to everything I could get my hands on.

The next phase of my life included more self help and less selling such as the 7 habits of highly effective people and Awaken the Giant Within, both very cool audios as well. Some audios gave me great lessons on how to do certain things and others were more of a shot in the arm of energy.

As I reached 35 and hit my midlife crisis I happen upon some very cool books. The Four Hour Workweek, Getting Things Done, Escape from Corporate America and the E-Myth Reality I began to really question my role in the corporate world and decided that I would only properly fit in firms that were less than 50 people. The other idea that was planted in my head was the idea that I had to get out of the 14 mile radius that I had lived in all my life and get out to see the world.

In the past year I’ve dragged my very family over large parts of the globe and I hope that I am only just beginning. We’ve been between East and West coasts, and to Africa. We’re looking to get to the far east soon and would love to travel through Europe with the barest essentials.

Here’s where my post gets goes all over the place:

In the US, wireless connectivity options are excellent provided that you stay in the US. Once you leave, many wireless broadband cards won’t work or they will but at a pricey premium. I buy access to various wireless providers wherever I happen to be and on many occasions I’ll find an open network to work from. Some of these open networks are downright shady so I subscribe to a service provided by WiTopia called personalVPN which basically allows me to create an SSL VPN tunnel from my laptop back to their network which has a global array of proxy servers that I can surf from. Of course nothing is foolproof but I feel a bunch better surfing over this encrypted tunnel when I am outside of the house or in a foreign country. A perk that I don’t want to emphasize too much is that cool services such as streaming TV, iTunes and others treat me a lot better when they think I am in the US as well. (If you are wondering why I don’t VPN back to our corporate network it’s because we don’t have one. We outsource all our services to service providers for Email, CRM, Mailing list management and others.)

I was impressed enough with the service and the interface that I wanted to show how it works. (you may have to double click these pictures to see the icons)

This lock icon indicates that I am currently not connected to any VPNs at the moment ( you’ll recognize this interface as an OpenVPN client called Viscosity).

I click on the lock icon and pick the proxy that I’d like to use to surf from here. There are plenty of places I can proxy through, just depends on where I happen to be at the time.

The following screen is what it looks like when I’m connecting, the icon goes from a red lock to an orange “connecting” icon:

Once connected, I get a green lock symbol at the top of my screen:

Growl kindly notifies me that I’m now connected and gives me my IP address too.

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I use a Mac but don’t let this stop you from checking out the service, it works on Windows and Linux as well.

Anyhow, I warned you that this would be a convoluted post. In full disclosure I am friends with one of the founders at WiTopia but I’m a full priced paying client because I love the service.