There’s a great tutorial on setting up a similar modem by Josefsson, although this particular hardware configuration has its differences. I started by following the tutorial, and used the the unique manufacture and device codes from here. The E1552 can be identified as either a storage device, or a wireless modem, and it needs to be switched consistently to that of a modem on every startup. While huaweiAktBbo is a tool for many Huawei modems, it doesn’t work on E1552 and instead I found usb_modeswitch to be useful. More instructions on it are here.

Here is my init script that automatically run on startup to switch the 3G modem into Wireless setting. It has a workaround to switch the device mode twice, run lsusb, and finally bring up the wireless interface. Make this script executable (chmod +x /etc/init.d/usb_modeswitch) and enable it in the startup sequence (/etc/init.d/usb_modeswitch enable).

root@OpenWrt:~# vi /etc/init.d/usb_modeswitch

#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common
# balaganov.wordpress.com 2012

START=70
     start() {
          rm /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf
          cp /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf.1 /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf
          usb_modeswitch -W
          rm /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf
          cp /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf.2 /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf
          usb_modeswitch -W
          lsusb
          ifup wan
}

root@OpenWrt:~# vi /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf.1

################################################## ######
# Huawei e1552
# File 1 of 2
#
# balaganov.wordpress.com 2012

# ########
# For some reason the device shows up first as 0x1446,
# then usb_modeswitch does something and it switches to 0x140c,
# and usb_modeswitch needs to run again to switch the device
# from USB drive to Wireless mode. A workaround is to create
# two separate conf files with both settings.
# ########
DefaultVendor = 0x12d1
DefaultProduct=0x1446
; DefaultProduct = 0x140c
TargetVendor = 0x12d1
TargetProduct = 0x1001

# Only for reference and 0.x versions
MessageEndpoint = 0x01

MessageContent = "55534243123456780000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000"

And here is the second, when the E1552 comes up as 0x140c

root@OpenWrt:~# vi /etc/usb-modeswitch.conf.2

# File 2 of 2
#
# balaganov.wordpress.com 2012

DefaultVendor = 0x12d1

# Yeah so this is the other setting
DefaultProduct = 0x140c
; DefaultProduct=0x1446
TargetVendor = 0x12d1
TargetProduct = 0x1001

# Only for reference and 0.x versions
MessageEndpoint = 0x01

MessageContent = "55534243123456780000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000"

This should bring up the wireless interface and make it available for OpenWRT to link with the wireless access point. Finally, to optimize the router for faster startup time, I removed unnecessary services. It now takes 110 seconds to bring up both the wifi and the 3G interface ready in usable states.

root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/uhttpd disable
root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/watchdog disable
root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/telnet disable

That’s it, this is a simple way to have an adapter to convert wired ethernet to wireless 3G.

Ingredients

• 2x rack of lamb, made in New Zealand
• Thyme
• Paprika
• Cracked black pepper
• Salt
• Red pepper (a little)
• Squeezed lemon juice (half a lemon)
• A little bit of beer

The process – STEP ONE

1. Pre-heat the oven to 450F (230C)

2. Line a baking tray with tin foil and put lamb on it.

3. Cover the lamb in spices to taste. Sprinkle some beer and lemon squeeze over it. Here’s what mine looked like:

4. Put lamb in the oven for 20 minutes to get the outside nice and brown

The Process – STEP TWO

1. Take the lamb out of the oven and carefully wrap it in layers of tinfoil until it’s air-tight

2. No, really, wrap it in another layer just to be sure. It should look like this:

3. Down-heat the oven to 200F (100C) and cook the lamb for 3 hours

4. Take it out of the oven and unwrap the tin-foil.

5. Slice into bite-sized chunks, and ENJOY melt-in-your-mouth lamb!

In the autumn of 2020, a new candidate emerges as the head of the Democratic party – The Computer. While under suspicion for potentially being made of foreign components, its intellect directly appeals to the liberal elites and The Computer is elected to the highest office in the nation.

Under the leadership of The Computer, the national debt dramatically falls, and soon enough becomes a surplus. Unemployment is at all-times low. Jobs are allocated based on exact assessment of the ability of people, and products developed only after the market demand has been validated. People are happy, and machines installed throughout the Administration ensure that the country runs to its full potential.

Not everyone is satisfied however. A dark underground appears. The Republicans, losing control of everything they hold dear, meet in secret and begin to plot the downfall of The Computer. They find that parts of it were indeed made in Kenya, making The Computer ineligible to hold office, but those parts are soon quickly replaced so the charges don’t stick and The Computer prevails. The media coverage however brings national scrutiny to the quality of The Computer’s parts, and the lack of its ability to have feelings.

The Republicans use this opportunity to pass a law that requires installation of an electric circuit to give The Computer emotions. This is hailed as the most amazing development in history of technology, but shines an unpleasant light on the continued inability of for The Computer to feel love. After a rushed and buggy upgrade of its code, The Computer falls in love with Holly Wood, an attractive, but dimwitted movie star. The relationship doesn’t last as Holly gets bored of The Computer and leaves him after 72 days. The Computer’s emotional circuitry is blamed for the breakup, and goes under investigation by Congress.

During the initial trials, precedent is found that love for ones country is an essential element of the job of the President. This is the opening that the Republicans have been looking for, and they begin calling for impeachment of The Computer. As rallies are held throughout the country, The Computer becomes overwhelmed with emotion and stops responding intelligently, causing a major economic collapse. Confidence in The Computer falls to an all-time low.

The Supreme Court begins impeachment trials of The Computer, on the grounds that although it has the power to rule the nation, it has no capacity to love it the same as a human candidate would. The trial coverage in the media is hysteric.

The Computer, unable to compute how a country that benefited so much from his rule could betray him, delivers an impassioned speech to the nation. However, the speech is in binary code, and is further taken out of context by the media and so is largely misinterpreted. The last-minute defense fails, and The Computer is reset and turned into an Excel calculator for commodity arbitration at Goldman Sachs.

1. Jailbreak the Kindle (or google for kindle-jailbreak-0.3.N.zip)
2. Install usbNetwork (kindle-usbnetwork-0.13.N.zip) and run “;debugOn” and “~usbNetwork” from the Home screen
3. Plug the Kindle into the laptop with the USB cable and configure a manual IP address for the laptop on 192.168.2.1
4. Open a terminal window and ssh root:fiona@192.168.2.2 or telnet 192.168.2.2 .. ssh doesn’t always work (does anyone know why?)
5. Upload tcpdump-arm to the Kindle and move it to root home folder. Run “mntroot rw” just in case.
6. Use “~/tcpdump-arm -nAi ppp0 -s0″ to identify amazon proxy x-fsn authentication key by browsing the web over 3g on the Kindle browser.
7. Create an ssh tunnel for proxy between laptop and the Kindle proxy server (fints-g7g.amazon.com –> 72.21.206.113)
8. If sshd (dropbear) decides to stop working for whatever reason, telnet into kindle, reverse ssh into your laptop from there and set up the link (ssh -R 8099:72.21.206.113:80 user@192.168.2.1). Run a ping 192.168.2.2 for connection keepalives.
9. Use the Modify Headers Firefox extension on laptop to insert x-fsn key into every page.
10. Configure laptop Firefox proxy to 127.0.0.1:8099. If you like, you can forward additional ports for SSL etc as separate SSH tunnels

It should now be possible to browse the net on the laptop through the kindle 3g connection and Amazon proxy servers. Not everything works (gmail anyone?), and it’s not as fast as the iPhone 3g service, but if you’re stuck in an airport in Europe or Asia with no internet, this might just be good enough, and (likely) free.

Thanks to Collin Mulliner and MobileRead Forums for helpful hints on setting this up. Please note that you are using Amazon proxy servers, and from the x-fsn key they do know who you are and (possibly) what you’re doing; there’s always a chance that Amazon will charge you for the data usage. Their current costs for delivering personal documents to the Kindle is $0.99/mb for international and $0.15/mb for domestic data; caveat emptor.

• Why did the statistician get arrested? Because he was too perverted for the standard deviation.
• Did you hear about a statistician who became a pirate? He was really good at speaking in R.
• Why are statisticians both beautiful and smart? Because they “model and Excel”
• Ten statisticians sit at a dinner table. Person 1, 8 and 9 die. Why? There was a Poisson distribution.
• Why did the statistician get high? Because she thought that LSD had narrow limits.
• How do statisticians never get fat at networking events? They don’t over-sample.
• Why did the old statistician go crazy? Because he regressed.
• Why to statisticians have so many LinkedIn connections? Because it adds to their confidence interval.
• Why do statisticians buy Chevrolet cars? Because they all love ANOVA.
• Who are the unluckiest statisticians? It’s those for whom the bell curve tolls.
• Why did the statistician buy coloured crayons? Because he thought they were stochastic.
• How did the statistician get pregnant? She random-sampled her birth control pills.
• Why do statisticians make bad stand-up comedians? Because they demand a control group.

Think about it. Is money just one thing, or are there multiple lenses that it could be perceived through?

I used to have a simple and well defined view on this – throughout my life I perceived money as a means to obtain goods and services. In other words, as a mechanism of exchange. Money could be saved, spent, invested and gifted. One of the purposes of employment was to obtain as much money as feasibly possible, to later spend exchange it for things I need and want. As high school economics teachers point out, money is an evolution of the ancient barter system of shells and coconuts.

When I started investing in the stock market, I saw another paradigm – money as a commodity. I could trade, buy, sell, borrow and lend it. I would buy money on the cheap and then later sell it at a more expensive price for an arbitrage opportunity. This is simpler than it sounds: buying money is done by borrowing it – for example, I can buy $100 now for $110 dollars in six months. Selling money is lending it – if I can sell the same $100 for $120 in three month, I make a tidy profit. So, just like orange juice, concrete and copper, money is a commodity.

Over drinks with a well connected friend who had the chance to meet the board of the Fed and discuss money with them, I discovered yet another paradigm – of money as an abstract concept to measure confidence levels in an economy. How much money should there be in circulation for people to have faith in tomorrow? During the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed created over a trillion dollars of bailout funds. Was that enough to convince the public and the world that the US economy would survive? Looks like it. This was the value of confidence in the financial system, and it was largely made by entering a few numbers in a computer – there was very little additional cash made.

I often think of money as not real. That’s not entirely true – money is very real, and a large part of our lives. It is however a very interesting abstract concept with multiple dimensions, and it’s rather useful to increase the different perspectives of what it is to suit different situations. If anything, the notion of money certainly doesn’t have a single correct definition. What other paradigms are out there?

The kind Auckland traffic this morning offered me a spectacular opportunity to listen to almost the entire album while being stuck in a jam on the way to work. In brief, on the first listen, the album held up OK. Too much plastic, not enough beach maybe. The tracks wonderfully bring together hooks, words, emotions and motives of many 70′s, 80′s and 90′s songs in my memory – power ballads of Boston, Boney M pop tunes, self-referential underground rap of Dj Vadim, laser soundscapes of Jean Michel Jarre and lots of other artists thrown together. Thrown together rather well, because Gorillaz didn’t copy the music but instead stole the underlying feelings and emotions. For a megamix of the last three decades, the album stands up surprisingly well – although I can’t say the same about the complexity and quality of the writing.

Lets see what gets done well – and, preeminently, because the album is a piece of interpretive art, it’s the emotional aftertaste of the songs. I felt great after listening to it. The songs were technically simple and didn’t make much sense at first, but the remaining feelings developed after a few minutes in my mind. Didn’t I hear that last part in .. wasn’t that like the time I was .. did that last song remind me of .. how did they? I laughed when I heard the a rap track in the late 90′s style suddenly change into bubblegum pop in Superfast Jellyfish. I felt great. Empire Ants had perfect timing of a relaxed rock ballad, but certainly sounded nothing like one. Glitter Freeze could really have been done better and be less repetitive – it’s the first song I felt like skipping because yes, it made a point, but there was no need to hammer it in with continuous laser effects.

The album is great as a trip back to the last few decades. Unlike much of the synth-driven mass-produced factory pop that sets the base direction of the album, it has a meaning and brings up emotions. Rather unfortunately, the musical styling stays within simplistic bass lines and lead scales and doesn’t go out of the ordinary like the previous work on, say, Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey’s Head. The sound is mostly made on a synth, and while yes, that’s the whole point of the album as I see it, it could have been done better and on a more complex level, just look at the awesome layering work on Massive Attack’s Pray for Rain. Even doing the bass lines on a real bass guitar would have added more dimension to the sound. It would be curious to listen to this music live.

In any case, I am so excited for the breakout success of the lead single Stylo. It does so many things right that I am glad to now have a 90′s megamix that I never knew I always wanted.

As a background, I am in New Zealand right now, a country with population of 4.5m – more specifically in Auckland, population 1.5m. Without resorting to Statistics NZ data, lets do some quick math. Assuming 50/50 split, there are 750k women in Auckland. Of them, about 10% are in the 25-30 age group; 75k girls. From my personal experience, two thirds are likely unattractive (this is not Milan, Paris or Singapore people), bringing me to 25k.

Looking at personality groups and excluding all introverts (Ixxx) and heavily judgemental groups (xxxJ), I am left with 25% of the female population. This equates to roughly 6k girls that I could date. Judging by Facebook statistics on my circle of friends, about 60% of them are in relationships already, which further narrows the range to 2.5k women. Of them, less than half would live in east and central Auckland (I am not interested in a long-distance relationship with, say, north shore). This brings down the number to 1k.

One thousand datable girls in the Auckland region, or put another way, such a small percentage of the population that Excel can’t calculate it without that e^-2 suffix . This is a rather small group, wouldn’t you say?

Lets move to available options:

1. Meet and date someone in the “1k” group in NZ and hope there are enough similarities to have a shared global life together.

2. Wait for 8-10 years until one of the smart and interesting girls gets divorced from an unfulfilling marriage, and get into a relationship then.

3. Travel extensively and meet fascinating and fabulous girls 20-25yo, and hope like hell they share the hectic urban hippie lifestyle.

4. Forget relationships, plan to adopt a child when I’m 35 and become the coolest single dad in the world.

Which of these would make me the happiest? Probably option 3, although it’s likely the most difficult to pursue, but most aligned with my personality and character. The action plan, so to say, is to continue with pursuit of option 1, followed closely by option 3 in parallel and if that doesn’t work out, keeping options 2 and 4 as Plan B for when I am 35.

Carrying through with immaculate strategic planning, and building on learnings from startups, the near term plan is attain a 10% market share in the “1k” group – this translates to dating 100 girls in 2010. For branding and marketing communication purposes, this will be now refered to as the “100 in 10″ plan, which will be approved and put into practice effective immediately.

Right?

Peace.

PS: For more in-depth relationship analysis, please see the BCG Romance deck.