Archive for October, 2008

Circumventing the Pandora restriction

Published
by
Rizwan Alvi
on October 28, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

I realize this has been known for quite some time now, but by blogging about it, I want to show my appreciation to whoever came up with this neat trick to get around ISP blocks and Pandora’s own block to anyone outside of the US.

For those of you who don’t know, Pandora is a cool radio site where you control the music you want to hear. If you haven’t checked it out already, get over there now- you’ll be happy you did.

Anyway, Pandora doesn’t allow use of their service to anyone outside of the US. Fortunately, neat little programs like Hotspot shield allow you to connect to an American VPN that give you an American IP and also prevent your ISP from monitoring your browser traffic, for the most part. This is also a sweet program that gets around anything else your ISP might be blocking. If your ISP is pretty strict on keeping their blocks active, they’ll eventually block the IP of the VPN that you’re connecting to.

Never fear. The Global Internet Freedom Consortium provides four or five more programs which are basically identical to Hotspot shield (without the annoying banner ad) and allow you do the exact same thing.

Now all you non-US users, go out their and stick it to the man.

Updates- better late than never

Published
by
Rizwan Alvi
on October 26, 2008
in Med school and Pakistan
. 0 Comments

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably post here less and less. I had planned on keeping this site up to date, but of course the more important things in life (food, video games, computers, and of course, video games) take priority.

My fourth year at Shifa College of Medicine is finally at an end, and I have only finals to look forward to for now. Winter break, although 2 months long, is going to be speant doing volunteer research (electives!) in ophthalmology, though I’m not sure where as of yet. Right now Duke, Michigan, JHU, and Bascom Palmer are all possibilities. Finally, I’ll get to start my long-awaited final year of medical school next February, after four long, long years. It’s now more than ever that I wish the MBBS program was also only a 4 year stint instead of five, but no such luck. Another whole 12 months to go! Continue reading ‘Updates- better late than never’