I am currently sitting in a terminal at JFK, which reminds me of my sojourn in Heathrow earlier this year.[1] JetBlue has configured free wireless hotspots, which is nice, but I do not want to wake up on New Year's Day to find my Google Account hijacked and my domain stolen, so I cannot simply connect to the unsecure wireless network named "default" like everyone else.

Thanks to the Unix underpinnings of OS X, configuring my VPS in St. Louis to relay all of my network traffic was as simple as running the command ssh -D 9999 marteydodoo.com [via] and configuring proxies in System Preferences (see screenshot).
Configuring a SOCKS proxy in OS X 10.5's System Preferences.
Since JetBlue requires you to stay logged in through a browser popup window (so they can figure out when to reassign your IP address?), I ended up taking advantage of the fact that Firefox has its own network proxy preferences (Right now, Safari is connected to the JetBlue hotspot, while Firefox is tunneling to my server).

This gives me my first New Year's Resolution: set up my own VPN server. If I had VPN already set up, or access to an existing VPN, it would not actually help in this situation (because of the aforementioned popup window), but there are several other situations where it would be useful.

--
[1] JFK is significantly more "exotic" than Heathrow. For example, for the majority of the time I was writing this mini-essay, I have been intermittently listening to "Who Let the Dogs Out?," because someone does not know how to answer their cell phone.

Earlier, I was accosted by a gentleman who inquired if I was traveling to Pittsburgh. Who travels to Pittsburgh for New Year's Eve?