Overloaded tricycles

I often see hugely overloaded bikes and tricycles around Beijing. Often they seem to be piled high with enormous mounds of cardboard or plastic or some other, literally, garbage. However, sometimes you see a delivery like this double-bed:

VPN in Ubuntu

So, some people in China have a VPN and this can be tricky to set up. It took a while to work out all the tweaks to get Ubuntu VPNing. I recently had to re-do this because I accidentally messed it up. Here's the tips (NB this was an SSL VPN, not PPTP as PPTP can have trouble running over routers and/or PPPoE, I believe... in any case it doesn't work for me!:Go to the networking icon in top-right and click edit connections and use VPN tab of Network Manager.

• Don't select "make available to all users" even if you want it to be available to all users
• Don't enter a password in Network Manager, you will be prompted for one when trying to connect the first time and can save it in the gnome keyring which works better, but managing the gnome keyring can be a nightmare and its sometime better just to create a new VPN with the same settings!#
• May need to change the default port for SSL connection to 80 (I did: perhaps the GFW is blocking the default port?)
  
• sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart can sometimes fix things
• A hard reboot can sometimes fix things! Yes, I know you "shouldn't" need to.

Ubuntu really should work on making network manager easier to do VPN and force a restart of it.