Unless you can teach the skills better than he can (which I can attest too via my experience, as well as knowing many others that are now teaching on their own based on what they learned through Tom), then you are in no position to critic his skillset.

Oh, and if you go around the country and look at many of the biggest and most respected survival skills schools, you will find a large percentage of them include Tracker School in their background, and many of the skills as currently taught were originally learned from Tom. (obviously he learned them from Stalking Wolf, and Stalking Wolf learned them from his tribe and others as he wandered the Americas for 60 years, but many were effectively lost until Tom began teaching them)

He who is trained better, let him cast the first stone!

I have also run into those taking his classes that weren't paying attention or didn't take it seriously, and thus didn't continue practicing it afterwards, and they wouldn't be able to show anybody else, since they didn't bother actually learning anything. The fact that they seem to gravitate to you concerns me! lol

As a long-time student, and friend of several that have been involved with him for years, I can tell you without a doubt that what he teaches works, because he teaches the skills passed down from the Lipan Apache.
And before you claim that story to be BS, I am also friends with one of the members of Grandfather Stalking Wolf's tribe who now is involved with Tracker School and the Children Of The Earth Foundation (the non-profit branch dedicated to bringing kids back to nature and teaching them the primitive skills) as an instructor.

The biggest problem with the books is that he had editors that cut and rewrote a lot of the material, plus the fact that many things can't be taught via a book.

I find it interesting that most of the people that love to ridicule TBJ/Tracker, have never actually had any experience with them, and are simply parroting hear-say from others that didn't apply themselves to learn the skills. Sad really!

You should come to one class and see for yourself, who knows, I might even be there helping!
(I plan to be in Boulder Creek May 2012, see you there!)

I've done similar on both Mac and Linux and it's always a bit of a pain. I've used Cyberduck (ok but a little buggy) and Macfusion (ok but not very tolerant of crappy connections). Now I'm mostly switched to Linux I use sshfs (as used in Macfusion) but generally prefer Viming over SSH…

Another option to investigate might be Webdrive for Mac: http://www.webdrive.com/products/webdrive/mac/ind…

I've used (and I've set up for some of my clients) Webdrive for Windows to mount a remote SFTP filesystem as a Windows drive letter. It works really well but it's not the cheapest solution ($70 for Windows, $35 for Mac by the look of it). There's a trial version though so you can see if it'll work better than a free solution for you.

For times when it makes sense to do the work locally, I typically use git to record the changes and push them up to the main server. I much prefer this workflow for long coding sessions.

Also, as a side note, if you're stuck having to FTP files to a server because for some reason they don't have SFTP (as was the case in a recent project), you should check out lftp. With a little time you can develop a script to mirror everything from your local copy to the server (or vice versa) allowing something similar to the git pushing / pulling.

I've tried everything, ExpanDrive, Transmit, CyberDuck, SFTP in BBEdit, MacFuse… they do a decent job, as long as there isn't too much netlag. Browsing files is what kills everything for me, specially with folders with large number of items in them.

Another thing that contributes to how much this sucks is the fact that I use ADSL, and the upload speed stinks, when things take longer than expected – weird things start to happen. I've spent too much time staring at the dreadful spinning beachball, or watching editors die on me.

This works:
Edit locally, sync with server via scp/svn.
Edit remotely using $EDITOR over ssh.

SVN is on both sides so I can update things if they get out of sync. It works well enough that I've been using it full time for the past few months, it's a lot faster than MacFUSE/ExpanDrive, and I get to use tools on local files.