The columbia proxy/vpn never worked super well for me. Or at least I didn't try very hard to set it up. I really only need it for viewing academic articles off campus. So usually I just search for it via the columbia library's website, log in, and retrieve the article. Doing this I noticed that the library is just feeding me the usual link (e.g. from acm dl) but via an "ezproxy". So
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2185544 becomes
http://dl.acm.org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/citation.cfm?id=2185544.
I wrapped this replacement into a javascript bookmarklet.
javascript:(function(){window.location.href=window.location.href.replace(/http:\/\/[^\/]*/,"$&.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu");})()
Now I can follow the google search result, hit this bookmarklet, log in if I haven't already, and view the articles.