Make the most out of a mac without admin account So. I've got this laptop from work. Big corporate enterprise.
Bureaucracy can't give me an admin privileges so I'm stuck with what I can install at my home folder.

Got lucky it came with a C compiler (clang), a decent Python distribution and Ruby so I could get homebrew running.

It seems that I can't get to the app store, but that would not be such a big deal because I don't want to spend money on this.

I'd love to get matplotlib running but it seems that it could not be done without tinkering some lib paths. Is there a way to workaround that?

Fuse or whatever I could use to get to mount something other than mac-formatted disks. Particularly my cellphone as a storage device and not that crap you get as bluetooth manager...

Any experience on the subject?

How did you deal with this kind of setup?
Ask your IT folks if they'd be OK with you running an OS X VM inside VMware Fusion and have admin rights inside the VM. 

That approach would allow you to get what you want (a developer environment where you could install things) while sandboxing it (which may satisfy the security rules and policies that your IT folks need to abide by.)