The Ek’s Files

No, not me. My boy. He’s just about finished with college and ready to enter the working world as an English teacher. I still haven’t quite figured out how I, being an engineer-type, managed to father a teacher of English. Perhaps it was his mother’s genes. Whatever. He’s done well for himself, and I’m proud of him.

The boy’s a poet, too. Here is some of his work.

I decided to give the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron beta a whirl today, but really didn’t have much luck with it. First, I was having a hard time integrating it into my existing multiboot scheme on my computer (I use a separate GRUB partition for managing booting between Gutsy Gibbon and WinXP), but I ignored that for the moment. The real difficulty came when I tried to get my Linksys WUSB54G (ver. 4) wireless adapter working. I figured that I could simply follow the instructions that I wrote for doing so with Gutsy Gibbon, but alas, there was no joy. When I tried to manually configure the network settings, I found that I could not select the wireless network settings to modify them. Perhaps this will be fixed before it goes final, or someone else will solve this problem…

In the mean time, my experiment with the Hardy Heron beta has ended. I’ll pick it up again at a later time, perhaps when it’s released in final form.

I’m about to set up a new computer for myself, and it’s going to run both Windows XP Pro and one or more flavors of Linux. Obviously, it’s going to be a multi-boot system. So I’ve been boning up on a lot of the issues associated with setting up such a system, such as:

• What’s the best way to partition the system?
• Can I use a single /home partition and just share it with every Linux distro I install?
• How can I easily share files between WinXP and Linux?

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It’s makin’ me wait…

Sorry–couldn’t resist.

I’m anticipating a lot of things right now. Mostly, I’m longing for warmer temperatures and longer days. For a lot of reasons. Many things are on the workbench, waiting for meteorological conditions to be more favorable.

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For quite a while I’ve been keeping my eye out for some kind of case for my Garmin eTrex GPS. Most of the cases I’d seen thus far would attach to your belt just fine, but I wanted one that I could hook onto my backpack so that it would be exposed to the sky while I hiked (so it could make a track of my hiking route). I finally found this one, made by Gilsson Technologies. It’s a black neoprene zip-up case with clear plastic windows for the display and the buttons on either side. In addition, it has a loop for slipping it onto your belt, but it also has a plastic clip for fastening it to just about anything on your pack. I actually bought one on Ebay from FIS4HER COM GPS Gear (their price and shipping time were fantastic), and mine has a metal ring an a carabiner instead of the plastic clip. This case looks like a great little case that’ll work perfectly for backpacking, and the price is right.