The Ek’s Files

Hello, my name is Dave, and I’m a mapaholic.

Being an occasional backpacker, I use topographic maps both for planning hikes and camping trips, and for navigating on the trail. My map of choice, just like practically everyone else, is the 7.5-minute USGS quad. I obtained my first one of these back in the late 80’s, before the internet, and before it was feasible to store much map data electronically (can you say “40 MB hard drive”?). I think I ended up ordering it from someplace, and it came in the mail rolled up in a cardboard tube. I think I just about wet my pants when I first unrolled it. It was soooo cool! The level of detail on that map (1 inch = 2000 ft) was more than I’d ever experienced, and I could determine the latitude and longitude of anything on the map. It wasn’t long before I could smugly recite the coordinates of my house down to the arc second or so.

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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.

If you want a great book for learning HTML, XHTML, and CSS, I highly recommend Head First HTML by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman–it’s an easy read that’s packed with examples and exercises. It won’t make you an expert, but it’ll arm you with the basic tools and understanding you need to create decent web pages that are easy to maintain. I haven’t finished my web make-over yet, but I’ll let you know when the new pages are up.

I’m dorking around with a new look for my web site (no, it’s not up on my site yet). I wanted to create a GIF with a transparent background. You can use tools like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to do such things, or you can use a free online GIF editor at http://www.gifworks.com/. It’s free and does many things besides help you make the background of a GIF transparent. You just upload your file, use the editor to do what you need, and then do a right-click save back to your hard drive. You can also save via FTP, although I never tried that.