The Ek’s Files

A few days ago I wrote about how efforts to increase the security of U.S. citizens have generally come at the expense of personal privacy. The government feels that collecting large amounts of data on its citizens as well as foreign nationals will allow them to better ferret out terrorists, making our nation safer. But over on ars technica, Jon Stokes makes some pretty convincing arguments that the existence of large amounts of personal data just makes it that much more likely that the data will be used against us.

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If you’ve been following the news at all lately, you’re aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller concerning the ban on handguns in DC. This case is expected to clarify the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which gun rights activists believe guarantees the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms, and which gun control advocates argue only addresses the right of the states to arm a militia. This case has reached the Supreme Court because a federal appeals court in March 2007 struck down DC’s ban on handgun ownership as a violation of the Second Amendment.

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There’s an interesting article at The Raw Story about how the U.S. government is drafting plans for surveillance of pretty much everything on the internet. Nobody who’s been following what the Bush administration has been doing in the name of homeland security would be surprised. Perhaps one of the most compelling statements in the whole article is that “Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.” In other words, any policy or action that favors individual privacy has a negative impact on national security, and vice versa.

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My wife, Dot, had been nudging me for a couple of years–heck, ever since we started dating–to go skiing with her. Now, let me start by saying that this was not a Bad Thing; I’ve lived in Colorado now for nearly twenty years, but I had never gone skiing. I was one of those people, the guy who receives stares of incredulity whenever it became known that he had never skied. I admit that I was a little bit ashamed of my status.

So, when Dot suggested that we go skiing, I thought to myself, “What the heck? Let’s go! It’s about time, don’t you think?” And we scheduled a trip to Monarch ski resort. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Duffey, KK6MC/5, also known as “Dr. Megacycle” on the QRP-L email reflector, was quoted a couple of times in a recent digest:

- “Better is the enemy of good enough.”

- “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”

Truer words were never spoken…

This weekend I took the plunge big-time, completely replacing my Windows XP desktop installation with Ubuntu 7.10. Being a ham, my computer setup is a little more complex than normal because I use my computer to control my ham radio (an ICOM IC706MKIIG) for contesting and for making contacts in digital modes. I use a West Mountain Radio Rigblaster Plug & Play USB interface to control my radio and for sound card and keying interfacing. So, it was with a little trepidation that I abandoned the world of Windows for Ubuntu.

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Well, in a moment of possible lunacy this weekend, I blew away the remaining vestiges of Windows XP on my two PCs and went over to the Ubuntu side. I’d already been running Ubuntu exclusively on my notebook and using that as my day-to-day system for a couple of weeks now. But I had still hung on to my Windows XP desktop system (nothing special–a 1.5GHz AMD Athlon with about 750 MB of RAM and a 40GB HD), in case I needed to go back.

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I walked into a Target store the other day to purchase some cold medicine for one of the kids. In the cold medicine aisle I was greeted with shelves filled not with cold medicine, but rather filled with little cards depicting the medications. I had to take a card off the shelf and take it to the pharmacy counter, where I had to show identification and give my signature before I could have my chosen medication. It seems that the medicine I chose contained ephedrine, and our concerned lawmakers had recently passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 in an attempt to make it harder for criminals to purchase ephedrine-containing medications and turn them into meth. Law-abiding citizens are thus treated as potential criminals whenever they purchase something that has a perfectly legitimate and legal use simply because it’s also possible to use it to make an illegal substance.

After the Dec 2007 shootings at New Life Church in Colorado Springs, I learned that security guards in Colorado Springs were only allowed by city ordinance to carry revolvers, not semiautomatic handguns. I cannot fathom a reason for such an ordinance, other than that it was somehow felt that a semiauto held too many rounds and was therefore a menace to public safety (never mind that people with concealed-carry permits can carry semiautos legally). Thus, we place the security guard at a disadvantage to the gun-toting criminal. That’s so like California, which prohibits weapon magazines that can hold more than ten rounds. So once again, the honest, law-abiding citizen will obey this law and put himself at a disadvantage to criminals who have no regard for the law.

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(Updated 20 Jan 2008–added “sudo ndiswrapper -m” step, and added a note about manual configuration)

As a follow-up to my earlier post on using the Linksys WPC54G v2 with Ubuntu Gutsy, the procedure for using the WUSB54G is quite similar.

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My oldest young’un is a college senior, getting ready to enter the working world as an English teacher. College kids–er, young adults, sometimes exhibit tremendous enthusiasm for expressing ways in which the world would be a better place if only someone would listen. My boy’s lucky enough to be writing a column for his college newspaper (The Daily Nebraskan) which gives him the opportunity to express his viewpoints on a regular basis.

Here’s one of his columns, which I particularly enjoyed…