Droid’s navigation funnies see South Lakes Dr as s. LAKES dr. Also pronouned Pinecrest as PIN-e-crest…
Ran into frequent brief wireless drops using network-manager, switching to wicd seems to have resolved it. Using native r8192se_pci drivers for now…
So I wasn’t so lucky with the Realtek driver for the wireless card. It was able to see my wireless networks, but so far I haven’t been lucky enough to get it to work with encryption. I tried the ndiswrapper and original drivers, and no love with WEP or WPA. Plus the drivers were questionable, performance suffered. I had more success this morning with the native drivers. At first they didn’t compile under the PAE kernel, so I switched back to the generic kernel, they seemed to work much better. Then I switched back to the PAE kernel for troubleshooting, turns out the linux headers didn’t install a symlink from /lib/modules/linux-2.6.31-14-generic-pae/build to /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.31-14-generic-pae/. Once I made that symlink, I was able to compile the native drivers for the PAE kernel, so right now I have the best of both worlds — internet AND full recognition of my 4GB of RAM. Since this driver is so much better, I’ll probably give encryption a shot later as well, once I get out of bed.
Picked up a Toshiba A505-6980 at Best Buy this week. I’d been looking at that deal, since my four- or five-year-old Dell Inspiron 700m has truly seen better days. Even after replacing the screen, the battery and power supply more than once, and quadrupling the RAM to 2GB, it’s still barely functional for the types of tasks that I require of it (mainly running virtual routers for network planning and studying, but facebook has started to suck recently as well).
The Toshiba’s specs were out of this world for the price, although next year’s model will likely be faster, cheaper and more sexually appealing, because that’s always how it works. Dual-core 2.2GHz processor, 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive, harmon kardon speakers built-in, integrated webcam, HDMI out, just $629 at Best Buy. It shipped with Windows 7, so of course I felt compelled to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala, released last week).
I first tried the 64bit desktop version, but ran into problems getting the Realtek 8172 (aka 8192se in Windows-land) working and stable. I used Realtek linux drivers obtained, if I remember correctly, from the Ubuntu community, and was able to connect to my wireless, but after a bit of traffic (less than an apt-get update) it would dwindle to nothing, /var/log/messages would report an AP loss of power, or something like it, and then shortly after, the entire system would crash. Blank screen except for maybe a cursor line, no mouse, only a hard reboot would recover.
I learned that the alternative for drivers, using ndiswrapper to load the Windows drivers, was not really an option for the 64bit Ubuntu OS.
So I tried an alternate approach, installing the 32bit desktop Ubuntu version, replacing the stock kernel with the PAE generic kernel so that all of my RAM would be utilized, and then doing the ndiswrapper thing. Detected and found networks right away. I’ll update this later when I confirm that I can connect to a WPA2 wireless network.
As to the rest of the system, I have yet to stumble across anything else with troubles. The built-in webcam comes right up with Cheese, no new drivers necessary. The video (integrated Intel) works fine without proprietary drivers.
I got lucky yesterday. Around lunchtime, I heard through an unlikely channel (the Fredericksburg Area Brewing and Tasting Society email list) that the Dark Star Orchestra would be playing in Fredericksburg at around 6pm. I hustled out of work, home just long enough to change into a Jerry shirt, and then headed over to Celebrate Virginia Live for the show. Celebrate Virginia Live is basically a semi-permanent festival space behind Central Park, just down the road from the new Wegman’s grocery store.
Dark Star Orchestra, for those who don’t know, is a Grateful Dead tribute band formed in 1997, two years after Jerry Garcia’s death. Rather than simply playing covers, well, I’ll let them explain (from their website):
Precision is king with DSO; the band adapts their stage positioning, vocal arrangements, specific musical equipment and instruments to fit the era of the show they are performing. Following each performance the band announces the date and venue of the original performance. Dark Star Orchestra could dip into any incarnation of the dead at any of their shows, allowing fans to experience shows that happened long before they were born.
The show was great, I left with a big smile on my face just like I did when the Dead played, then and now. The crowd was fantastic — who knew there were so many heads in the greater Fredericksburg area? I didn’t see ANYONE I knew, though. That was a bit of a bummer. The family was too exhausted and pre-exhausted to join me (pre-exhausted because there’s a swim meet today).
Last night’s show was a recreation of the Dead’s April 1, 1986 show in Providence, Rhode Island, aside from a 2nd set opener of Hey Pocky Way, headed up by none other than Keller Williams who just happened to drop in for a single song.
Somehow I missed this story in late March on The Smoking Gun, about a guy who was busted for DWI and other charges after wrecking his Motorized Bar Stool. Yes, you read that correctly.
Found myself back at Prince William this morning. Finished Bryson’s book this evening on the way home, and boy, do I understand, once you get started hiking, how the trails draw you back. This morning, before work, I followed the Ecology Trail down to the waterfall just by the fall line, and then around to its second intersection with the North Valley trail, taking the North Valley trail back up towards the car at Parking Lot E, finding three of five letterboxes planted on the trail in the process. When I first arrived, I saw several mountain bikers and a lone hiker who went on up the road. When I returned to my car, there was a camper (presumably) sleeping on a picnic table. He wasn’t there when I entered the trail, so I’m guessing he was camping somewhere on the grounds, got up for an early hike, and decided to nap again while I was exploring. Or maybe I roused him.
Talked to a ranger this morning, he says it was most likely a coyote that I saw on the high meadows trail. Makes sense, coyotes, dogs and wolves are all cousins. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t get a close enough look to tell for sure, although I wish I had snapped a photo.
To go along with my increased hiking this year, I picked up an audiobook of Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail this week. Having just completed a 15 mile hike, I stand in awe that a significant number of dedicated hikers choose to do just that for an entire summer. Averaging fifteen miles per day, which is a little bit past the pain threshold for beginning hikers, as I can testify, it would take a thru-hiker 140 days to complete the entire trail, barring lost days due to pain, injury, bear attacks, blizzards, rainstorms, getting lost, etc.
Bryson’s sense of humor had me laughing out loud in the car, especially near the beginning where he described how exactly he would die if four bears entered his campsite.
Seriously, this book is a great companion. You might think, with some of the horror stories contained therein, it might be used to help dissuade a potential A/T hiker from making such a foolhardy journey. The reality is that it makes the journey more attractive.
I think you have to be either wealthy or destitute to attempt such an undertaking, rather than in the middle like most of us. It’s hard to take off an entire summer — impossible even — when you have a mortgage and kids. But if you’re wealthy, you’re good to go, and if you’re destitute, hell, you’ve got nothing to lose.
I’ll be forty-two years old this year, but I still think of myself as a child. This is why I am not surprised to see myself doing something really, really childlike — exuberantly pushing my boundaries and getting in over my head.
I have been doing five mile walks at Burke Lake fairly frequently. Two days in a row is no big deal. This is why, when I got a copy of 50 Hikes in Northern Virginia, I was excited. I knew I was ready for more than 5 miles. I quickly crossed off the list those hikes that are one-way hikes, and those that required camping overnight, and those that are “too far away,” and settled on a great little circuit put together by the author in Prince William Forest Park. If you read the park’s website and maps, you’ll note that no single trail is longer than 9.4 miles. But the author strung together a series of trails and fire roads around the park to come up with a perfect 13.5 mile hike that takes you through every major segment of the park.
I started out at the Visitor Center at 8:45am. I finally made it back to the car around 4:45pm or so. I took maybe an hour’s worth of breaks, and a half hour of deviations (adding probably 1.5 miles onto the total for a grand total of around fifteen miles, in eight hours. I saw deer, beaver, turtles, and what looked to me to be a German Shepherd running alone through the woods carrying prey. Could it have been something else? I’ll ask the park ranger when I get a chance. I saw bear scratches on trees. I saw animal droppings with candy wrappers in them, and I saw fresh candy wrappers that hadn’t been eaten by the animals yet. Much of this I got photos of, except for the “Shepherd” and the beaver. They moved before I got the camera out. I picked up the candy wrappers from the fire road to prevent another animal from trying to eat them. It makes me angry to see people litter in a trash-free forest park.
I love this park, it’s an undiscovered and underutilized gem. Two branches of Quantico Creek flow through it, there are trails for all levels of hiker and biker, and it’s QUIET. Especially out on the North Valley Trail, where I didn’t see a soul for over an hour.
Here’s a gallery of photos taken at this park today:
Prince William Forest Park Gallery
