Grumbles from the Springs...

Before activating grouchy mode, I'd just like to say I had a really nice time at Feht's last night. We discussed the state of the world, came to a general consensus that things are not as bad as some of our acquaintances think, and I had entirely too much to eat, falling off the lo-carb wagon like, well, a ton of lard.

And a point of information: Feht's place is out of range of cellular towers, which caused my Blackberry to exhaust its battery from 100% to beepingly low in 5 hours or so.

We now return you to my originally intended rant.

The wifi drivers that I carefully downloaded, compiled, and installed do something nasty to the overall setup, causing the wifi to stop working upon reboot. At first I thought it had to do with kernel updates, but it would appear that if I reboot after installing the compiled drivers, I have wifi. Booting after a shutdown, however, results in a failure to detect the wifi hardware. Bah!

In other news, I managed to retrace my steps in recompiling and installing a new cypress_m8 module for my EarthMate GPS, but also realized - in retrospect - that the LJ post in which I chronicled this process was not as clear as it should have been. Still, in the end, the puck now works. The next time the Eee is near a wireless network, I shall have to take the next logical step and download some decent maps.

Cheers...

Moving along smoothly, with bumps...

I called Galina at around 9 am this morning, and caught her somewhere inside of Indiana, 700 miles or so from her starting point. Given where she was and the time, I estimate it will take her until sometime Tuesday to get here by herself.

Drew called late in the afternoon and invited me to pick up a few steaks and drop by. I would have gladly complied, except that now the other rear tire is flat. (My Pagosa experience is now complete.) He came by, we picked up a pair of ribeyes at very nearly half price, and consumed them with copious quantities of asparagus and a couple of Killian's Irish Reds.

The prepackaged version of GpsDrive (for Linux) seems to not understand a number of its command-line parameters, but when I tried to configure the source code for compilation, I ran into some problems, starting with the version of gcc on my Eee.

The configuration script complained that my version was not ">= 3.x" when, in fact, it was somewhere past 4. In examining the script, I saw that the problem lay with assuming that if the version regurgitated by the -dumpversion option doesn't start with "3", that it must be a previous version.

After I fixed that, the configuration script started spouting other error messages that I simply wasn't in the mood to address, so I reinstalled the prepackaged version and admired its ability to operate with the maps I downloaded earlier in the day at the coffee shop, even if I can't control much else about how the application works. Drew was suitably impressed.

I managed to get more than halfway, but short of 2/3 of the way through the translation due Tuesday morning. I procrastinated doing anything about it yesterday, and finally sat down to deal with it earlier this afternoon. It turned out to be a lot more straightforward and a lot less stressful than I anticipated. I will leave it alone for the rest of the night and pick it up first thing - or nearly so - tomorrow morning.

Cheers...