Flu, Garmin, SuSE, and cachin..
This week I came down with the flu. I suspect it's dna's fault because other people who also hung out with him last weekend became sick as well... Wednesday saw my fever rise to a wee bit over 102 (102.4F), which was anything but comfortable :-(. My fever broke by Wednesday evening, and now I'm just stuck with the coughing crud and dripping throat. This has probably been the worst year as far as getting sick that I can remember...

On Wednesday I went ahead and ordered a Garmin GPS V. I was originally not planning on buying a GPS for the trip, but in a moment of weakness I went ahead and ordered it on Wednesday. See above about the fever :-). The Garmin arrived on Friday, and Sandy and I played with it a little bit last night. I downloaded the Gainesville and surrounding maps from Mapsource, and we used it to plot our way to dinner and back home. The built in nav function worked like a champ, and was pretty cool to boot.

Heeding the advice of Matt Grover, I decided to take the Garmin out for a day of geocaching today. I wanted to find the Book Lovers cache, so I set out with Dali in tow to go find it. When I was within 200' of the cache I knew it wasn't a good plan, the trails were really muddy and I was in sandals. Oh yeah, the skeeters were ferocious. So, with dog in tow, I headed home.

Ed came into town around 2pm and I convinced him to go with me to find the cache. This time the dog was left behind and I went in hiking boots. Within 10 minutes of getting to the vicinity I found the cache. I took the book Defcon One by Joe Webber and left The Lions Game by Nelson DeMille. Defcon One got 4.5 stars on the Amazon scale, so I hope it's good. I was surprised to see The Lions Game only received four stars.. I hope whoever takes it will find it as enjoyable as I did.

Speaking of book trading, Greg Pink just wrote me back saying that he enjoyed The Ghost Rider which I had sent him last month. He said he's got another book for me, so I guess the book trading game is going well, but I need to get cracking since I now have three books to read.

I also received my copy of SuSE professional 8.2 on Thursday. I went ahead and reformatted my laptop and installed it on there. I'm testing it out to see if it'll be a viable replacement for RedHat, especially considering the fiasco that has become the RedHat support policy. So far, so good. It's definately different, and I've run into a few kinks (like my keyboard was goofy until I fixed it), but I think it may work well. And, with the backing of IBM and United Linux, (and the German Government), SuSE should remain solvent for awhile.

Oh one last thing. On Monday I dissected the hard drive that crashed last week on the Flamingos server. The platters were see through because the magnetic substrate had been scrapped off. That's what the pictures are of in my photo album.

Posted at: 22:09 on 26/04/2003   [ /diary ] #