My girlfriend and I have been getting ready to go to Peru finally, and one thing we had to do was to make some real hats to will keep us warm at night.

I've spent some time shopping around for hats, but really, when it comes down to it, there is no finer camping hat than a balaclava. It can be worn on your head Smurf-style; It can be worn all the over your head burglar style; Perhaps you want it below your chin, or maybe above. You can pull the whole hat over your entire head and poke your head through the face hole so it works as a scarf. I ask you what other hat could possibly accomplish all this?

Ah, the balaclava - My favorite piece of gear. After months abuse, they never give up. The ones that I make are always made of 200 weight Malden Mills Polartec fleece, which is the finest fleece in the land. I just take a sheet of it, hold it around my head and start pining. After a good twenty minutes of pinning and stitching, I cut out the face hole, give it a blessing and consider it done.

Just a quick note today to announce that pictures from last weekend are posted in the photo area for those of you that have logins.

It was a fantastic weekend. Some friends and I decided to go to Yosemite to go hiking, show shoeing and camping. All in all, Yosemite remains one of the most beautiful places on earth. The pictures are impressive, but they still can't tell the whole story. Enjoy.

I'm planning a quick trip out to Yosemite for next weekend, and I wanted to print out a couple of maps from Garmin Topo! beforehand. The last time I used Topo! was about four years ago, when I had Windows XP installed. I don't remember how I installed it then, but that probably means it wasn't too challenging.

This time, however, I don't have a computer running Windows except for as a virtual client within Ubuntu, so I figured that would be the best place to begin. I booted up Windows XP, popped in the CD, mounted it within the virtual client, and tried to install. No dice: some error message. I played with it for a while, and I eventually decided that for some reason, it just wasn't going to work.

My next idea was to try installing Topo! within Ubuntu via Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator). Wine is an application that attempts (and often fails, sometimes works) to allow Windows applications a method of working within Linux. I closed down Windows, opened the install CD within Ubuntu, and double-clicked the Setup.exe file. Amazingly, the Windows Install Shield business popped up, and the installation proceeded with no problems whatsoever.

Once that was done, the only remaining step was to make myself a nice link/alias/launcher. Once it's installed, the Topo! executable is located at ~/.wine/drive_c/TOPO!/TOPO.EXE, so it's just a matter of making a link to that, and you're all done.