The nerd in me has taken on another nerdish challenge: To get Ubuntu to work on my old Dell laptop.

Getting it up and running was surprisingly easy, download the Live CD, which also worked as an install CD, check it out for a bit and then install. Everything went OK until I was to connect to my wireless network, which uses WPA encryption. And I’m just not able to get WPA to work with my D-Link DWL-G650+ wireless card. WEP is OK, but in the words of one of my favourite cartoon characters: Idowanna!

Since I face enough challenges at work, I really don’t feel like sitting in front of a computer strugling with something like this. Right now I’m connecting through a Windows box using a twisted TP cable and that works well – but it’s not very wireless. I have now taken what can only be descibed as the easy exit; asking the people over at the Ubuntu Forums for suggestions on PCMCIA cards that work out of the box. Hopefully they’ll come up with a cheap alternative.

The German movie Stalingrad is on the idiot box in the background. It looks like a movie I should probably see properly one day, but not right after dinner. Violent, violent stuff. “War”, I think they call it.

And while we’re on the subject of war. On my way back home from work today, I biked passed a pro-Israeli demonstration. A lot of people, and a lot of cops. Perhaps a perfect opportunity to photograph riot police beating the living shit out of activists. So I got home, grabbed my camera and walked back. But when I got there, they had left.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know where they had gone, which is too bad, because after a while the pro-Israeli crowd had stumbled upon a not-so-pro-Israeli crowd and they’d startet hiting eachother, burning flags and all kinds of really mature stuff. Kodak moment upon Kodak moment, and I wasn’t there!