A hostage situation at Hastings

I’m being held hostage by an excruciatingly slow download and install that I may not even need.

I left home on the bike this morning with thoughts of a long ride to the Arkansas Post National Memorial to collect another stamp in my National Parks Passport.

The Arkansas Post was the first European settlement in Arkansas down in Southeast Arkansas near Gillette.

My previous experience with stamp gathering has shown me that it can be a little tricky finding the exact location where the coveted rubber stamps reside, so I wanted precise GPS coordinates before setting out. (I rode several needless miles earlier this month tracking down stamps in the Tupelo, Miss., area.)

So after I picked up the mail at the post office, I headed for Hastings for coffee and GPS research. I quickly discovered that I needed to download and install the cumbersome Google Earth to get precise GPS coordinates for known locations, not something I cared to do on my netbook.

Google led me to parkstamps.org, the National Park Travelers Club web site that boasts GPS coordinates for every spot referenced in the Passport. The problem is that both ways of displaying the information involved software that is not on my netbook – Google Earth for the map and Microsoft Excell for the spreadsheet version.

OK, so we’re back to having to install cumbersome software again. OpenOffice.org’s office suite includes a spreadsheet program that reads .xls files, so I decided to download and install the suite to my 32GB SD card D: drive. So I started the download to the D: drive more than an hour ago. Here’s the progress so far:

Then it occurred to me that Google Docs may have an Excell reading/creating program up in the Google Cloud. I checked and they do, so I tried to upload the .xls file from parkstamps.org several times and each time got a “server error” message.

So I’m back to futzing around with the OpenOffice.org suite install. And the sky is clouding over, so it looks like the only riding I’ll do this afternoon is riding home.

Oh, great. Now I see the Install Wizard won’t let me install the suite on the D: drive. It would choke the rather limited C: drive, so I’ve just wasted a couple of hours.

Back to trying to upload to Google Docs…