Paying Respects

Today we sail to Belgium to pay respects to one of my Uncles who died in 1918 in the Ypres salient. My uncle was the eldest of three brothers (Ernest, Harry and George) who joined up together, trained together and very nearly died together. The official story is that Ernest was badly wounded and died at St Julian Dressing Station. His two brothers were also wounded at the same time but survived. The unofficial story is that they were sharing a section of trench with their mates when they were subjected to a gas attack which penetrated their respirators. As they scrambled out of the trench to escape the gas, a shell exploded near them. Ernest was badly wounded and died a short time later. Harry was wounded with shrapnel in both legs that he carried until he died in 1958. George, who was nearest the blast from the shell, was physically uninjured but the blast caused him to suffer shell shock from which he never really recovered.

Two years ago we realised that Ernest's grave had never been visited by any of the family so we took a day trip to Ypres and went to find the grave. It is in the St Julian Dressing Station Cemetery about 2 miles from Ypres. There was just enough time to leave a message on the grave and to visit the Menine Gate before it was time to set off back to catch the ferry.

When we got home, we realised that there was a lot of things we hadn't seen starting with the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres so we started to plan another visit, this time with an extended stay. I'll let you know what we find when we come home.

Network wise CCL have not been able to get the bits I want to rebuild my FTP server but sorting that out will have to wait till we get home again. However I have managed to get my main computer to dual boot with Vista and Ubuntu Linux. Vista for once is running beautifully but Linux is a right royal pain.

Being new to Linux I am having to learn how to do all the things that we take so much for granted in Windows like installing drivers. In Windows all we have to do is download the appropriate file, virus check it (You do check everything you download with an up to date AntiVirus program don't you?) and then after unpacking it with WinRAR or WinZip a double click starts the install process. In Linux it seems that first you have to download a shell script which then needs to be compiled in Terminal. Then you have to find the driver and authorise it. So far I haven't managed to do this successfully so the Linux side of my computer is running on the native drivers at a low resolution and on a single screen unlike Windows which has a three screen display. Oh well it will all wait till I get home and try to work it all out with a fresh mind.