Nothing Could Be Finer
We just returned from our trip to South
Carolina. It was the first time in several years that all three
Wilson girls were back in Columbia. It was a largely domestic
trip, with lots of time spent being familial and stuff. We celebrated
Roland's birthday at Robin's house with lentil soup (96 calories/cup),
ate an early Thanksgiving meal, drank lots of coffee, and cut into one
of Barbara's raw milk camemberts.
assert(visiting_family == eating);
I downloaded Gutsy Gibbon while we were there, intending to play a prank on a Windows user involving the live CD. To my dismay, it Gnome would not start cleanly on the system, leaving me with a blank X display, no toolbars, no menus, and no way to start a terminal (without resorting to one of the virtual consoles). This was not a state I wanted to leave the computer in, even as a prank, because the point was to demonstrate the usablity of Ubuntu to a Windows user who had earlier in the weekend claimed that he might be persuaded to change to Linux if only he were a computer nerd. Disappointing.
We also went out to visit Village at
Sandhill, an example of the lifestyle center
retail shopping concept. Interesting to see in action, it's a mixed-use
development heavily weighted toward shopping—like a cross between
new urbanism, a traditional mall, and Disney World. The Disney
World
feel comes from a sense of artifice and manufacture. I'd
like to go back in a few years and see how they're doing, not because I
think it's doomed to fail, but because I think it might need some time
to become lived-in before it starts to feel like a neighborhood, which
is, I think, what the developer intends.
I should have blogged all these things separately, but I was mostly
cut off from my
exocortextthe net the whole time, save a trip to the
bookstore, where I mostly tried to gather research materials for later
reading. Is it bad that I often think of vacations in terms of time
to work on projects
?