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
?