Blogging, time warps, travel, cruddy hotels, problems
This post will be post-dated to appear Thursday, but I'm writing it on a Wednesday. The reason I'm doing it that way is partly because I don't know how much opportunity I'll have to post again this week. But the other part of it is that I'm not clear on whether or not Holiday Inn--specifically this Holiday Inn--is still offering free wireless. Getting onto the wireless network involved agreeing to conditions I didn't read (oh crap, I guess if I ever have kids, there goes the firstborn son) and clicking on something that said "one day free." That might mean that you have to go through their stupid log-in screen every time you try to get onto their network or it may mean that their stupid network infected my system with a cookie somewhere that will keep me from getting on for free tomorrow unless I go through and try to find the stinking cookie. Times like this, Cory Doctorow starts looking like the Moses for my people, the tribe of geek.
The Holiday Inn's goofy setup meant that I actually couldn't get on via Firefox--when I did, Firefox all but seized up. So I went onto Konqueror to see if I could get onto the wireless network that way, and lo! So then I tried to write this entry through Konqueror and Konqueror crashed. Then I went back to Firefox and suddenly could use the internet again. Presumably, if I used Internet Explorer, I would be using a crappy excuse for a browser this all would have worked perfectly, because IE is considered a default by people with their heads up their asses pretty reliable in this context.
The drive from Charlotte to Wrightsville Beach was awesome for a while and terribly tedious for a while. The only direct connection between the two places is I74, a route that was never designed for traffic between North Carolina's largest city and a major in-state tourist destination. They're working on expanding it and creating various bypasses, but there are plenty of spots where the speed limit drops to 35 as you pass through little podunk towns that may blow away if there's ever an alternate route around them. I couldn't help thinking of the politics of it, wondering if part of the reason 74 is such an awful corridor is that there are a number of state lawmakers who are painfully aware that expanding the corridor would force this or that Bojangles to close down, wiping out a third of the non-farm jobs in some of these towns.
The land itself is beautiful, but it gets monotonous after a little while. The trees you drive past start looking like the same trees, the scrabby farms in the sandy soil start looking like the same farms. I passed underneath some raptors circling the highway, and they were beautiful, elegant things looking for something small and vulnerable to rip apart with their vicious beaks and talons--gorgeous and terrible the way wild things really are--but when I passed under another ring of wings I had to wonder if they were circling me. Post a comment about them waiting for me to die if you must; if there's a hell it may involve driving back and forth along the last leg of I74 before you hit Wilmington.
So anyway, I'm at the beach and this is a Thursday blog entry posted Wednesday, and there may or may not be another one this week depending on my schedule and the network. Hope you're having a good week.
POSTSCRIPT: And in further insult added to injury, this entry may appear today instead of tomorrow despite the date in the headline, because Blogger's scheduling function may or may not be working right now. The entry is appearing when I go to blog, and not listing as "scheduled" when I manage posts, but when you look under the title, it clearly says it's "Thursday." Welcome to the world of tomorrow!
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