Day4: Deborah's knob arising from peachy bottom (hills, apparently)

The only motel in Sparta had a great selection of teas, including Constant Comment - very welcome as there was no real milk and like Fake Steve, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of non-dairy creamer. We had comedy moments of finding nearly every gas station was either closed or out of gas or didn't have a working card reader, but we gassed up eventually and I picked up the guidebook to discover that we were passing the view of the aforesaid knob arising from the aforesaid bottom. I must admit that we sniggered.

The first overlook we stopped at had Québécois bikers and a much better view on the other side of the road - of a curved, half-bald mountain (maybe it was Peachy Bottom, but from this angle the Knob was not aligned).

The log cabin was both cosy and exposed; I was thinking how far away from everyone, the widow moved out after she left it to the park because too many people came through! The flax patch looks as if they grow it every year for demonstrations and the grass was starred with tiny flowers.

Lunch at a lodge right on the parkway - country ham biscuits and pulled pork with cheese between two corn pancakes which is way better than it sounds (although it was my day for foreign objects; I got the fish-hook in the carpet (point down, luckily and the hotel manager literally blenched when I showed it to him) and the hair in the pancake).

The colours of the foliage on the parkway are amazing; not just the variety of greens and the mix of trees but white blossom, flame azaleas, something that might be pink azaleas and all the leaves coming out pink and copper - I may have as many shots of unfurling leaves as I do of vistas.

The denim magnate's fancy house is fancy; white painted wedding cake with 11 miles of carraige drives and it's now a craft shop with views.

The stunning Linn viaduct; we saw it, slowed down for a photo, drive back to the waterfall before it and couldn't get a photo, drove over it and then hiked under it past rivulets and trillium.

Shortly after that the parkway was closed so we drove away and then back; as we were going to be right behind a honking big truck, we pulled over to buy local jam and honey and let the truck get away from us. Back on the parkway at the Linn River turnoff and along the twisty bits before we hit another diversion - into Transylvania!

We made it as far as Brevard on the diversion and stopped for the night, finding a really rather good strip-mall sushi joint for dinner, by the name of Sora. The local beer came in two styles, amber and dark, both of which go nicely with sushi!

Does Godwins Law apply to Apple comparisons?

I was half awake in Charleston this morning and musing over Fake Steve's ban on flavoured coffee (can't disagree there) and my mind went to the progressions of control.
I didn't complain, said the developer, when they came for the frameworks because I could write native code and hey, Flash apps can be resource hog. I said nothing when they came for the diaresis because I never use it and it's such a fancy frou-frou punctuation mark...

Ooh, I thought when I was awake; is that an offensive parody? And then I thought, I'm annoyed with Apple. Why? The iPad is a great Internet appliance (as is the smartphone in general) but like a console, it's a closed platform. You can't install just anything - it has to have been anointed under opaque and arbitrary oversight. Will it tempt kids into creating content and devloping apps or just consuming content? I think we've lost a lot of potential developers when kids switched to consoles where it's been much harder to go from playing games to coding them than on the PC and I think if we hail the iPad as the ultimate netbook (which too many people I respect have done for me to be comfortable) then we risk losing the huge diversity of more open systems. I think I feel a little like FOSS and Linux fans do looking at Microsoft (though I find modern Microsoft more open than many think and more open to having conversations). And yes, jailbreaking - but that's not a long term alternative, it concerns me that it's more than once involved security holes and to do it you already have to be at a technical level of ability (and have access to something not an appliance). And yes, Web apps and Web development, but I rather like rich client apps and the power of a full OS.

Turns out, quite a lot of people want an Internet appliance rather than a computer; now that the Internet is powerful enough that can be enough for a lot of people. But I don't want us to say that's all anyone is supposed to want or need - that what's enough for one person is enough for everyone else, no matter what they do. I don't want any one person, experience genius or not, locking the appliance down so hard in the name of experience that it can't be as empowering as an open computer. I want full-power computers to get easier to use so it's not a choice between usable and powerful, between easy and open. And I don't want us to say anything less is acceptable however shiny it is.