home! and cities
May. 25th, 2015 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishI am home, after literally twelve hours travelling. It would have been less but Delta's checkin system is incapable of understanding the concept of "permanent resident," and wouldn't check me in for a flight to Canada unless I could tell them when I'd be leaving Canada. I figured I'd better get there early in case their desk staff were as incompetent as their computer system. They weren't, so yay, except for the part where I sat around BWI for two and a half hours to go with the three-hour layover at JFK.
It's rainy and grey and just a bit chilly here. Feels like home. We got the obligatory couple of nice weeks in early May to lull us into complacency, and now Vancouver has said "FOOLED YOU!" and gone back to being miserable until the first of July.
I'm finding it easier to read printed books than ebooks. Not sure what's going on there; the physical item is just more attractive to me somehow. I may be objecting to the bright white "page" background? I dunno. But I blasted through a reread of Kavalier & Clay on the trip out, and am halfway through Jane Jacobs's Death & Life of Great American Cities after starting it in BWI around noon.
I'm finally getting around to reading the Jacobs because if I'm going to keep ranting about Robert Fucking Moses and the terrible things urban planning has done, I should at least know a little of what I'm talking about. (At dinner with Megan I went on a bit of a tirade. Apparently I have Opinions about cities, and automobiles, and urban development in general. Who knew?) The book is really interesting, by which I mostly mean "confirms many of my prejudices and preferences," but also feels very dated in parts. Like the bit where she's horrified, and expects the reader to be horrified, by the woman who won't let her kids, between the ages of eight and fourteen, go down and play "in the street" (on the sidewalk) outside their New York apartment.
Reading the book makes me think that the living environment I want is "New York, specifically Greenwich Village, in the late fifties." Which is going to be difficult. I am pretty sure there are neighborhoods in Vancouver that can sort of replicate that feeling: Commercial, Mt Pleasant. They'll just take some effort to find.
Meanwhile I need to unpack and sort and generally fall back into a normal yet useful rhythm. Today, I think, is a wash as far as scheduling and Doing Things (other than viola practice, which Must Happen) go. Tomorrow will be better.
It's rainy and grey and just a bit chilly here. Feels like home. We got the obligatory couple of nice weeks in early May to lull us into complacency, and now Vancouver has said "FOOLED YOU!" and gone back to being miserable until the first of July.
I'm finding it easier to read printed books than ebooks. Not sure what's going on there; the physical item is just more attractive to me somehow. I may be objecting to the bright white "page" background? I dunno. But I blasted through a reread of Kavalier & Clay on the trip out, and am halfway through Jane Jacobs's Death & Life of Great American Cities after starting it in BWI around noon.
I'm finally getting around to reading the Jacobs because if I'm going to keep ranting about Robert Fucking Moses and the terrible things urban planning has done, I should at least know a little of what I'm talking about. (At dinner with Megan I went on a bit of a tirade. Apparently I have Opinions about cities, and automobiles, and urban development in general. Who knew?) The book is really interesting, by which I mostly mean "confirms many of my prejudices and preferences," but also feels very dated in parts. Like the bit where she's horrified, and expects the reader to be horrified, by the woman who won't let her kids, between the ages of eight and fourteen, go down and play "in the street" (on the sidewalk) outside their New York apartment.
Reading the book makes me think that the living environment I want is "New York, specifically Greenwich Village, in the late fifties." Which is going to be difficult. I am pretty sure there are neighborhoods in Vancouver that can sort of replicate that feeling: Commercial, Mt Pleasant. They'll just take some effort to find.
Meanwhile I need to unpack and sort and generally fall back into a normal yet useful rhythm. Today, I think, is a wash as far as scheduling and Doing Things (other than viola practice, which Must Happen) go. Tomorrow will be better.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-25 08:51 pm (UTC)Huh. Weird. Me too, and I can't pinpoint a reason either.
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Date: 2015-05-26 12:17 am (UTC)Oh well. I will just have to read some of the zillion books I have in hardcopy instead of the ones on the ereader!
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Date: 2015-05-27 03:26 pm (UTC)That's the method I'm adopting!
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Date: 2015-05-25 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-26 12:22 am (UTC)Possible reasons, in descending order of likelihood and some or all of which may be partially or wholly right: 1) they didn't think to check what happens if you live somewhere other than where your passport's from, 2) they're aware of it but the couple hours it would take to code and test a fix would cost more than they think they'd save in not losing me and people like me as customers, 3) Delta management have covert or overt racist anti-immigrant sentiments and this is but one expression of that.
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Date: 2015-05-26 12:51 pm (UTC)I think the answer is 1) the original designers didn't think of it because "online checkin" didn't exist and 2) it hasn't been a big enough issue to make it worth finding IBM mainframe assembly code programmers to fix it.