As I noted earlier, last weekend I was at Oregon Country Fair, which is a great time. OCF has permanent facilities and has become more popular than it wants to be. All the booths, including food, have to be juried in and can in theory be kicked out to allow new ones in if popularity drops.

This results in much, much better food boths than you see at a typical random fair with vendors coming in simply if they pay their money.

And I wondered, can we extend this concept into the everyday restaurant world? For example a food mall, where the restaurant tennants are regularly judged for quality, and kicked out if they don't make the cut. Where you are assured a good meal at a reasonable price. If the idea works, people would go to this mall and make it worth the effort by the restaurants to stay.

This might work the same way movieplexes took over from solo cinemas. People go to a movieplex for the hot movie, but it often is sold out, so they go to a 2nd or 3rd or sometimes even 10th choice of what they want to see. This sells a lot more tickets and avoids people driving home without a movie at all -- though in my case I still sometimes bail out. Here, you could go to the restaurant mall with a particular restaurant in mind, but know that if it's too busy a fine meal is assured unless the whole mall is packed. There could even be a central line for "the next available restaurant."

Has this been done before? And what about going further and combining facilities...

Having completed a long fly-n-drive road trip, I have some lessons and observations.

1. If you will be driving a lot, use a rental car even if leaving your own city. We put 3000 miles on our rental car for $300 -- far less than the depreciation cost would have been on my own car.

2. It's great to have a cooler in the car, you can buy perishables and get cold drinks when you want them, but forget about those $5 styrofoam coolers for any long trip. Within a few days ours was leaking, we fixed it by putting a plastic bag inside and out, but they are not very sturdy. There are collapsible coolers and we have one but didn't have luggage room. You can buy a cheap solid cooler for under $20 at wal-mart or Costco, but it seems wasteful to throw it away. If you have extra luggage, you can fill a cooler with stuff, duct tape it and check it as luggage, however.

I recently visited the Oregon Country Fair, which among many other things has entertainment acts which pass the hat to earn their living. (OCF only costs about $13 to attend, not enough to pay much if anything to acts.) This is a pretty common setup.

Everybody is having a great time these days with the new and increasing satellite imagery found at Google Maps, finding their own houses and world landmarks.

I found a database built by a Keyhole user describing all the coordinates of the 788 Unesco World Heritage Sites. With a bit of perl magic I turned the Keyhole format into a series of web pages with links to Google satellite imagery.