The verdict is in

We are at the Wal-Mart in Elizabethtown, Kentucky (map). While this store is on the far northern outskirts of the city, it is across the street from the mall, and dining options abound here. We had an excellent Teppanyaki-style dinner last night at Kansai Japanese Steakhouse, just across the parking lot. The food was excellent, and the chef was a good showman; I would say the place rivals Benihana at a fraction of the cost. They also have sushi, but we did not partake so can not comment.

Yesterday we had a lovely drive from Lake Barkley, alternating between narrow and sometimes winding US-62 and the Interstate-like Western Kentucky Parkway. Absent any other concrete plans, we have decided to continue northeast to Louisville, where we have a reciprocal club, and this was a convenient stopping point en route.

Yesterday was also the final day to return my new netbook computer, and I have decided to keep it and give it the test of time. I am still getting used to typing on the smaller keyboard, but my error rate has dropped considerably in the last week. Right now I am still having to type on the larger Gateway, as well, and now I am having more errors on that machine -- we get used to a certain keyboard layout and any change makes for clumsy typing. The Acer, thankfully, has the CTRL key in the right place, and I had become quite accustomed to it being improperly placed on the Gateway, one adaptation I will be happy to "unlearn."

I am still finishing up the last configuration changes on this machine to make it really work for me. What has come out of this lengthy and sometimes frustrating process are several pages of notes on what turns out to be two separate configuration projects. One of those is what I would call the "normal" process of installing personal customizations and software onto a new and fresh Windows XP installation. The other is the process of tweaking Windows and other software to work well on a netbook -- the lower computing horsepower requires a number of tweaks to get decent performance, and the smaller screen resolution requires additional tweaks to make things display nicely. I am now thinking about posting two separate articles here on the blog detailing these, for anyone interested, now that the netbook explosion is making its way into the RV community.

We have a conference call today at 2pm, which we'll take right here at Wal-Mart. I expect to be in Louisville this evening.

Photo by afsart, used under a Creative Commons license.