Dispatches from a happy Hullian

First of all, fajitas in grocery stores.

The grocery store will try and sell you fajita kits. The spice mix packet usually says something like "salt, MSG, spices" to keep you coming back rather than making your own. The secret, my friends, is cumin. And look in the bakery section rather than the Mexican section for tortillas — they seem to be cheaper there.

Second, Firefox 3.5 for Mac OS.

This is the release of Firefox that really feels like a Mac browser. It's zippy, smooth and has all the features of Safari I care about. Also, it accepts add-ons easily. Like Fission, which brings back the nice progress bar in the address bar that Apple mysteriously scrapped. A progress bar makes pages feel like they load faster! Also, Aardvark, so you never have to print more of a Web page than you actually want to print.

Third, a message from my burlesque-singing, raunchy, funny, should-get-an-Ottawa-tour-date-dammit, cousins-in-law, the Wet Spots.

Not safe for work! If you see them live, maybe they'll do the longer, funny intro about hospital staff...

I'm on the sidewalk, soaking up wifi vibes from Petit Chicago. We went there last night for a drink, the beer there is pretty good, and cheap on Tuesdays. It's a little grey, with a nice breeze out here.

Two policemen with funny hats just walked by. They're without a contract (and have been for a while) out here, but they haven't given up on the somewhat sketchy area around Place #1. Good on them.

Things are coming together: thesis is progressing (and ratio of stuff that falls under "know it, did it, just have to write it" as opposed to "don't know it, have to figure it out, beat it into submission, then write it" is nice, considering that I have to be done by the fall); we have appliances coming, Verdun stuff arranged for moving, paint colours almost picked and several nice people offering to help us lug what stuff we have at Hull Place #1 to Hull Place #2..

I look forward to taking a break from writing to illustrate some stuff. Maybe I'll give my recently-downloaded copy of Inkscape a spin. I know I'll be hammering away at GraphViz, which is a very cool free program for drawing stuff connected to other stuff: OmniGraffle for poor people who like editing text files and dislike making layout decisions. Seeing that I'm using L_AT_EX for the text, it's a logical choice for graph drawing.

In other news, I had a nasty cold before that seems to be going away.

So, this morning my rear derailleur died semi-dramatically on me (it is now hanging only by its cable), changing "I should get my bike looked at by a pro sometime this summer when I have time" to "I should get it fixed ASAP." On the first day of a transit strike, of all things.

Then, between appointments, I open up my laptop, and it freezes on me. Badly. And has been spotty in starting up and freeze-y since, thus preventing me from doing much of anything with it.

I'm going to be running around trying to resuscitate my technological extensions for a while. Goodbye productivity for the same while, probably.

A while ago, I was looking for a utility that would attach SMTP settings to my location settings in Mac OS X.

I found one, mentioned on TidBITS: Location X. It's a shareware utility that not only ties 14 control panels' worth of settings to a location in its own system-wide menu, it also switches locations automatically, triggered by entering or leaving a given wireless network. The switch takes a couple of seconds and saves me running around to three or four different preference screens: I just turn the wireless card on and get on with what I'm doing. Any Mac laptop user who hops from network to network should consider getting a copy.

I like it very much, and at $20 for a license which gets rid of the nag screen (unlicensed users get a nag screen and a limited number of switches), it's pretty reasonable.

I will be very disappointed if our otherwise budget-conscious governments decide to help (by ceding land or kicking in funds) build a giant religious structure, as Mr. Jaziri Saïd is suggesting (for the record, any cathedral still acting as a cathedral's upkeep should be the problem of the church using it). Just because all the cool mid-Eastern monarchies' taxpayers are kicking in, doesn't mean we should.

In other news, the donated computer continues to flake out. Gift horses and all, I guess, but I can't pass my old clunker on without a reliable replacement, and this new one isn't it just yet.