Leopard (OS X 10.5) has its fair share of goodies, including a new and improved terminal client with *gasp* tabbed windows. I thought this feature would be great news, since as I wouldn’t need to install the venerable iTerm in much of the same way that Spaces has supplanted VirtueDesktops. After a week though I’ve gone back to iTerm, as it became painfully obvious that the Window Groups features of the Leopard terminal couldn’t hold a candle to the bookmarking features in iTerm. The Window Groups in terminal fail to retain any useful information such as which host you are connected to, and you’re manually forced to ssh back to where you were before, this is something that the bookmarks in iTerm solve easily. So close Apple, yet so far…

If you work in a 9-5 environment, then the biggest mistake you can possibly make on a Friday afternoon is to start major changes in your code. Stop! Step away from the keyboard! This one goes right up there with never sending an email late at night (especially when you’re tired or cranky) or discussing work/money in bed.

I learned this lesson on my own and it bears repeating, because even after all these years I still catch myself doing it sometimes. It’s Friday, you’re tired, and when your guard is down that’s when you start doing stupid things to your code.

So go write some documentation or as Marc-André Cournoyer suggested, fix the little things that you told yourself you’d do later but never did or add some tests. Just stay away from major changes on a Friday afternoon!

You can’t resize the Window except when you use the lower right corner.

That’s a terrible design issue, one that has annoyed me a bit in OSX but annoys me even more in Windows. I guess this is a strong sign that Window resizing won’t be changing in Leopard.

The RSS icon doesn’t respect what everyone else is using.

Sure the little orange RSS icon isn’t very clear on what it does, but at least once you know what it does you can easily recognize it. The RSS icon used in Safari strays from that, and yet fails to be any more useful to someone who doesn’t already know what RSS is.

Yet another browser for web developers to debug.

This is a lazy complaint to be sure, but proper testing does take time, and some clients are going to demand it. Plus there’s no guarantee that how things render in Windows will match how things render in OSX, so you can’t be sure until you’ve tested on both platforms. Finally, this could lead people who might have purchased an Apple computer to not bother since they can test Safari from a Windows PC.

While walking to the market today my friend Cyril proposed we take turns cooking food in large batches. It would only take a few like minded people for us to benefit from cooking on a large scale, making meals that most bachelors and couples would find too large or expensive to prepare, such as lasagna or chili.

We quickly came up with a list of batch cooking recipe candidates:

• Chili
• Bread
• Pate
• Picklings
• Jams
• Pies
• Cookie doughs
• Duck (If you want to make confit you’ll need at least 3 ducks)
• Lasagna
• Pierogies
• Pate Chinois
• Soups

With luck, we’ll get a few more people together (4 to 6 people, 8 tops).

I hope to avoid the “too many cooks” issue by delegating a meal to each household and having the household coordinate the shopping and preparation, while splitting the grocery bill between each participant. Once a month should be a good starting pace, and if it picks up we could add homework assignments such as cookie dough exchanges.

I think there is a lot of potential here, and with the practice there are a few recipes that I would like to use as Christmas gifts (the pate, picklings, jams and cookie dough all come to mind).

The next step will be to find a few more people to join us, and find out who’s cooking first.

“For about four months back in the 90s I kept what was once called a diary, and I enjoyed doing it but what happened was - and I think this is a very common response - is when you start living your life inside your diary you become quite mercenary, and it’s all about ‘will this make a good entry?’

Suddenly your life becomes that Warholian thing where every moment of your life should be something you can sell, you’re always taking pictures, taping everything, and then I think it’s just psychologically strange.”

Fortunately the schism between living a good entry and writing a good entry is wide enough that I’m spared Mr. Copland’s predicament. I am a big fan of Douglas Copland’s earlier books, but I can’t say I’ve ever assessed how much of an impact Microserfs has had on my life.

I had the great opportunity to go snowshoeing in Val-David this weekend with a couple of friends. It was a lot of fun but it was also the first time that my army issue “old school” snowshoes let me down.  The trail was packed hard and my snowshoes had no grip on the steep mountain we climbed.  Fortunately we only had about 300m to climb, so I persevered, but when you contrast my struggle to those who were running around me I felt like a dinosaur gasping in a bog.
I tried to figure out how my shoes would be so inadequate in this sort of situation and it dawned on me that my snowshoes are a throwback to when the point of snowshoeing was something to get from point A to point B.  People didn’t make detours to climb mountains in snowshoes 300 years ago, they weren’t even doing it 30 years ago.  They were in the bush to get to their trapping lines, following a river to a lake so they could ice fish…there was no need to climb hills in the snow.

So although I’ve tried bear-claw snowshoes before and didn’t enjoy them (albeit in deep snow), I think I’m going to have to break down and get a pair if I want to keep up with my friends.  Of course, once that 40cm of powder comes down, we’ll see who’s laughing last.

Work has monopolized the majority of my free time since returning from the honeymoon. In fact we’re only starting to print wedding photos and write thank you cards now. I have done a few small projects though. I’ve been Windows free at home for two months now, and don’t expect to ever go back, and I’ve set up rsync to properly backup my stuff offsite. I’ve also been doing freelance work to bring in a bit of extra cash, and took keep my wits sharp.

The project at work I’ve been busy with for the past year and a half goes live this weekend and I am looking forward to switching gears. That and the change freeze slated for December should free up my personal time for something more interesting. It’s time to write me a plan and a schedule so that I can take my own projects to the next step.

It’s what gets me started. It’s what keeps me going.