After an extended stay in Japan (15 months), a visit with the folks in Seattle (10 days), a short stop in Tucson (7 days), and a trip to Atlanta GA and Jackson MS (10 days), I’m finally back in Tucson with no plans of going anywhere soon. To make a long story short; I had a great holiday, and I’m enjoying being back in the US, but I’m totally burned out in regard to traveling. Maybe in a few weeks I’ll change my mind but for now I’m content with just staying put for a while. Callie and I finally have our house together (for the most part) and I’m getting excited about doing some freelance web design here in Tucson again.
Our new place is really cool. It’s downtown, very spacious, in an old building, and has a really nice view of the Catalina mountains and Hotel Congress’ neon sign. The new office is as big or bigger than our whole house was in Japan, and having more than one burner to cook with has been nothing short of amazing. Living in Tucson is still taking some getting used to, especially since I made the decision to leave my car in Seattle and go bicycle-only. Fortunately, I was able to find a nice bicycle for $100 at Casa De Los Ninos. It’s an older Fuji touring bike and it was in really good condition. I’m still kicking myself for going through all the work of getting my single speed Univega back from Japan and then from Seattle to Tucson. It seems now that it was all for naught, even though it’s still a super fun bike to ride.
As a present to myself for 15 months of hard work in Japan I bought a new MacBook. As far as the hardware goes, to say that I am very impressed would be an understatement. However, the software is another story altogether. Having used GNOME for over two years straight as my primary desktop, I might be a little biased, but in my opinion OS X has some usability problems, especially when it comes to finder. It also has quite a few bugs. The most annoying bug occurs while using different spaces with Photoshop or Illustrator CS4 is running. When opening multiple documents in either application, the control panel as well as the tools panel ends up on a different virtual desktop. A similar, but different bug occurs when using spaces and X11 applications. Nonetheless, I’m happy with the machine overall, and I’m really excited about running KDE applications on OS X without using X11. Currently the project is in early development, but it’s looking good so far. I think the biggest problem right in terms of usability is not being able to open native OS X applications from konqueror or dolphin.
Other than that, I’m enjoying working with the newly redesigned WordPress 2.7 (with all of its new jQuery goodness), listening to tunes on SongBird 1.0, eating good Mexican food, and sleeping in a nice bed.