Ah, Ecuador, how I miss you. Let me enumerate the ways for your edification:

• The rapid change from pouring rain to beating, hot, hot sun
• Your lack of an identifiable delicious Ecuadorean food (other than humitas, of course)
• The incessant barking dogs that kept me awake until the wee hours of the night, only to wake me up early the next morning
• Your numerous pimped-out Toyota Neon taxi cabs, with 6 inch spoilers on the back, black lights on the inside, and fuzzy seats
• Your drivers' inability to let pedestrians have the right of way -- forcing all pedestrians to take their life in their hands when crossing the street
• The diesel-choked streets, where all Pintos come to die

Lynn was having issues with her MacBook laptop where she couldn't find our wireless router -- well, that isn't entirely true. It would pick up someone's wireless signal and mistakenly identify it as our wireless signal. So, for a few weeks, she was basically using someone's free wireless signal, thinking it was ours. It was all very strange, but basically it meant that her connection would fade in and out and any sensitive traffic was flowing through the airwaves unencrypted through someone else's router. That's enough to give anyone even slightly paranoid the heebie-jeebies.

After diagnosing her issue for awhile, I could get it to connect to our actual router, but only sporadically; if she ever put her laptop to sleep, it would lose the connection -- not the most ideal situation. So, right around this same time, Leopard came out and I saw in one very thorough review that the network preferences were upgraded. That was enough to convince us to upgrade to the new OS X.

After going through a pain-less upgrade installation of the new operating system on Lynn's MacBook (the weird wireless issue went away, everything worked great), I decided to update my aging Mac Mini. I tried to do the same upgrade installation that worked so well on Lynn's laptop and I got the dreaded blue screen of death. I have had my own share of issues upgrading Windows before, so I just shrugged, powered down, and started the upgrade again. Again it hangs before the login screen pops up and I start to panic. So, praise be to Google, I found the Apple support forum that details the ramblings of lonely Mac geeks and their hypothesis of why this was happening. After reading that it might have to do with the Unsanity's Application Enhancer product, I realize that I had installed it awhile ago to fix a quirk in an old version of Parallels that has since been rendered unnecessary by the new version. Cursing my fool-hardy attempt to escape the enclosed system that has been blessed by the Almighty Steve, I grit my teeth and install Leopard using the Archive and Upgrade option and everything was right with the world.

Overall, Leopard is a nice evolutionary step for OS X. The Finder, while not spectacular, is a marked improvement over Tiger's -- less beach-balling, snappier, etc. Spaces is nice, although not anything revolutionary -- it works well though. Spotlight is greatly improved over Tiger's implementation. Even though I just bought Launchbar to replace the awesome, yet strangely slow on my machine, Quiksilver, I am still happy that Spotlight works how it should have worked in the beginning. Time Machine is, uh, sort of weird. Haven't done that much with yet, so I will reserve judgement.

So, even though everything seemed honky-dory, my pain was still palpable. For Parallels continues to not include the one feature that seems like such an easy fix: in full-screen mode, they should not pass keyboard events to the host OS. If I press Ctrl-Arrow Left in Windows, it shouldn't move to another Space. I know I can turn off Spaces, or change the keyboard configuration, but that seems like such a terrible solution. VMWare provides the ability to either pass the keyboard to the host or not, hopefully Parallels will add the ability soon as well. So, because of this one limitation I made a series of somewhat rash decisions:

1. I wanted BootCamp, so that I could boot into a real Windows box to code
2. I couldn't create a BootCamp partition because my drive was too fragmented
3. Backed up all of my data and did a clean install of Leopard
4. Installed BootCamp, Windows, Visual Studio 2008, etc

It took me the better part of a weekend, but basically I did a re-install of my entire computer and all of its key systems.

Then, this weekend I re-installed Windows, Visual Studio 2008, etc on my laptop because somehow Windows became corrupted and hung when logging into the box.

I'm a nerd.

You might have read about the exciting arrival of the flood into our office a few weekends ago. What Lynn forgot to mention was that along with moving all of furniture out of the room into our dining room, we also decided to buy some more furniture -- you know, for when the office actually has a ceiling again.

So, Lynn was looking for a faux fur coat to go along with her Edie Sedgewick costume for the Halloween party we were headed to that night and she thought that the thrift store down the street might have something that would do the job. We walk in, look around the clothes section, but don't really see anything worthwhile. Then, we walk into the back of the store where their furniture is stored and I spot a great-looking futon without a price tag just sitting around. Apparently the couch had been dropped off so recently that they had not even gotten to price it yet. We found an employee who called their manager who gave us a great price, so we decided to buy it. During the price wrangling Lynn continues to look around and finds a great desk to replace the two (really cheap, old, and crappy) desks we already had. Our office will finally become the office/guestroom that we have been planning since we moved into the apartment.

Of course, the really funny thing occured once I picked up the futon in preparation to carry it the block to the apartment: of course it was made by Ikea. It's like we can't escape the cheap furniture manufacturer, even when we try. And then a few weekends later, we ventured to our nearby Swedish megastore and we saw our new futon on display (for $50 more than what we paid). I don't actually remember what the name of it is, but I am sure it is something like the Flipnfuk, in black.