Operating System Cognative Dissonance

I've come about 85% of the way to deciding to buy a mac laptop to use as my desktop computer. 15% reservations about it. I was at about 90% before I talked to dan yesterday.

On a day-to-day basis, the things I care about are: emacs (aquamacs), firefox, being able to turn on sshd, being able to use my media (photos and audio). This is all good.

Also there are my coding projects, which I currently do on my linux desktop. I want to be able to turn my linux machine off and still be able to develop in macland. Most of my remaining 15% reservations are about the development switchover.

Fink has lots of great unix packages. But if I buy (*suck in breath*) an intel-based mac, it looks less happy-shiny. The latest news I can find is that intel/fink currently relies on hackery and compiling from source. That's not the sort of coding project I'm looking for, when I really want to just install things to get a project done.

I just want the perfect operating system, 's that too much to ask?

Maybe I should just give up doing dev work on the same machine, and specifically boot a second machine for it. Maybe I should give up getting a mac laptop and buy a slightly cheaper intel laptop. Maybe I should get the mac, use it for what it's good for, and assume the rest will come along soon enough. Like Parallels- I could theoretically run virtual linux, and have the server stuff under the hood? If it's not stable yet, probably it will get there eventually.

*sigh* what a waste of brain-power, cognative dissonance is.

pretty great evening...

I came home to tbiedl plus two sprog (*) sitting and chatting with dan; they brought over Professor Wormbog and the Zipperumpa-Zoo specifically because I mentioned it fondly the other day in this journal; I read it to C. (who's three). T. offered to loan it to me, with a wink (which nicely forestalled one of her problems, of a certain assertive small person demanding that book be read to her 89 quadrillion times.) Hey, I'm willing to help out. *shrug* Which is how I got a kid's book on loan this evening.

We all went out to the yard, and discovered our neighbour two doors down, digging in the gardendandelion patch next-door. He said that our neighbour will be tilling it under in a few weeks, so any flowers we want, we should probably come rescue. Sounds like a good challenge to me. My mission is to figure out the ones that T. and dan recommended, dig 'em up, and plant them in our yard. Bonus points if they live more than a month; double bonus if they come back next spring.

Rover seemed to have rolled in something awful, so d. gave her a bath. Go boyfriend go!

I took d. out to celebrate passing his citizenship test; we went to the Bookshelf Cafe in Guelph. The food was OK. My appetizer was super: fried fish-cakes on top of mango and apple slices. My main course was so-so deconstructed mu shu with tofu, but it wasn't as good as the mu shu my sweetie makes. Our server was a bit over the line on being friendly, on toward flirting. Well, no, she was well over the line- she touched my shoulder a buncha times, and consiprationally told me about falling off the wagon on her Cleansing yesterday (she ate a piece of chocolate). d. suggested that maybe the two were connected, and she thought maybe I was a bar of soap? Y'know, to help with the clensing. Hm.

*Sigh*.

I'm thinking it's bedtime.

(*) who came up with this term for progeny? I forget. Anyway I like it.