I've got a lot of things that I want to write about, but right now I've just popped in to mention the following snippets while I expand other ideas into proper paragraphs

• If an apartment is in a building of condos, and the condo association doesn't allow pets, that I understand. It's landlords who own their buildings outright and simply say "no pets" without a willingness to talk about it that irk me. Yeah, your apartment will eventually rent but you're still going to have to shell out to have it painted and repaired when the tenant moves out. If you'd let me move in, I'd have probably done it for you, as well as spackled your walls, changed light bulbs, mopped the floor, and fixed that broken kitchen cabinet that you've been meaning to put a new hinge on for the last decade but just haven't found the time to touch.

• Avoid the words "quaint", "charming", "cute", and "cozy" when looking for a new apartment. They are all synonymous with "horrible".

• The Perry Bible Fellowship book is every bit as awesome as you'd expect.

• The Chronicles of Wormwood is a surprisingly thoughtful story from Garth Ennis. Yeah, it's all drinking and swearing and weird sex. There are no surprises here. But to me, this is the most direct statement about what it should mean to be a modern Christian vs. what most people actually do.

• Kikuichi knives are deliciously simple to sharpen because the steel they use is so good that it just needs a few quick passes over a 1000 grit or finer stone to remove the slight dullness that you might maybe possibly somehow have managed to wear into the "cut off your fingers without actually making you bleed" blade. Good luck finding one at a reasonable price though. The weak dollar-to-yen exchange pretty much guarantees that you're not finding anything from them for as cheap as you'd like.

• While I'm babbling about knives, the Victorinox Forged Professional line is possibly my current favorite line of german cutlery, but so incredibly hard to find in stores. They feel like a perfect marriage of Japanese knife design (little to no return or finger guard on the bolster, allowing the blade to be sharpened all the way to the end of the edge) and European style (thicker spine, flatter top, curved tip) with Solingen steel. It's designed like a Wüsthof or Henckles knife, but actually worth the cost. If the spine of the knife was rounded off for you already, it'd be the perfect European chef's knife. As it is, the 10" chef's knife is the first knife I turn to for large jobs, like this last years Thanksgiving dinner.

• Absolutely unrelated, I miss having a web-hosting account that I could run Simplelog on. While it hasn't been updated properly in almost a year, I really miss having a simple, easy to use and easy to maintain app that I'm comfortable hacking around on pushing my horribly abrupt and disjointed ramblings out to the world.

• Also, it bears mentioning that for the most part, I agree with both Zed Shaw's vitriolic shovel-spade-name-calling (because his points are usually at least in the ballpark when they're not spot on), and his points about things that the Rails "community" is doing to smash its own toes in.

CSSEdit has the most powerful and well thought-out interface I've ever seen for working with stylesheet properties, and its source-and-visual CSS editor is rightfully award-winning. If you've got to spend more than an hour a week in stylesheets, CSSEdit is the only reasonable tool for the job.

If you're more of a codemonkey, TextMate is the darling of both the Unix refugee camp that took shelter in OS X recently, as well as the Ruby and Rails development communities. It's sort of the best damned text-and-code editor ever produced for the MacOS, with the possible exception of the long-time heavyweight, BBEdit. The bundles are well structured, and support almost any language or variant you can think of.

If you're in the market for power editors, you could do worse than giving these two a spin. Of course, if you're the "all in one" sort, there is always Coda, by the boys at Panic. While it was slightly raw the last time I used it, if I hadn't already owned a license for TextMate and CSSEdit when it came out I'd have probably purchased it. It's improved considerably, and it is under steady development, but it is extremely web-centric (see the supported languages) and that might be a drawback for some people.