It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so here’s a quick overview of what you’ve missed!

Candice and I found a place to have our wedding and set a date, only to find that there was a good chance that the Ontario massage therapy regulatory organization would be moving her professional exam to a conflicting date. We had no problem moving the date around, so now we’ll be getting married at the Courtyard Restaurant on July 8, 2006.

We finally got around to arranging for TV at home. For all the time I was in Montreal I never bothered getting cable there, partly because I tended to entertain myself by going out with a book, partly because I was on a student budget, and partly because basic English/French cable didn’t seem like a great deal. But I can afford it now and we always enjoy watching specialty channels when we’re at either of my parents’ places, so we’ve got a StarChoice dish on our balcony now. It’s been great, even if we have been watching the Food Channel pretty much exclusively so far. I did finally manage to see Family Guy, so now everyone’s mood themes and usericons make a bit more sense.

Fweebles and Spratt came down to visit a few weeks ago to see Ottawa, and the four of us went out for dinner one night. Had nummy food at the Black Tomato and then were planning on walking over to Parliament, but decided to cross the Canal on the skating rink and found that La Bottine Souriante were playing on the Winterlude stage on the canal, so we stopped there instead. It was great to meet Fweebles and Spratt (who we’ve known through LiveJournal support for a while) and to finally get to see Bottine live.

Speaking of live music, Shonen Knife played Ottawa a week ago at Babylon, which is a very small club. Fantastic live band. They played a few tunes from their older albums that I’ve got but most of their show was newer material. Still good, just not familiar. They did cover “I Wanna Be Sedated” in an encore, though. If you didn’t already know it you’d think it was just one of their tunes.

I’ve got a new laptop from work, a Dell Latitude D600 — it’s nice to have a 21st-century computer! My machine at work was a 750Mhz PIII, and my home desktop was an 800Mhz Athlon, and my old laptop was a 450MHz PIII, so this 1.8GHz Pentium M is a bit of a nice change. I managed to get everything but the smartcard reader running under Fedora 3 without much trouble, although suspend-to-RAM was a bit of work. Since I’ve got the extra power, I’ve finally decided to give GNOME a try. Turns out the Linux desktop improved a bit while I wasn’t paying attention. :-) I picked up an Linksys WRT54G wireless router and threw the dd-wrt fork of Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware on, and it’s replaced pretty much everything but the NAS parts of my old firewall box. It’s nice having some dedicated hardware for that so I can play around a bit on the old machine without impacting connectivity here. It’s nice having >2Mb/s wireless, too.

Also, those of you who remember me not understanding RSS: It was because my RSS reader sucked and because I was regularly working from two different computers. With Liferea and one computer I understand RSS now.

And I found a Cat mood theme! And a gin and tonic. Can it get much better than this? I think not.