Just today I finally got sick and frickin’ tired of putting up the Firefox web browser. Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox, but my computer does not. In fact on both of our computers Firefox takes ages to load and pages are often slow.

I love Firefox’s user interface, everything makes sense to me, it’s fully logical for me. But the constant slowing was making me nuts. And recently it’s been crashing daily. I’ve re-installed and I’ve eliminated various plug-ins that could be to blame. But things continued to get worse.

Using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 is not an option for me because, well, because I DETEST it. That AND it’s just as slow as Firefox athough it doesn’t crash AS often.

So what I did was I fired up Opera. Opera is a very mature browser (Opera was the first browser with to bring us tabbed browsing), it’s on version 9.24. I’ve had various versions of Opera on my computer for the last 5 years, and I’ve tested in it. But I never actually moved my bookmarks into it, until today.

When I look at the system resources that Opera uses while it’s running they are fully 1/3 of what Firefox uses to show me the same web pages. Opera is using less memory and is responding faster. And it almost feels like I have a new computer.

Now I just have to convince the husband to switch. He’s been variously switching between Internet Explorer and Firefox, and cursing the lot of them. I’m hopeful that Opera will make his life on the web more pleasant. Find out more about Opera.

I was just reading an interesting blog article titled “Forgotten your password? Google can find it for you. Unfortunately“. The article discusses a potential security vulnerability having to do with the way that passwords are stored in many of the databases of the various web sites we all visit. Now I’m not technical enough to explain this properly, but I “get it”. And what it boils down to for me is that this is yet another reason not to use the same password over and over for all the sites you visit.

Personally I’ve always been paranoid about relying on one password. This is because I’ve been witness to organizations with very lax data security standards; I’ve seen databases that held usernames, passwords, credit card numbers and expiration dates along with billing addresses but which were unsecured and free to be copied by any employee in the whole company. One disgruntled employee who copies a database like that could do a great deal of damage to the people whose data resides there. I’m paranoid about that one disgruntled employee.

As the computer industry, and especially the web, ages and matures we see a greater attention to security, and disgruntled employees can do less and less damage. But still, it seems there’s always some new threat that some brilliant hacker has just figured out.

So what I do is to use a different password for each site I visit. And then I keep track of those passwords by writing down codes for them which no one but me would understand. For example, if I used the password Purple890 I might code it for myself as notRedX09. And then when I see notRedX09 I would associate notRed to mean Purple and I would know that X means the number 8 and then I would know that the last two numbers are simply reversed.

If you are confused that’s the point. The point is that I encode my passwords so that the associations to the encoding are mine and mine only. I encode them using connections to concepts or numbers or patterns which occur in my head alone. And that means that unless you plan to torture me you are not going to figure out what all my passwords are.

When I get bored, as I just did this evening while waiting for a boatload of monstrous PDF files to upload to a client’s server, I look at MetaFilter. You should too.

Some of today’s MetaFilter findings:

• Gilmourish – If you love David Gilmour (must I date myself by saying he was in Pink Floyd?) this is for you, and the web design is just luscious. When my design skills get that good it will be time to jump in front of that ever-present Cancun taxi cab. There will be nothing more to live for.
• Chat Noir – That means black cat in case you live at the bottom of a barrel and never took French. It’s a game, it’s addictive, and I keep losing.
• Lucky Dube is Dead – If you don’t know who Lucky Dube was then you probably do live at the bottom of a barrel. How’s the light down there? He was one of those critical, seminal reggae musicians. And I’m so out-of-touch that it took me a whole month to find out about his death…
• David Byrne Narrates A Bike Ride Through NYC – That’s The David Byrne to you. Gawd I miss New York.
• TED Talks – Well this isn’t a find for me, but could be for you. The TED Talks feature some of the most important speakers around (yes, like Al Gore, yes, I know).

Oh crap, it’s raining, gotta run…I have clean sheets (formerly dry) on the clothesline.

I’m not sure what this is. Is it a 4-year-delayed case of homesickness? Or is it a mounting disgust with the shit of living in a 3rd world country that is full of corruption? Or is it the realization that a number of the friends I’ve made here are considerably more self-centered and not nearly as loyal as they make themselves out to be?

Or maybe it’s because my kid isn’t here?

The things I know are these:
– I look at real estate prices in Colorado altogether too often.
– I HATE, beyond words, living in a place where the local press is keeping track of the number of EXECUTIONS this year. So far we are at 29. And these are not normal big city murders, these are mob-related executions where the people get kidnapped and then shot in the face after a dose of torture.
– Just recently someone in the local mob just happened to stop by my house, yeah right. Excuse me if I feel sick, excuse me if I don’t believe that he was just driving by (on my dead end street).
– I already have a plan for how to move these lovely 10 cats to the U.S. (just watch me, I have it all figured out). It may well cost me 10 grand but I will do it.
– Cancun sucks as a place for walking, or running with, your dog. And guess what, Boulder County DOES NOT! They have this thing called Open Space, which is paid for by tax dollars, and is open to my doggie.

But there are these other problems you see. The first being that I don’t know how I’m going to stand winter again, EVER! Then next being that Americans are cold-hearted bastards and I don’t really want to live around them, especially if they have not traveled extensively or have not lived abroad. Then there’s the problem that there are probably (though I have not looked it up yet) laws against having 10 cats in 1 house in Boulder County. (Not to mention that I don’t want carpet in my house with all these gatitos.) Then there’s the fact that I’m so busy here. I’ve got more to do in the next 6 months than I’ve ever faced before!

And I’m facing all that work while being homesick to the point of not always functioning. Yesterday I just stayed in bed all day, despite the work that needs to be done, and I spent the day reading a novel that takes place in Boulder, Colorado. Pathetic, I know, it just makes me MORE homesick. But at least I’ve now taken my first day off since whenever that was in August.

I just found Free Rice, which is a charity site that donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nation World Food Program for each English word that you can correctly identify the meaning of.

I found it pretty hard, my vocabulary is not as large as it should be. Some of the words I was asked included: casque, duenna, newel, panegyric, oppugn, hidebound and thaumaturge. I got thaumaturge wrong, it means magician. You can use your dictionary because the site doesn’t seem to be timing your responses. But you need a pretty good dictionary since many of the words won’t be in a basic English dictionary. Have fun!

I’ve been tagged by Cancun Canuck to play a little blog game. Here are the rules: when tagged link to the person who tagged you, then post the rules of the game, then list eight random things about yourself. At the end of the post link to eight other people’s blogs.

8 Random Things About Me

1. I can’t sleep with either of my ears exposed to the air. Short haircuts do not work for me because I then have to sleep with a pillow or an arm slung over the exposed ear. If I feel air on my ear I wake up. I’m sure this goes back to the recurring nightmare I had when I was 2 years old about the gorilla that would hide in my closet and then come out when it was dark and bite off my ear. I could get therapy for this, or I could just not wear my hair short.

2. When I was a kid I wanted to be a clown, or a detective, or a spy.

3. Now that I am an adult I want to get a Master’s Degree in Application Usability.

4. I secretly like pictures of cherubs and angels, even though I think they are tacky and I would not be caught dead putting that kind of trash on my walls.

5. Within 5 feet of me right now are: a poster from the Pearl Jam concert which took place on November 7, 1996, a book titled “the zen of css design”, a 17 year old cat whose hobby it has always been to throw up daily and a plastic wind-up penguin who hops (but only when you wind him up).

6. I like to do sit-ups. In fact I like to do at least 100 per day, but that doesn’t happen usually.

7. There is someone that I hate.

8. I just, today, named my most recently acquired street cat “Emma” (she is our 10th cat); Emma being short (in my mind) for Clementine or Clementina (have not decided which).

8 Other People’s Blogs

• Hell’s Half Acre
• Yucatan Living
• My Magic Roundabout
• 1603 Katrina
• Cancun Blog
• Julie Zickefoose
• La Gringa Mas Bella
• Dropped In

I spent 2 days this week NOT answering email, NOT returning phone calls and NOT working on anything but the condo. I did answer my cell phone, but that was it.

When I got back to my desk after this 48 hour hiatus I had no less than 5 voice mail messages from people who were freaking out and were wondering if I had died. And I had no less than 45 important new email messages, not including the usual junk and jokes and normal emails. I’ll be up until midnight just reading new email. I’m not sure when I’m supposed to get any actual work done.

It’s nice to be needed, but this is too much.

The condo is nearly done. The tenant is sleeping there for the first time tonight. Three bedrooms are cleaned out now so she has room to move in. Her rental period starts on the 15th so I don’t feel obligated to actually have all the work done until then, which is good, because it isn’t. But almost.

We’ve still got a list of stuff that needs doing there, but it’s rapidly shrinking. The kitchen counter came out well, the tile looks great and the grout we chose looks nice with it. Hubby was able to reinforce and fix up the old solid wood cabinets, so we didn’t have to completely start over with that. The previous owner probably never actually cleaned the cabinets, so I spent a few hours with some Windex and a brillo scrubbing pad and was able to get the cabinets to look like wood again; they previously looked like baked muck in a cabinet shape.

I’ve been waxing all of the woodwork in the condo, of which there is a great deal. The 20-year old doors look a lot better after a coat of wax. And the new closets we built look presentable after a coat of wax. The problem with the wax is that it makes me sick to use it, I can stand it for about an hour but after that I start to feel a pain in my upper lung and get sort of stupid. Hubby keeps asking me if breathing the wax makes me high. All day he says “is that shit making you high yet?”. He’s a broken record. And I wish. I think I’m going to have to detox seriously after all these stinky fumes. But the reason we chose this product is that after just one application you get water beading up on the wood. The wax has color in it and is really thick. So even though I’m suffering from the stink this is still better than first applying stain and then dealing with polyurethane. This won’t last like poly would, but it’s pretty good, and that’s good enough. It IS only a rental after all.

We also decided to install a stationary gas tank on the roof of the building. And yesterday the gas company came to fill it, so now the new hot water heater is working and the new stove is working. Add to that the nice new kitchen sink and the nice new bath sink and that place is livable.

We still have a couple more days of knocking things off the list. And then it will be time to bring home the 4000+ tools that have migrated over there. My husband is a tool collector, truly. I think the guy probably has at least 6 hammers. Screwdrivers are definitely too numerous to count. So it will be a big effort to actually get all that crap back over here.

But then, then it will be done. Then I will be able to collect the rent and not go over there and work. Then I’ll be able to get this week-old pile of clean laundry folded. And I’ll find time to watch that DVD I just bought of some bad Bruce Willis action film. And maybe I’ll even begin getting some of my other work done. That would be nice.

My husband figured out yesterday that he’s working 90 hours a week right now (including drive-time). And, to be completely honest, I’m not far behind him. I do get a bit more sleep than he does, but I often work 10 to 12 hours a day and that doesn’t include the time I spend cleaning cat litter or taking care of my house. And I cannot, honestly, remember the last day I took completely off. I think, but am not sure, that it was in August. There might have been a day in August that I didn’t check email, respond to a client, work on the frickin’ condo or work on a client project. Maybe. Or maybe it was in July.

The good news is that hubby and I have plans to spend two whole nights and most of three whole days in Tulum, at an “eco-resort” (eco here usually means the hotel is not on the power grid). We plan to bring the nice bikes (we each have 2; 1 nice one, and 1 crappy-city one) which will give us a good way to see the sights and get some exercise. And, of course, the place is on the beach, so we can actually act like tourists and get lobstered and snorkel and hang on the beach. I might even have a piña colada.

I’m really excited to just get away, even though it’s not far from home. It will be a break in the rhythm, a break from this monotony of work and responsibility, and I hope that we can have fun. I expect it will be fun because one of my favorite friends here, and her lovely husband, will be staying there the same weekend. So we have built-in entertainment!

All I can say is Starbucks better not start charging tax on all the money I make in their coffee shops. Or rather, they’d better not charge tax on the potential income I could make based on the contracts I sign in their coffee shops.

Today I signed a contract, in Starbucks, worth quite a lot of money, if I do my job, which I have every intention of doing.

I can’t tell you more because then I’d have to kill you, or at least make you sign a non-disclosure agreement and provide proof that you have several million usd in near-liquid assets and certain required skills and intentions.

Sorry for the mystery, but that’s what it is.

At least Starbucks can count on me always purchasing a Mocha Grande Con Leche Light sometimes Descafeinado por favor, so they ARE actually getting paid, a whole $38 pesos.

I will say that it’s very nice to be working on a big project again. It’s been a while since I tackled something of this size, and I feel, well, I feel completely in my element. That probably sounds totally conceited. But it’s not meant that way. It’s more that I just feel that the importance of this project to the client will equal the effort I give it, for once. Normally it seems that I bust my butt and then get paid peanuts. This time I will bust my butt and then be able to afford go to Italy and finally see Michelangelo’s David in person!

But first I need to do my job!