Gary Fong lightsphere

I'm in Florida at the moment, this exact moment finds me in New Sryrma Beach, it being around 20 degrees and bloody lovely. Yesterday I bought the Gary Fong Universal starter kit. It comes with two lightspheres, a cloud and half cloud. Essentially the fancy names just describe how translucent the domes are.
Why did I buy them? Well I'll tell you, the one person ( me ) reading this blog.
They make your hotshoe flashgun into a softbox, a big-arse softbox spreading that lovely harsh light coming from my Canon 4 something flashgun into soft speadable light.
Giving it a bit of test at the mo'. I'm usually shooting on ambient light anyway and seeing how the lightsphere fills in the shadows.
It works well on camera but it's making me think about using the lightsphere in conjunction with pocket wizards and nikon speedlites. So that we could end up with tiny controllable softboxes which behave like much bigger ones.
I don't know about you but the idea of having lighting gear that has the spread of your elinchroms and profoto at a fraction of the size is a good one.
Perhaps we don't have the power but the portability is a major bonus.
I recently shot Dr Haze from the Circus Of Horrors, a british freakshow at his home using Profoto gear. It was all delivered but even so you're looking at four to five boxes of gear. This recent photo project of mine where I go to people's houses photographing them has seen me switch from Elinchroms to Nikons to profoto and back again and by far the best results have come from the smaller gear even though I only got three blasts from the SB900 at full power before the batteries were totally drained.
This does bring up another question though, I'm a Canon man and why is it I can't get Canon flashguns to
a. easily work on manual
b. work with pocket wizards
c. work with other brands of flash
d. why has it got a slave mode if you can't get it to slave.
e. Why on earth do Canon think I'm going to shoot on E-ttl when I want to have complete control over the lighting, hey Canon your system is totally retarded.
f. Finally Canon, I'm using Nikon flashguns to get the lighting control I need, wake up..ahem!