NIN offers new single in GarageBand format: “Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has made available the band’s new single, ‘The Hand That Feeds,’ as a free download for Apple’s GarageBand application…”
(Via MacMinute.)
Way cool, NIN is one of my very favourite bands.
Just had a great weekend, well, it was until about 3 hours ago.
Mandy and I went across to Glasgow for the weekend, for some shopping, pampering and a mooch around the Ideal Home & Garden exhibition.
We spent Saturday afternoon shopping for clothes etc, and I think I bought even more than Mandy, which is quite a turnaround, I’m usually very bad at buying clothes for myself. Mind you, Mandy did thrust a few things into my hands to try on that I would never have picked up, most of them turned out to be ok.
Then we went back to our hotel, the Radisson SAS, which was modern, clean and efficient, great location being right in the centre, just a few steps from the main shopping centres. We had dinner there, which was also very nice.
Today (Sunday) we got up fairly early for us, about 9am, had breakfast and then out for even more shopping. Once we’d finished we went back to the car and started on our way to the S.E.C.C to visit the Ideal Home & Garden expo, but didn’t get very far. We were stopped at the T-junction traffic lights after leaving the car park, the lights turned red for the cross traffic, I waited until we had a green and then slowly (and I do mean slowly) pulled out when a car came along the main road approaching the red light, and just kept going. Mandy even had time to say (or rather shout), “he’s not stopping”, I came to a complete halt, and he just skidded into my front wing. It was very sereal, we could not believe it was happening, but it did, in a kind of slow motion.
Aparently he “wasn’t concentrating” and “too busy talking”, yeah, great, thanks. At least he’s admitted full liability and given me all his insurance details etc, so hopefully I won’t lose out money wise, apart from having to take time off from work to get the car fixed up etc.
We’re both seem to be ok by the way, and the car was drivable to get us home. As you can see from the pictures the damage is limited to the front wing (thank heavens I was alert and stopped quickly otherwise it’d be my door that was hit) and bumper/lights.
So, the weekend didn’t end too well, but it was a nice weekend otherwise.
So, I’ve ordered my copies of Mac OS X Tiger for desktop and server, have you yet?
However, I’m in a quandary, when should I actually install it on my main development desktop, and when should I implement the server?
The geek in me wants to install both as soon as I get them (hopefully before or on the 29th April), but the more sensible side of me says that would be a bad idea, and that I should wait for a couple of things to happen:
It’s already known that there are a couple of fixes that didn’t make it into the “gold master” release of Mac OS X Tiger, and that they will be implemented in the first point release, how many other fixes might there be once this very large update is out in the wild?
As far as I’m concerned Apple always releases quality software and hardware, I’ve only ever stumbled across a couple of very minor problems with their products. But this is a huge release, there’s bound to be some creases to be ironed out. Can I afford to lose any of my data or time to such issues? Panther gave me no troubles, but will Tiger?
It could take a very long time before all the software I use is either verified as working fine on the released version of Mac OS X Tiger or a new release built and verified for it.
My biggest concern is of course RealBasic, and in particular RealBasic 2005 which is due out in the next couple of months. RealBasic is what I’m using to build my own software, so I really do need to know that it works well with Tiger, whether I need to wait until v2005 is out before running on Tiger, will v5.5.x work OK on Tiger? Will the software I build with RealBasic on Tiger work on Mac OS X Panther, all the normal versions of Windows and Linux (if I decide to support it), or should I stick with Panther for a while? Will the software I build on Panther be OK on Tiger? Will the first release of this huge update to RealBasic that is v2005 be stable from the get-go too? There’s a lot of uncertainty there for me.
For the first time I’m going to start running my desktop Mac as a full blown server, I just can’t resist having Mac OS X Tiger as my main server in the office, dumping my trusty (but old) mini-itx based Debian Linux server. I’m really looking forward to the account management aspects and Portable Home Directories which I had real problems with on Linux, but hope that Tiger can do simply. Hopefully then my PowerBook and PowerMac will be in sync every time I re-connect, and it looks like this will include all my music, pictures and everything else in my home directory, which is way cool (gonna take some lengthy syncing at first though).
This is obviously going to be quite a shift, I’m really looking forward to all the tools OS X Server brings to the table to make configuration a breeze. I also have a lot more disk space in my PowerMac than in my current Linux server, four 120Gb disks compared to the single 120Gb drive in my mini-itx box, and I’m thinking it might be good to configure them as a couple of mirrors for safety, hopefully I can do that during install, but I don’t know for sure.
So it seems I have a lot of questions, and these may take some time to be answered, let’s hope I get some reassurances before the 29th, because I’m just not sure whether my sensible side will be able to hold my technology lusting geek side back!
Just got back from seeing Jack Dee at the Edinburgh Play House, it was superb, a great night out.
I drove into Edinburgh directly from work and met up with Mandy at a Tapas restaurant that we’ve enjoyed eating at before. The meal actually wasn’t that great this time, but the company was fantastic (I have to say that, she’s my wife)! We then went for a drink in a nearby pub followed by a wander for a couple more metres down the road to the theatre for a thoroughly good laugh, Mandy was even in tears of laughter a number of times! Jack was much better than I expected, I kind of expected it to be a bit of a rip-off, barely an hour of observational humour and tired old jokes already seen on the TV. But no, it was two hours of very funny commentary on life, funny situations and the occasional groan of revulsion at something disgusting (but very funny), and lasted well over two hours (with an interval to catch your breath).
If Jack’s coming to a venue near you, go see him, you won’t be disapointed.
Went to my first Edinburgh Linux User Group meeting on Thursday night, well worth going to.
I’ve been a bit of a lurker on the mailing list for while, and always meant to go to one of their meetings; it took a chance mail to the group from a fellow Informix user to spur me to go.
Not much more to say really, just that it was well worth the trip over the Edinburgh on the bus to have a few pints with some fellow Linux users, a nice relaxed evening, good to put a few faces to names. I’ll be going again.
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Phew, quite a lot of years when you look at it that way!
