One of the fantastic gifts I got for my birthday was the most awesome new album "Demon Days" from Gorillaz. So good, in fact, that when I hear it at the music store, or on the radio, or if I just happen to catch myself humming the tune, I have to rush and put it on, and turn it up LOUD.

Michele got me the special edition that comes with a DVD containing extra lewt. The DVD has the video clip for "Feel Good INC." as well as a bonus track called "The Swagga". Michele and I were watching this, and we got the distinct impression that they don't like doing video clips, but the ones they do they do well. The DVD lets you unlock certain features on their website that allows you to get even more special features, including screen savers, wall papers, and another extra track "Happy Landfill". Very cool stuff.

It's really very good ^_^

So that was my birthday... Pretty uneventful, but that's how it should be.

The thing with birthdays in our family is that everyone suddenly starts hounding you for birthday ideas. The problem is, and I've said it before, I don't really want or need anything that I haven't already gotten for myself, or that I really need. I tend to make do and forget about it, or go and get it for myself. That said, I do have some ideas, but they're usually pipedreams or big expensive items that noone is going to get me in a million years :P I did manage to score some impressive loot though.

The other aspect of Birthday Hounding is the organisation of an Event. This was done by Michele for my close friends. We went to this mob called "K on Hay" in town, formerly known as "Kilo". Nice place - cheap menu, decent food. Add great friends in there, and it's Fun All 'Round. I had to organise my own birthday family diner though. After a bit of discusion, I ended up suggesting dinner at my place, and we ended up making some home made pizza. Very tasty, and I've still got some in the fridge :) It was nice spending the Friday and Saturday evenings together with family and friends.

My legs are officially jelly.

I spent this weekend training for Kenbu - Japanese Sword and Fan Dancing (I suppose it should be really called Kenshibudo, but whatever). Two sensei from Japan - Nagayama Sensei and Shoji Sensei - are down in Perth this week to help Ramon Sensei teach Kenjutsu and Kenbu.

Nagayama Sensei was instructing Jodo and Kenjitsu, but because I wasn't at least an ikkyu in Jodo I wasn't able to join that class. Shoji Sensei was taking Kenbu, which I had wanted to experience anyway, so I did that. Shoji Sensei is the Kenbu Sokei - a Japanese National Treasure. It was a fantastic opportunity to learn a new art from someone so qualified to teach it. It was a real honour.

I hadn't had the opportunity to meet the sensei when they were down last, but they're really nice. Shoji Sensei only knows a few words of English, but really got on well with everyone. Nagayama Sensei speaks enough English to get himself in trouble, but still really gets on well with everyone. I didn't get a chance to spend much time with Nagayama Sensei, except for Iaido training this morning (really good!), but he appears to have a really subtle sense of humour.

Last night we had a welcome dinner for the Sensei, which also doubled as a birthday celebration for Norma, Ramon Sensei's wife. She was dressed up in her beautiful Kimono, and was her usual cheerful self. Shoji Sensei had the three of us that were left from Kenbu (the others having other dinner commitments) perform a dance for Norma and the rest. Although I'd only "learnt" the two dances I did that day, I didn't stuff up too badly. Hans and Rebecca did more dancing than I, but it was Shoji Sensei that really stole the show - as you would expect. The sheer grace and perfection of her performance was really awe inspiring.

Although the seminar was this weekend, there may be more Kenbu training tomorrow evening that I can attend, before they head back to Japan on Tuesday. Shoji Sensei makes it look easy, but it's very exhausting. My legs and knees ache, and I was sweating profusely, but it was really great fun and I look forward to doing it again.

I was enthusiastic to try Tiger, and then I realised that I can actually get a copy under work's site licensing scheme. I decided to go for a full format & reinstall combo, so I dutifully backed up all my important data (except my bookmarks - bugger) on the file server at work.

Tiger is pretty. It looks and feels almost the same as Panther, but it's fixed a few annoyances that I had. The extra feature are very nice too (I'm already using the improved Spotlight), and it has a lot of polish on it. Unfortunately, there is one major show stopper: you get authentication errors trying to mount samba shares. This is a big problem in our networked environment around here, and was especially annoying because all my backed up data was done on a samba share.

Work arounds include:

• use smbclient
• use some other file transfer agent, like scp or ftp

Very annoying, to say the least, because I can't transparently mount my samba shares and access the files directly. There's a bug report for it, but there's no solution yet. The suspected belief is that when Apple introduced NTLM authentication support, they broke plain text password support (a la windows world). There's no easy way to test or fix this though. Most annoying.

So, overall it's good, and I haven't encountered any other problems (yet). I reckon if you want to install it, as long as you don't need Samba, you should be ok. If you do need it, stay with Panther until it's fixed. There's no pressing need to upgrade in any case.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is finally out. There's a whole swag of new improvements over previous releases, but I think some of the best and more interesting improvements and new technology are to be found under the hood. This article is probably one of the better OS reviews I've ever read (and that's a few). It gives a deep overview on some of the problems that modern operating systems have and how Tiger overcomes it. In particular, the discussion on file meta-data and it's related topics (from filesystem to application) shows that the people at Apple really are thinking about what they're doing.

If there was never a reason to get a Mac, this article will give you plenty. I can't wait until I get my copy of Tiger to play with.