Damn. I lost the first version of this before I saved it. Poop. Okay, so here's "The sounds of silent screaming - Take 2"

I'm much happier than I was the other week. I managed to bash out two really good emails to the people at HR, and in the end I was paid correctly (minus a few cents). So all's well that ends well. Unfortunately, it doesn't help the fact that the job sucks in the first place, but it makes it more bearable...

The car is still broken, but now I have the means to fix it. Over the next couple of pay checks, the car should be in and out getting various little bits looked at in preparation for selling it. It's kind of a bummer to have to fix it up only to sell it, but I really need to get over this hump (of a credit card debt) so I can plan things for the future. That's life, I suppose...

On Saturday I went to see BeatleMania at UWA's Octagon theatre, with Michele, her family, and some of their family friends. Michele's mum was singing in the choir, which was dressed up in 60's regalia. The effect was great - they looked like a bunch of hippies (albeit, aging hippies). There was also some (apparently famous) local talent that kept the audience amused with guitar sing-alongs to Beatles songs, but I think the real show stopper was the sextet that played beautiful arrangements of some of the best Beatles songs. Ever. They've just formed their own group called "Odyssey", so I think I'll have to keep an eye out for them.

Some people might know that I've been playing with Mac OS X on works spare Powerbook G4. I've been trying to use it as a replacement desktop OS for the past couple of weeks now, with good results. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from Windows and X environments (the way I like them anyway), but it's not a bad shift. It's a useable interface, and after dicking around with some configuration and customisation, it turns out that it's a very nice system to use. I think I knew I fell in love with it when I was watching a DVD in one window, and then I had a transparent terminal window overlapping it, and the video was running perfectly through the transparency. The people at Apple got it right - use the graphics card to render the video, and then you can add all the shiny stuff that the card is suited for with ease.

A couple of essentials that I found made my life with Mac OS X bearable are:

• Desktop Manager, for multiple desktops
• Fire, a decent MSN (amongst others) client
• Firefox, a good web browser - I like it better than Safari and use it on windows anyway
• GVim, a decent text editor
• Microsoft's Intelimouse drivers, so I can configure the mouse buttons better
• Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client, so I can connect to and use Windows machines still
• SmoothWheel, a Firefox extension that makes scrolling in Firefox under OS X a not-as-ugly affair.
• MPlayer OS X, and assorted codecs, so I can enjoy my media files
• Video Lan Client, and assorted codecs, so I can enjoy my media files

OS X has some annoyances though, which is ... annoying. One of them is consistency. There seems to be inconsistencies in behaviour between certain applications. Some of these are (apparently) deliberate, but others appear to be left up to the application programmer to work out how to make the application behave. Another is the lack of customisability available, but I can actually understand and respect that. The other big one that I've come across is the Terminal program that comes with OS X. By default, page up and page down are mapped to scroll through the terminals buffer, not send page up or page down to the terminal. this is really annoying. After much swearing, tinkering, googling, I finally found the solution (after announcing that I'd given up on OS X, of course). Sure, it's a small problem, but it's little things like that which can drive people away from converting to OS X. I had searched for other terminal alternatives, however they are sadly lacking.

It seems that the majority of OS X users are not very "computer savvy", which is fine, but the people at Apple make some decisions that limit the people that are perhaps more "computer literate". As a heavy unix user, who's grown at least accustomed to working in a somewhat configurable Windows environment (as opposed to the favoured X environment of choice), the lack of configurability, the limiting choices, and some of the behaviour is uncomfortable, and initially hindering. However, the change in paradigm is not unsurmountable, and after a while working with Mac OS X seems almost pleasurable.

I'm not sure when I'll move back, or even if I move back, but or now I think I'm enjoying this.