MaW’s Blog

This weekend saw three things happen. On Sunday it was my birthday; on Friday Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ was released to a salivating Mac community (yes it’s good); and all weekend was Moveable Feast, an annual gathering of Tai Chi players. It’s not an open event, more of one which spreads through people being invited by other people who already go. The idea is to make sure that the group stays as compatible as possible, and to stop it growing too large. Seems to be working out fairly well.

Although it started on Thursday, I didn’t get there until Friday afternoon. We stayed at Voewood, a grade 2 listed early 20th century house in High Kelling, Norfolk. It’s a very, very strange place, lots of stuffed animals, insects in glass cases, bizarre paintings and very strange decor. Amazing atmosphere though, making it perfect for a Tai Chi retreat (it’s used a lot for yoga retreats, judging by the guestbook, and their needs would be similar to ours in many ways). Although vegan food I find a bit irritating after a while, there was plenty of it, and Sunday lunchtime’s soup was some of the best soup I’ve ever had (carrot, orange and ginger says my rumbling stomach). Rice pudding made with soymilk does rather lack something though, and I suspect that something is the feeling of the extra inches I’m adding to my waistline by eating it.

Anyway, I camped in the grounds because the house was full, and had the joy of waking up very early the first two mornings, once because the airbed was nearly flat, and then because there was a thunderstorm. For those of you who’ve never experienced a thunderstorm inside a small tent, let me just say that it’s extremely loud. Not only is there almost no impediment to the sound of the thunder reaching your ears, the rain hitting the tent fabric (and it was raining very hard) makes a noise rather like someone’s standing next to you pouring a bag of frozen peas onto a large drum. Sleep in such circumstances is impossible. I’m just happy my tent stood up to the rain and didn’t let any in — poor Joe got quite wet as he discovered that his tent really isn’t waterproof at all (he brought the wrong tent with him, he won’t be making that mistake again), and Libby also found that hers leaked a bit.

In the evenings before bed we had a bonfire and music — quite a talented bunch of musicians. I definitely want to hear Fergus’ song about homicidal teddy bears again, it was very funny and excellently performed. Plus I discovered that Joe is about as fanatic about folk music as I am.

So when I got back I of course installed Mac OS X Tiger on my Powerbook. Was it worth the money? Definitely! It’s faster than Panther (and not just because it’s a clean install, as I’d done a clean Panther install onto a new hard drive just a month or so ago and it was never this quick), has some nice new features, and I’m actually using Apple Mail 2 and liking it. No more Thunderbird for me, woohoo! I used it, but I never really liked it very much as it was slow and clunky and the Mac integration was horrible. On Windows it’s pretty good, but on Mac OS… no thanks. Since Mail 2 has a much-improved UI and has been injected with a healthy dose of sanity, it’s now handling all my needs, including (via plug-in bundles which are only vaguely documented but seem to work very well anyway, Apple should really promote these more as they seem to match Thunderbird-style extensions in possiblities) GPG encryption and Growl notifications of new mail. Very nice.