The available Jabber-clients for OS X are definitely not my cup of tea, more so as I need proper groupchat support (like for debianforum.de’s chat). I guess I gave most available OS X clients a shot:

• Tkabber - The reference. Functionality is unreached. When it comes to usability, well, you have to get used to it. I’m using this on GNU/Linux, but with OS X the feel is just horrible.
• JabberFox is pretty usable but I ran into problems with character encoding and wasn’t motivated to look into it further.
• Adium is a neat mulit-protocol client based on libgaim. Unfortunately, if you’re used to Gaim, Adium just lacks too many features.
• Apple’s own iChat AV also supports jabber with v3, but there’s not even nick-completion for groupchat - barely useable.
• Another mulit-protocol client available is Fire. Unfortunately the current version has issues connecting to jabber-servers on Tiger. Besides that I don’t like it’s look and feel. Fire’s icon is nice, though.
• For now I’ll stick with Psi. I used it for some time some years ago with Debian, got the current OS X version today and it works pretty well for me. TLS/SSL, groupchat support, GnuPG integration..

Somehow this happens every now and then, I don’t know what my problem with IM-clients is but I went through the same procedure more than once with GNU/Linux. For the sake of completeness: It took the KDE-fanboy in me over a year to realize that Kopete is attractive in both, optics and features (well, besides that horrible groupchat support, if any), but way to immature and unstable. Once I even tried the jabber-plugin for irssi..

Weekly random facts exclusively brought to you in corporation with Hangover and Shortage-Of-Sleep.

Well, the hangover isn’t that bad. Lately, after drinking and before going to bed I consume considerable amounts of something non-alcoholic, preferably juice mixed with water or something.. great to prevent headaches in the morning. Of course, this is common sense, I just never found the discipline doing so until now. Another nice thing is being cooked for at 4am. Thanks Katja, delicious pasta, although I’m not quite sure if I had valued it appropriately, my condition considered..

So yesterday’s evening turned out to be pretty fun drunk after starting somewhat disappointing. We went to Munich to see Rise Against and Alexisonfire. For some reason we didn’t pre-oder ticket’s for we thought “Hey, how big can it be”. How wrong we’ve been. Sold-out. But I somewhat expected that. Speaking about selling out, Rise Against signed at a major label last year, statement: “We want to reach more people”. Well, sure, and that’s pretty much what they did. I’m not saying that all bands that leave for majors suck in general, but somehow it just smells rotten.. oh, Anti-Flag also did it recently. Anyhow, they are playing in Stuttgart tonight, but there’s also Further Seems Forever playing tonight at the Backstage, guess I’ll go for them. Would be 3x Munich this week, I’d say that’s a personal best..

While getting drunk after driving back to Ulm (serious thunderstorms on the way, great light show..) I had a thought about a former liaison. I still dream about her (literally) every now and then, normally nothing I’m looking forward to, but the last one has been different. She looked awful, behaved the same, in short, she left a pretty horrible impression. Well, that probably might be considered a subjective image of someone. I guess everyone experiences this all the time with people, but sometimes it hits you pretty out of the blue. People just look better the more we get to know and like them - and vice versa. How I’d love to show her an image of herself as seen in this last dream.. healing takes some time, more as expected.

Also, I had a talk with a friend that was pretty due. Maybe a little bit inappropriate after a couple of beers, then again, maybe not. Cleared up open “issues”, at least to some extent. Definitely better now..

Anyhow, as long as there are all those little, unimportant things to distract oneself.. maybe I write about them later - more random facts to come, no gut-spilling in disguise, I promise.

Just returned from a concert at the Backstage in Munich. Support has been Semana Santa. Metalcore from Wangen, Germany. I saw them a couple of times now, and every time they seem to get better. Or at least I like their sound better. They cleared the stage for Hand To Hand, who have just released their debut, A Perfect Way To Say Goodbye. That’s quite a title for a 1st album, isn’t it? What I don’t get is that Hand to Hand is always referred to as (Ex- As Friends Rust). AFAIK Zach (drums) is the only connection to As Friends Rust, sound-wise there’s definitely no similarity. Not even the slightest. They are playing pretty intense, errr, well, emocore with a good portion of metal. Sort of. I somewhat lost track of all the genres and sub-genres. Anyhow, great show, I really enjoyed it. Check the band’s pages for listening in..

Now for the noise: on my way home I lost my muffler. There have been quite some sparks flying around on the highway.. fortunately it happened just before an exit so I could leave the highway and loose the muffler completely on safe terrain. No problem, I packed the muffler into the trunk and drove the last 80 km unsilenced. That was a nice ride. I don’t understand that some car-tuning freaks do this to their cars and themselves on purpose. Crazy world.

When I switched to HFS+ on my external HD and copied over my audio collection using linux, it seems that resource forks for every single audio file have been created. This is very annoying when copying over directories to my mp3-player (actually, it’s a multi-codec jukebox ) for it takes some time until the forks are skipped and the music starts playing.

FinderCleaner lets you easily remove resource forks and the like by selecting the appropriate device or folder. Dead simple. Very handy.

On the developer’s site is also an announcement for MusicSync which will enable iTunes to handle non-iPodish audio players. For I can address my iriver as a storage device and therefore load it with everything capable of copying/moving files it’s not really a must-have, but promising none the less. I mean, I’m not exactly a fanboy of iTunes but getting used to it, it’s a nice app. And if I can use it as a single point of music management, so be it. A long way to go, though..

For me, my Mac’s startup chime has been annoying from the beginning. More so if I had listened to music with the volume of my amp cranked up and the powerbook connected to exactly that amp. Switching on such a setup after a pretty short and seriously drunk night knocks you straight off your feet. Searching the web, the more creative workarounds involve plugging in a jack to the audio out, but as written above, I already have a jack in there, with the amp connected to the other end. Great. Of course one might just mute the volume before switching the mac off or even better: just don’t switch it off. Or on. Guess that depends.

But not all is lost, StartupSound.prefPane to the rescue. It let’s you adjust the volume or disable/mute the startup-chime completely. Works like a charm and it’s free. As in beer.

Speaking of which, if you’re getting drunk and about to screw up, better bail out before it gets serious or screw up completely.. everything else will leave you in a pretty troubled state of mind. Come to think about it, I _did_ screw up completely. Even worse.