As you all know, I switched to Mac about a year ago. It was really great to have a fast machine with real Unix underpinnings to run Lilypond and various build script for dealing with my sheet music archive. When OS 10.5 (Leopard) was released last November, I upgraded right away. Unfortunately, Apple made some far reaching changes that caused several programs to stop working - among those Lilypond. Not to worry, I thought. These things sort themselves out pretty quickly. There will be an update soon ...

... or not. None of the current developers of Lilypond seem to use Mac, so we poor users were all left in the dark. And we waited, and waited, and waited ... Finally someone realised that we could run the PowerPC version unde Rosetta emulation. This worked, but it ran way too slow. Until finally ...

when the santas congregate to torment you with demands of money and of affection. Fight the evil santa!

This only concerns those few who have legitimate user accounts on my site.

When the web host I use upgraded the PHP version on the servers a few weeks ago, it suddenly became impossible to log in to my site. Well I finally found a fix for that, so everything is back to normal again.

Soon it is time again - I'm off to Tenerife in eight days from today. It is going to be wonderful to get some sun, since the summer here in Sweden has so far been the wettest and most miserable in ages.

This time I'm actually going to do something during my stay in Tenerife. Yes, I'm taking a diving course to get an open sea diving certificate. How about that? It is going to be great fun - this is something I've been wanting to do for many years. I will post more reports when I'm there.

I started my computer life as a Mac aficionado. Well, actually it started before there even were Macs or PCs, but that is ancient history. Anyhow, for various reasons I switched to Windows about the time when Apple released System 8. I have glanced occasionally at what Apple has been up to with it's various versions of OS X.

I finally caved in a few days ago and got myself a MacBook Pro. And, by golly, is that a nice machine or what? The Unix underpinnings makes it excellent for me as a web developer. And it has Textmate, the greatest text editor ever (yes, even better than emacs!) I have some relearning to do here, but so far it seems like it was a good decision to make the switch.

Yes, I've been to Tenerife again. Third time in 8 months. Maybe it is time to move there permanently?

This time the reason (as if I needed one?) was to celebrate Mum's 80th birthday. Me and mum stayed for two weeks, my sister had to go back after only one week. Mum is pretty mobile for her age, but she is 80, so no mountaineering or other strenuous activities like in last summer. We did go on a couple of trips, among those one to La Gomera which is a really, really nice place to which I will definitely go back.

Images in the gallery as usual.

I have been contacted by the copyright holders for some of the tunes in the music archive and asked to remove a number of tunes. While I may have opinions about that, legally I am compelled to do as they wish. Hence, the archive is a little smaller now.

I encountered a funny scam here in Tenerife that seems to be pretty popular. As you might know, there are a lot of electronics stores here with pretty aggressive sales people. A new way of getting tourists to buy terribly overpriced stuff they don't need seem to go like this:

You are grabbed on the street by someone who wants to look at your digital camera and wants to know if "you have an infrared or regular memory card". You go, "huh? well, a regular one, I guess" and the person drags you into the store "just to show you the difference, no need to buy anything." After complimenting you on your excellent camera the person (or persons) hook it up to a tv, snaps a few pictures to your own memory card, and shows the images that looks really awful - murky and fuzzy. He then swaps to the "infrared card", repeats the process, and - lo and behold! - the images are bright and clear.