OS9, OSS7 and Snow Leopard

Still tingling from The Dark Knight, we trudged down to Suntec in high spirits. I scheduled this meetup to coincide with John Larkin's happy return to Singapore for his classes at NTU. John was one of our meetup stalwart's and he now looks forward to these when he's back to teach.

Despite the lack of any email flurry, I met up with Hanx, Yezdi, Laurence, Kenneth, Mook Sum, Lucian, Coleman, Airani Geraldine, Catherine and Wilfred. Thankfully we had some very patient neighbours at a fairly crowded Mc's. Airani thoughfully grabbed the camera for a shots of the group there tonight.

Geraldine (like Mook Sum) who has rejoined the living and attempted to solve the problem of Panther installation on her clamshell in situ. That involved parasitising some outlet which she did with her usual charm. Eventually Yezdi figured her 6GB hardisk ought to be upgraded. Of course we gave her a hard time about her "toilet seat" Mac and it reminded John about a photo in his camera of an NTU canteen ceiling. Guess what the design reminded him of?

Not to be outdone by the OS9 interface staring at him across the tables from Gerry's clamshell, John whipped out an emulation of System 7 to demonstrate the old MacPaint. Amidst all this was Airani with hew new office-supplied Lenovo ThinkPad. Despite its small size, its battery didn't give out so she's a happy camper. Afterall, she still comes back to her iBook!

I was reminded by John's System 7 shenanigans that I actually want to run MacDraw on occasion for a screen grab. But first I have to send in my MBP for repair and clear out the hardisk in the process.

Still it was not all retro - Snow Leopard and multi-processor laptops were discussed and the Sep/Oct announcements were contemplated. I then got distracted with surfing on Catherine's iPod Touch. It had to be prised away from me eventually while I still was being wowed by its ease of use and consideration as a portable Mac!

I did talk about the ease of use of Posterous that Kenneth had first highlighted to me and quibbled with John facetiously over the pronounciation of its name.

I learnt Yezdi still has occasion to access my old post on bluetooth and GPRS - I was quite rabid about both M1 and Nokia lack of response at the time and it was solutions via the internet that saved the day for me.

Lucian and Wilfred reminded of an old but unused trick - two finger trackpad scrolling on my MacBook Pro and I realise its because I am usually using an extended keyboard. Still, when I next use it on its one hour of battery life, I will remember this! Lucian brought out his work's MacBook Air (w/SSD) and we enjoyed its feel until not its battery, but little Ann gave up for the night. We prised eager fingers and stopped our fountain of unrelated questions (Flock, Coda etc) so that he could get her back to bed!

Ivan had convened a GarageBand meetup at the same venue and they were the better behaved group of the two at Suntec's Mc's this night - they went on until 10pm as well, and we decamped just minutes later although we spent another quarter hour outside the venue as usual.

Once again the Heritage Fest exhibits beckoned at Suntec Tower Two and despite the face-tracking capability of the Fuji Finepix F50 I was using, Laurence wasn't able to provide one of his inspired poses.

At least one of us is having sweet dreams tonight - Wilfred collects his pink IC back from the SAF tomorrow. Congratulations Wilfred!

All the photos are up on Flickr.

See also Laurence's photos on Flickr.