Man, surfing is definitely way harder than it looks. I went out today for my first surf with Taylor and I seriously feel like I’ve been hit by a train now. We were out there for about two hours while I newbed about in the water and looked like an idiot and I tell you, the hardest thing I found was just sitting on the board and turning round ready to paddle for a wave. Standing up is tough too obviously, but just sitting there isn’t exactly easy either. Definitely need to practice a shit load more.

Everything else here in PB is pretty chilled at the minute. Had a fairly random week mind which included spending a day at a golf resort in El Cajon with a couple of the guys from OPM as part of a photoshoot for Revolt Magazine. Good blokes actually, I just made sure I steered clear of any conversation surrounding their music…. No new photos at the minute though, although I’ve been considering buying the Nikon 12/24mm F4 lens for some proper wide-angle action, only now everywhere seems to have sold out. Sod’s law or what?

Oh and Bruce Dickinson > Sharon Osbourne:

“You know, what do I care if I never appear on reality TV? ‘Fucking great, thank you! Can I have it in writing?’ But in her [Sharon Osbourne's] world, that’s really important. In her world, it’s really important what you look like. In her world, facelifts are really important. In my world, I don’t give a fuck. I get old and I get wrinkly. Who gives a shit?”

Reet!

Inspired by Fletch, here’s my list of top 10 11 applications that I wouldn’t really want to use OSX without.

• Quicksilver. Now this is something that really impacts how I use and work in OSX, what’s more there’s nothing like it for any other OS. Once you get your head round how to use it and what for (it’s so much more than just an application launcher) you’ll wonder how you could function in OSX without it.

  Check this out for example. I use the del.icio.us plugin so that I can quickly hit Apple-Space, type in a tag (such as ‘daily’), press ‘/’, and then quickly browse the list of sites tagged with that. I can select multiple entries with ‘,’ and then when I hit `Return’ they’re all opened up in individual tabs in Safari. Awesome.

• Growl. A notification system for OSX, it’s highly customizable and supported by an awful lot of applications. It tells me when I have new mail, when I receive a message via Adium when the client isn’t in the foreground, when my downloads in Safari have completed, when transfers in Transmit have finished, and so on.
• Adium. Or more accurately, Metal Adium. Decent all-round IM client that supports MSN, AIM, YahooIM, Jabber and also IRC if you really wanted to. I prefer the integrated look of Metal Adium.
• Newsfire. This looks and works like it could have been written by Apple. Simple, powerful, fast, and well thought out. Well worth a tenner of anyone’s money.
• mutt. I’ve given up on Apple’s Mail.app and have reverted back to mutt for all email stuff. It’s not without its flaws but it’s about the best there is, assuming you can live without a GUI ;)

  Here’s my current mutt configuration (with personalisations removed), and here’s what it looks like. It’s probably worth mentioning that mutt relies on a couple of other things like vim (obviously) and esmtp which I’ve written about before here.

• irssi. Probably the best IRC client there is. It doesn’t look like much, but it is.
• lftp. Easily my favourite application for all ftp / sftp / scp actions. lftp supports pretty much any protocol you can think of, as well as other niceties like session management, parallel transfers, mirroring, bookmarking, and so on.
• screen. GNU screen, I don’t think I could live without this on *any* platform. Here’s my .screenrc.
• Terminal.app. Should go without saying really considering some of the above….
• Safari. I tend to stick to Apple’s own web browser instead of using Firefox or Camino. It renders 99.99% of the sites I visit just fine, is speedy, consistent, and looks the part. It seems to chew a lot less RAM than Firefox as well.
• iTunes. Again, obvious ;)

There’s a few honourable mentions such as VirtueDesktops (will be obsolete once Leopard is released with Spaces), iPodrip (for retrieving songs back off my iPod), Firefox (still useful especially with the web developer plugin), OmniOutliner, and VLC but those are the main ones.

I’ve uploaded some photos I took of our trip up to Oakland and back here - there’s a couple from Hollywood / LA, some from San Francisco, and some from the drive back along the PCH including a stop at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park which was unreal. The scenery along the coast is something that everyone should witness at some point in their lifetime, it really is that amazing.

The drive back on Monday took us literally all day, we set off not long after 10am and arrived back in San Diego at around 1am the next day. We did stop off at a fair few places though including some trails just south of Oakland, Capitola, and later Santa Barbara for some dinner and a couple of beers on State Street.

All in all it was an ace weekend, I got to check out a couple of different parks (Gilman Street in Berkeley and one in Alameda) as well as some awesome street at the UC Berkeley campus. Shame my back was too sore to ride for most of the time but it was rad just being there all the same, the campus was amazing - so much fun small stuff to ride as well as a crazy selection of rails to throw yourself down. And not a skatestopper in sight which is an amazing thing in itself - totally different to how downtown San Francisco is now for example, I still can’t get over the fact that they stoppered the Embarcadero considering how central that place was to the whole skateboarding scene there at one point.

Oh aye, and the new Giddy Motors album is awesome.

Crikey, I’ll have been back in the US for two weeks this coming Sunday but already it feels like I’ve been here alot longer. So far I’ve managed to get sunburnt, flood a Reverend’s toilet, spend an evening on a booze cruise courtesy of Reef and eat myself almost sick at EZ-J’s. I’ve taken a raft of photos although I haven’t gotten around to sorting and uploading most of them yet, although there’s a few recent ones of Steve Woodward here that are pretty rad, and I’ll have some surfing ones up soon.

Currently I’m in Oakland (Bay Area, right near San Fran and Berkeley) staying at Taylor’s mom’s place (which is siiiick!) for the weekend as he’s up here on some family business. We drove up yesterday from LA after staying the night in Hollywood courtesy of a friend of ours, and the drive up along the PCH around sunset reminded me how beautiful this part of the world is. I was supposed to spend today in San Francisco but dodgy guts and poor directions meant that it didn’t happen - so far. I think the plan for the weekend is to get in a load of riding at various parks, maybe some trails, and of course plenty of booze although I’m hoping to do some touristy stuff as well in Berkeley and SF. It feels like lifetimes ago since me, Wes and Ben were in this area in 2000….

Not much else to report on so far. The drama back home in Blighty is pretty grim, good luck to Fletch on getting himself home with the minimum of hassle. More updates with some photos soon!