if you REALLY want to ramble, join us on our IRC server irc.alug.org.uk and the name of the room is #alug.
Yes, I'd forgotten about that. Was going to ask when it's most likely to be 'live'? (I'm used to going to IRC and saying 'hello? anyone awake? no')
For OSX I recommend Colloquy (http://colloquy.info/)
Cheers, got it already. Bit of a learning curve after running mIRC for n years: is Colloquy the leader on OS X the same way mIRC is in Windows?
R