Yes, I carved an Apple logo into a pumpkin. I am that big of a nerd.

Overall, I’m very happy with the upgrade. More details after the jump.

Installation

While I won’t say it went flawlessly…

… it was pretty painless once I got it right. If you’re like me, and you install a lot of third-party extensions, especially those that link in at the kernel level, do not choose the default “Upgrade” option when installing Leopard. You’ll end up with what I’ve come to call the “Blue Screen of Discontentment”. But, you’re about to say, I was never given an option! Yes, you were. It was hidden behind the “Options” button on the dialog where it asks you which hard drive to install to. Pick “Archive and Install” and don’t look back.

Once I figured that much out, installation went flawlessly across all three of my Macs (yes, I bought a “Family Pack”).

Features

Like I said, the flagship new features in Leopard, while cool, aren’t as mind-blowing as you might think. But they’re still pretty cool.

Time Machine

Alright, in the grand scheme of things, Time Machine is pretty awesome. While technologically, its barely a step above rsync and a cronjob, I genuinely think this is the first backup solution that will actually get the masses to back up their data regularilly. It does, dare I say, make backups sexy.

However, a couple gripes about it:

• Despite the product announcements to the contrary, it doesn’t seem to support backups to AFP drives not hosted on another Leopard machines. This is quite annoying to me. I have 2 terabytes of gigabit ethernet-accessible storage at my fingertips, but I can’t use it for Time Machine, since it resides on a Linux box. Luckily I recently purchased a 250 gigabyte Firewire 800 drive which is now happily accepting my Time Machine backups. That doesn’t, however, help me with my older PowerBook, which I rarely plug into a hard-line ethernet connection or Firewire drive. Since I never do any multimedia work on that machine, it would be perfectly reasonable to perform Time Machine backups over 802.11g wireless, since I’m backing up nothing but ASCII text (source code and blog post drafts, primarily).
• The complete inability to do something as simple as forcing Time Machine to take a snapshot at a particular time. I want to say “Hey, Time Machine, I’m about to do nasty things to my home directory, save me from myself”. But unless it happens to be an hour since the last time it backed up, I’m out of luck. Boo! At least give me an AppleScript hook (I looked…).
• While the Time Machine UI is very very slick, there’s no way to get it to simply dump out a visual “diff” of all the files that have changed between versions. So if you just want to see how many files have changed in each backup, you’re out of luck.

Cover Flow and QuickLook

Alright, fine, cool gimmick. I’ve come to like it a lot, especially for browsing images and PDFs. Its a nice application of technology, and it’s quite cute.

But, honestly, it is really only good for browsing images. It really doesn’t break from the normal file browsing paradigm, and it doesn’t make the task of browsing deep file hierarchies any easier. In fact, its only really useful if you have a very flat file hierarchy, which my hard drive has never seen.

Spaces

It’s strange to say, but I almost feel like Spaces is the most finely refined “feature” of Leopard. So what’s the big deal? It’s nothing that new. Virtual Desktops have existed in one for or another for probably two decades, so the concepts behind Spaces are nothing new.

The best thing about Spaces, in my opinion, is that it simply gets out of the way. Once you have it set up right, it simply gets out of the way. I have Spaces trained to keep my Textmate instances in one “Space”, my Safari in a second, and my chats in a third. Using motions you’re familiar with, you can simply tab between apps, and it jumps you directly to the proper Space without any fuss or muss. It is really, really, really nice, to see virtual desktops finally done right, especially under MacOSX.

Overall

I haven’t had much time to play with the other features, like Mail and iChat, but I’ll say that the most compelling thing about Leopard is not the big headlining features, but the OS as a whole. Overall, it is a snappy, fun to use OS.

For some reason, it just plain feels faster. Its hard to explain. I was expecting it to absolutely crawl on my old 1.5 Ghz 12″ PowerBook G4, but to my surprise, it made my old laptop feel young again. In fact, this entire entry, as well as most of the screenshots presented in it, were created on my now three year old PowerBook. And let’s not talk about how much faster it made my new MacBook Pro feel.

And the new, unified look tightens the whole experience. All the apps mesh together to create a more consistent experience, where the OS simply disappears from view.

All in all, I think that Leopard is a worthy upgrade. While I think I’d still be pretty happy with my old Tiger installation, I’m very glad I upgraded. Overall, I’m getting more done, in less time, while having more fun doing it, than I did before Leopard. Well done, Apple, well done.

One of the great things about the AdaFruit starter pack is that it comes with the ProtoShield, an easy daughter-board for prototyping. The ProtoShield also comes with two extra LEDs and a spare button you can wire up to use in your projects. They’re great to use as built-in status LEDs or mode buttons.

But there is no documentation anywhere on how to use them. Poking around at the board and looking at the schematic, I eventually figured out that there were just a couple spare holes on the board that you can use to access them. But they don’t lead to any of the onboard headers, so they’re hard to use.

Fortunately I had a left over three-position header from the kit, so I wired it up with jumpers on the underside of the board.

Its ugly, but it works. Now I can just run jumpers to my breadboard to take advantage of them.

Hopefully somebody else will find this useful.

Deschutes “Hop Trip” Pale Ale is a special-edition brew from their Bond Street series. A “Fresh Hop Pale Ale”, it is brewed with “wet” Willamette Valley hops, freshly picked and added immediately to the boil.

The resulting beer is hoppier than a normal pale ale, and the fresh hop character really shows through in the final brew, yielding a beer with a bit more “guts” than an normal IPA. Those hops are balanced with malty sweet caramel flavors to make a well-rounded, very drinkable beer. The kind of beer that makes me wish I’d bought more than one bottle of it, since the chances of me finding another bottle of this limited-edition brew next time I go back to the store aren’t good.

Overall, I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10 on my still very immature beer rating scale.

Beer Advocate Profile Page

Little did I know what I was getting myself into…

Of course I followed the instructions. I filled the sink with water, covered the backup drain with a wet rag, and pushed downwards on the can as if it were a plunger to force my pesky plug out of my plumbing.

And then my world exploded.

I live in an older apartment building. Older as in probably about 60-70 years old. Which means I have about 50-60 years of crud built up in my plumbing. All that crud, with the exception of the crud actually clogging the sink, chose exactly that moment to leave my plumbing. And exit promptly all over my bathroom.

As it seems, the extra large backup drain of my sink also provided an extra large exit for said crud, all of which promptly forced its way out past my carefully placed rag, and all over my bathroom. Covering my sink, my shower, my walls, and even myself. No innocent bystanders were spared.

The results? I was left with:

• A bathroom covered in crap that was older than me
• A sink fully of lemony fresh fizzy water
• A drain that is still completely plugged

And, while wiser for the experience, I’m still $9 poorer, and I still don’t have a completely working sink.

Although I’ve had accounts on a good number of them, I just can’t keep them properly updated and maintained anymore. Thus, I’ve decided to start “pruning my network,” so to speak. As such, I’ve cancelled my accounts on Orkut and Friendster. I haven’t even touched my Orkut account in about 2 years, except to occasionally accept friend requests from the hordes of (often quite attractive) Brazillian women who seem to try and befriend everyone on Orkut. And I hadn’t logged into Friendster for so long that I couldn’t remember my password. I also plan on canceling my Myspace account soon, but I’d like to notify a few friends on there before I suddenly disappear.

From now on, I plan on maintaining a much smaller collection of social sites:

• Flickr for my photo collections
• Facebook for general friend-networking
• LinkedIn for career networking
• Twitter for random comments

If you want to network with me, you’re best to find me on one of those four in the future.

Update: I’ve notified those people in my MySpace that weren’t already on Facebook and I’ve canceled my account.