May Contain Nuts

I think I’m beginning to understand how and why Blizzard continually manages to make more money than some third-world countries… they make one game and sell it to you three times.  Clearly taking the Square-Enix Final Fantasy approach to storytelling through games (whereby you answer an increasingly large number of questions about the primary story’s plot through additional titles, ideally on completely different consoles so that hardware manufacturers can get in on the consumer screw-fest), they’re releasing StarCraft 2 as 3 separate titles, each focusing on a different race.  I suspect that to get the whole story, you’re going to have to drop $150 on what should by rights probably be a $60-$70 experience.  And before I go any farther, I would just like to point out that this is a different sort of “sell one game three times” magic than what the likes of Tell Tale Games does with their products… you really only have to buy a season once to get the whole story, and a whole season is still cheaper than most stand-alone titles.  Blizzard, on the other hand, will probably charge full price for each installment of their epic title of ultimate destiny (dun da-da-dun!).

While I respect Blizzard on one level for being able to turn such massive profits off of the backs of crushed souls the world over World of Warcraft players and bucking the trend toward games being varying shades of brown and black, stuff like this (as well as the completely unnecessary and inexplicably popular portable soul-crushing experience World of Warcraft: The Gathering CCG) just strikes me as exploiting a fanbase already slavishly devoted to your every whim.

This is going to be a pseudo-live blog post; basically, I’m writing as it happens, and will just post it at the end of the event.  I’m also about an hour late in getting started, so I’ll just jump right in…

A lot of folks (including the live commentators at Engadget) have been complaining about the volume of 3rd party demos in the keynote thus far.  While I do agree that at 11:00 they seem to be continuing with no end in sight, I think it’s sort of a good move on Apple’s part to really play up the mass-adoption of the iPhone SDK and showcase as many different ways of using it as possible while the cameras are rolling.  I wouldn’t read too much into the current stock drop being indicative of anything… Apple’s stock always plummets during and after the Keynote because Jesus did not, in fact, appear on stage as predicted.

Some of these apps are pretty slick.  The games all look fabulous, and the social2.0 location-aware apps from Loopt and Associated Press sound very impressive.  The push notification service sounds impressive, though I’m sure a lot of folks will question the stability and scalability of a unified point for all service updates to the user’s iPhone… RIM’s service outages and .Mac’s occasional freak-outs come to mind as negative points here…

New features in the 2.0 software look cool: full Office and iWork document support, bulk message delete (yay!), save images from emails, scientific mode calculator (also yay) and contact search are niceties.  The parental controls aren’t really that fascinating to me, but that may be due to my lack of parentaling duties.  The $10 price point for the Touch2.0 update is also a much nicer pill to swallow than the $20 update for 1.1.3.

Mobile Me: Still not 100% sure about the name of the service, but if the stills from Engadget and MacRumors are anything to go by, this is going to totally kick .Mac’s ass in the usability and awesomeness categories.  Still $99/year, but they’ve kindly doubled the storage to 20GB.  Huzzah!  And I can finally view my calendar online!  Huzzah again!  Early July, with the iPhone software update.  Not quite as huzzah, but I’ll take it.  No mention of bookmark sync to Windows Safari though… grr…

Cheap As Free iPhones!  8GB for $199, 16GB for $299, whee!  Now, drop the price on the plan and I’ll sell my Touch ;).  Seriously, I love my Touch, but the lack of reliable Wifi around here is kind of a killer (there’s plenty in downtown Spokane, but it’s not free, and the signal is questionable… to say nothing of coverage out here in the Valley).  Just wish AT&T’s plans weren’t so damned expensive.  There’s even 3G coverage out here, so I’d be set for data, I’d just be broke at the same time.

I’ll be interested to hear what comes of the 10.6 stuff after lunch, provided any of it is allowed out of the session…

Update: After reading through Apple’s information on Mobile Me, it appears that syncing of bookmarks across platforms (and even browsers) is supported, though Firefox doesn’t appear to be included in that support.  Still, cross-platform Safari bookmark sync is something that should have been built-in from day 1 of the Windows Safari release for .Mac users, so at least that much is working now.  I still might stick with Firefox and Delicious on both platforms because bookmark tags are my new best friend, but I’ll see what Mobile Me’s sync capabilities are before making a final decision there.  I’m also interested in seeing if there are any improvements to iDisk’s performance in store for this upgrade, because that’s been a decidedly torturous experience in the past (though Comcast’s draconian upload speed certainly does nothing to help).

It’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness “here’s what’s on my mind while I’m at work” posts.  Feel free to insert your own “and now, for something completely different”s between paragraphs.  The people responsible for sacking those responsible for these subtitles have been sacked.

Costco is a cool place to get movie tickets, apparently.  $15 for 2 adult tickets at Regal, which is better than even the matinee ticket prices… and like $5 cheaper than the evening prices.  There will be serious Prince Caspianage today, followed by even more serious Indiana Jonesing next week.  On that note, we also got the new box set of the Indiana Jones trilogy Wednesday.  Willie?  Still twice as annoying as I remember her being (Osc was ready to shoot her during the first scene at the Obi Wan bar [which amused her to no end] in Shang Hai).

It’s gonna be the future soon.

Apple is apparently expanding on their original patent application for location-based content delivery.  I think I mentioned back when they signed that deal with Starbucks that being able to get on-demand location-aware content delivered to you in places outside the coffee shop would be seriously awesome… ordering movie tickets without waiting in line, buying a soundtrack from a theater’s “now showing” custom wi-fi music store, getting maps of malls or airports… the list goes on.  The iPhone, iPod Touch, and other mobile internet devices are quickly approaching and even surpassing the absolute utility of concepts like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Seriously, Star Trek’s got nothing on this stuff.  Meanwhile, Microsoft’s taking the map angle in a different, more public direction (I think the smart whiteboard application is more useful then 4×6-foot interactive maps, personally).  Did I mention it’s gonna be the future soon?

By the way, I have serious respect for anyone who can sing and play an instrument at the same time with any degree of capability, because I simply fail at being coordinated enough to manage that.

Recently I gave up on the money management app I got in the MacHeist bundle, Cha-Ching, and ported the last month or so’s worth of financial stuff into another app called MoneyWell.  It’s a very different application from Cha-Ching, but it seems to have much better support, is a lot more stable, and makes it possible to really granularly control our spending, which is a really good thing.  It’s amazing what you discover when you actually sit down and plan out all of your finances in a really serious way, and with all of that information in mind, we can make better decisions about how to spend the money we make in the future.

Jonathan Coulton makes any work day better.  I blame linking to “Future Soon” for getting me started listening to him today.

I’m very seriously considering getting a refurbished AirPort Extreme so that we can get the Wii and our Touches hooked back up to the internet at home, because we’ve run out of unlocked networks elsewhere in the apartment complex to piggy-back off of, and I have a very serious need to play LostWinds.  I need to play it very seriously, in fact.

On a related note, I listed my G5 on Craigslist last night.  Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it in short order, but if not, I may need to look into alternatives (still thinking that the local reseller, Mac Odyssey, wouldn’t be a bad way to go if not for the 30% they take for finding a buyer and managing the sale).  I’m hoping to get enough for the G5 and the display combined to cover the cost of a refurbished iMac at $1599, with maybe a little left over for the AirPort Extreme.

Well, tonight I did something rather unexpected.  After finishing up what I hope is the final draft for The Archiver’s 12th issue (coming soon to a virtual news stand near you!), I decided to delve into making Firefox my default browser.  Anyone following this blog knows how much I’ve hated on Firefox’s appearance in OS X in the past, and I’ve actually made several unpublished attempts at ranting about the almost-but-not-quite-there default theme in Firefox 3, so this is quite a change of heart.

There were several things that ultimately pushed me over the edge.  First was Firefox 3’s support for Aqua controls.  Second, the absolutely stunning GrApple theme by Aronnax, which fits in with OS X so much better than the default Firefox theme does (though I must say that OS X is the only OS that really makes the new Keyhole back/forward control look good).  Third, Delicious finally put out a beta of their new extension for Firefox 3, which was the single most important functionality requirement I had for switching to Firefox 3 full-time.

I had to do a little bit of tweaking to get the Delicious extension to look the way I wanted… the only thing that really bugged me was how ugly the default tag icons looked against the dark gray of OS X’s windows.  In the end, I probably spent 45 minutes pouring through Firefox’s innards looking for the extension and the icons it uses.  Since the icons ended up being inside the .jar file bundled with the extension, I had to get creative and figure out how to tweak the user chrome (not to mention dig through tons of CSS in the Delicious .jar to find the right class) to make the changes I wanted.  Not being in the mood to build a new tag icon from scratch, I went the simplicity route and just removed the tag icon completely, then halving the size of the space it took up to provide more bookmark bar-like spacing between the dropdown lists (I use Favorite Tag view).  I also bolded the text to make it a bit more like the bookmark bar.  If I feel up to it tomorrow, I might go crazy and dig up the actual style for the bookmark bar items to use in the user chrome for the Delicious toolbar.

I’m going to run Firefox 3 as my default browser on the Mac as an experiment for a week or so, and see if the system is more responsive after leaving the browser up under load for several days than it typically is under Safari. A lot of my problems with memory usage would probably be aleviated by just cramming more RAM into this thing, but I’m trying to be cheap right now.

I can’t say I’m an avid (or even staunch) supporter of the “Get Things Done” mantra that’s sweeping the corporate world and to some degree personal life across the country.  However, I do recognize the value in making lists of things to do that are small enough to keep you motivated but detailed enough to keep you organized.  Given that my entire job consists of a never-ending stream of projects with deadlines and due-dates, having a way to quickly and easily create and maintain lists of tasks for those projects is fairly important, and to that end, I’ve routinely tried to get a system together that works for me in that regard, with varying degrees of success.

I would like to take this moment to decry the state of Windows development when it comes to GTD software.  It’s just downright pathetic next to the myriad of options available for the Mac.  There are about half a billion (I may be exaggerating) different GTD-oriented apps on the Mac, ranging from free to about $80.  The stand-out winner for me thus far has been iGTD, due in large part to its flexible attitude towards “contexts” (which I rarely if ever use) and the degree to which it integrates with pretty much every other Mac application on the planet.  Need to keep a reference to an email handy for this task?  No problem, just drag it into iGTD when you’re viewing the task.  Want to have references to all the files changed by a specific feature addition?  No problem, just drop the files into the task from the Finder.  Have a website with the instructions for completing a certain tricky JS action?  Again, no problem, just drop the URL into iGTD from Safari!

Why is there not a single application on the Windows side of the fence that supports this kind of deep file-system and application-level integration?  Is it because the Windows shell isn’t flexible enough to support these kinds of drag/drop actions from Explorer?  Because Outlook is the single largest walled-garden application next to Windows itself?  Because IE is a pile of poop?  Because Windows’ drag/drop just isn’t robust enough to support cross-application tie-ins like that?  Seriously, why can’t Windows do all of these things?

Hell, I’d be happy to settle for a to-do list app that doesn’t make me want to vomit, let alone handle all the rest of these integration points.  Just give me something small, simple, and most importantly, free that I can use to create projects, put tasks in them, assign due dates to those tasks, and see an overview, by project, of the stuff I have to do today.  Why is this so god-damned hard?  Half of the GTD-oriented apps out there for Windows are Outlook plugins, and I don’t want to potentially break my copy of Outlook, lest the security nazi descend upon me like a ton of bricks.  The other half are either pay-only, or have such a crippled free version as to be totally worthless, or are the sort of open-source programmer-developed apps that have absolutely zero usability, or are apparently targeted at kindergarteners, judging from the insultingly overblown look of the UI.

Outlook 2007 has this thing called the Business Contact Manager that I’ve tried using on a couple of occasions, since it supports projects and tasks, and you can even link emails to specific tasks, but it’s tedious, bulky, slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use regularly.  I’d be totally gung-ho for this solution if they just made it easier to deal with by speeding it up, simplifying linking emails to tasks (or even creating tasks from emails), and took out some of the complicated cruft that I didn’t need (it’s oriented towards sales as far as I can tell [surprise...], which is decidedly not what I’m involved with).

I’m tempted to roll my own solution and run it off of my website at this rate.  It’ll have to be an off-the-job project, though, because I have enough else that I’m getting paid to do.  Though maybe I can pitch it to Brock as another service we can provide and/or sell outside of our core credit union demographic, and get paid to put this thing together for myself.  Yes, I’m devious.

So, I’ve been fiddling around with IE8 Beta 1 today, and have a short list of notes thus far.  I haven’t put it through any serious paces, so this list will probably grow over time, but for now, here’s the shake-down…

Nice:

• “Super-standards” mode on all non-quirks pages out of the box.  “Nice” is an understatement.
• Passes Acid2 (as long as it’s on the webstandards.org site; acid2.acidtests.org fails, apparently due to a cross-domain request issue that’s being worked on, so it’s a conditional passage, but still way better than the grenade-victim look of the smiley face in IE7).
• Wide buttons successfully render their corners in Windows XP.  Previously, if a button became too wide, the edges of the button would become super-pixelated.  Looks like someone back-ported a fix to IE7/Vista for this release.  Thank god.
• An “Emulate IE7″ button is included to force the browser back to IE7’s rendering mode and user-agent.
• Based on the demo at MIX this morning, there’s a sweet set of developer tools, including in-engine JS debugging.  This trumps even the Web Developer toolkit for Firefox, which is sort of a gold standard for dev tools (Safari’s ain’t bad either though).

Not so nice:

• Buttons still scale horizontally out or proportion with the contents of the button itself.  It’s like every character you pile on adds some number of pixels to the left and right padding for reasons that completely escape me.
• IE8 scores a 17 on the Acid3 test.  While it’s better than the score of 13(?) that IE7 gets, it’s still woefully far behind Opera 9.26 (46/100), Firefox 2 (51/100), Firefox 3 Beta 3 (59/100), and Safari 3 Build 31A15 (76/100).  While I won’t be placing bets on who passes Acid3 first, I’d be willing to put money on who passes it last…
• The “Emulate IE7″ button requires a complete restart of IE before it will take effect.  I also somehow doubt that this feature will last into the final release (especially if it remains this mean to the user), which is sad, because it’s obvious enough what it does that it could help alleviate some of the headaches that will inevitably arise from MS “breaking the web” again (and hopefully for the final time, though I wouldn’t count on that given the Acid3 compliance).
• The developer tools are apparently really, really buggy.  I thought this was a developer release… whoops?
• The UI is still crap, but that’s aesthetics, not web standards, so whatever.

Otherwise intriguing:

• Activities looks like an expanded take on Microformats, which I actually wouldn’t mind seeing other companies like Google, Mozilla, and Apple jumping on the bandwagon for.  Apple’s already got the whole data detector thing going on in OS X, with hooks for it in more than just Mail by the looks of a few tips on macosxhints.com, so this seems like a decent enough initiative to adopt as well.  It’s even being released under a Creative Commons license, so hooray for non-proprietary-ness…
• WebSlices look like Microsoft’s version of WebClips, only built into the bookmark bar instead of the Dashboard (or Sidebar… guess they couldn’t do the Sidebar integration if it’s supposed to be an XP feature too…)  Practically speaking, I think I prefer the WebClips approach, which lets you capture any portion of any webpage, rather than just those sections that the web developers of certain sites have deigned it appropriate to let you save.  The bookmark bar integration is admittedly more accessible than the Dashboard though, in most instances, though, so that’s nice.
• Domain name highlighting looks like Yet Another Useless Feature to try and keep people from doing retarded things online.  If red (well, pink) address bars, huge certificate failure notifications, and phishing alert notifications in the browser aren’t enough to get someone to realize they’re about to get themselves scammed, making the domain name stand out from the rest of the URL sure as hell ain’t gonna do anything to help.  I’m betting on it being more confusing than anything else, honestly…

I will be following IE8’s beta cycle with supreme interest, if only because I want to see just how much more work Microsoft is going to make me do to get my sites to render properly in IE8, but so far all of my work-related stuff seems to be doing well, which is hardly surprising given that it renders will in other standards-compliant browsers…

Internet Explorer 8 will now run in IE8-standards mode by default.
No wonder it’s been so cold here the past couple of days…

Kudos to the IE team for turning the browser around after the firestorm of disagreement from the web development community, and further kudos to whoever decided that IE8 needed to fall in line with MS’s new interoperability principles.

Now, if only people would adopt IE8 as quickly as Firefox users adopt new versions (and if only IE8 were available on more platforms than just XP and Vista), web development would become much less of a headache.

Who wants to take bets on IE being the last browser to pass Acid 3, too?

Anyone who remembers my little rant about “web 2.0″ and “cloud computing” may remember that I railed on del.icio.us for a couple of things. First, its obscenely over-clever domain name (which they seem to be moving away from them, gods bless them), and second, that it was a royal pain in the rear to use del.icio.us with Safari. Oh, sure, you can keep a tab open to del.icio.us at all times, manually navigate through your tags online, and just middle-click a link that you want to open, but that’s hardly the epitome of convenience or user-friendliness; two things that I have a bad habit of desiring from my computing experiences since switching to the Mac.

You may also recall that I pretty much dismissed out of turn the whole collection of third-party apps that brought del.icio.us to the Mac in desktop app format, because they succeeded in making del.icio.us a pretty, easily-navigable thing, but totally failed on the second point: Safari integration. Having to keep a second app running just to use my bookmarks doesn’t really appeal to me.

Well, tonight my desperate search for a utility that actually integrates Safari and del.icio.us is at an end. I stumbled across the rather obviously named “DeliciousSafari” website, which provides a SIMBL plugin for Safari that adds a del.icio.us menu to Safari’s menu bar, listing all of the tags you’ve added and all of the sites you’ve so tagged. It’s not quite as convenient as Firefox’s del.icio.us toolbar add-on, but it’s pretty freaking close. As soon as I get some extra money (like, say, my next paycheck), I fully intend to throw the requisite $10 at the developer as an expression of my extreme gratitude.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some customizing to do.

(On a related note, I need to rework some of the tags on my blog, too… but that’ll have to wait until after I’ve customized and organized del.icio.us and handled a few additional tagging projects on DPWR.)

So, I’ve been running Leopard for two days now, and I figured I’d join the crowd on MystBlogs professing my first impressions…

• After doing a full Archive & Install that took less about 45 minutes to complete (eat it, Windows…), I launched into Leopard with a shiny new never-been-used user account. I decided to start my account from scratch because I’d accumulated plenty of cruft over the past 2 and a half years, and I didn’t want to spend hours cleaning out the garbage on a brand new system. Plus, there were some glitches I was hoping a new system would help resolve. In under 4 hours, I was back up and running completely, with all of my mail, bookmarks, RSS feeds, and Keychains back where they belonged. It wasn’t without a few glitches along the way, though…
  • Mail 3.0 apparently doesn’t like importing Mail 2.0 mboxes using the Import Mailbox utility. I ended up just copying my old mailboxes into the ~/Library/Mail folder and having Mail run an upgrade on the mboxes the next time it launched. All is now back to normal.
  • I forgot to enable Web Forms & Passwords as remembered items in Safari, so I spent the better part of a day trying to figure out why my keychain was all janky.
• It’s not exactly a “New Mac [in] my Mac” as Apple’s marketing professes, but it is a very worthwhile upgrade in terms of performance. Everything seems to load a bit faster and behave a bit better than before, with a few notable exceptions… namely:
  • Photoshop 7, which actually alerted me upon install that I didn’t have a Classic environment set up, fails to make it past “Checking Preferences” in the splash screen before failing in an “unrecoverable” fashion. While not entirely surprising given the age of the software, it’s kind of annoying for obvious reasons. Have I mentioned how much Adobe has started annoying me lately?
  • Unity 2.0, the software IDE I’m using to do game development, crashes after attempting to launch the demo scene at startup. Unlike Photoshop 7, however, this is an issue that will definitely be fixed, and hopefully be fixed soon.
  • Safari’s a bit crash-prone, but for reasons that I don’t think have anything to do with the app itself. More on that momentarily.
• Apple’s move to try and nullify InputManagers has fortunately not left Inquisitor and SafariStand out in the cold for now. Unfortunately, either one or the other is currently causing some problems with the browser, but I’m not sure which. All I can say is that Safari seems to really hate the flash banner on the MOUL forums now, and it crashes intermittently while browsing the forum. I really don’t want to get rid of either tool, though, because I continue to be baffled by Apple’s insistence that a tabbed browser doesn’t need a “New Tab” button (which SafariStand adds), and Inquisitor is a highly useful search extension tool for me. If I had to guess which one was causing problems, though, I’d probably have to say SafariStand. Anyone else know of a free InputManager that adds a New Tab button that hopefully won’t crash Safari as much?
• The new 3D Dock is shiny, both literally and figuratively. In a departure from my MO in Tiger, I turned off magnification, because it seems to “read” better when the thing isn’t scaling all over the place.
• Despite what seems to be an overwhelming case of molehills-made-mountains over this feature, I rather like Stacks. Granted, I don’t have a dozen folders sitting on the right side of the Dock either, but that’s just not how I organize myself, so it doesn’t bug me.
• I have no problems reading the translucent menu bar and freshly de-pinstriped menus. On top of that, I like the slight gradient to the highlighted menu item, and the rounded corners are a nice subtle touch.
• Help Search is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The animated “here it is!” arrow that points out the menu item you’re searching for is equally super-useful, especially in cases where the documentation for an app tells you the name of the menu item, but fails to correctly tell you where it’s located (I’m looking at you, NetNewsWire…).
• Spaces is very nice, and so far I haven’t had any problems with apps misbehaving as a result of having 6 desktops set up (3×2 grid, top row for web development/browsing, bottom for game development). The only odd part of Spaces is that launching a collection of apps that span several spaces can be a bit disorienting, because Leopard will fly you to the relevant space as each app finishes loading. It’s kinda fun doing it on purpose sometimes, actually.
• With Classic gone, hopefully that will put more pressure on either Ubi, Cyan, or some contracted third party to actually develop a release of Myst, Riven, and Exile that actually works correctly in OS X on multi-core systems (Exile’s Bink codecs are old and don’t play nicely with multiple CPUs unless you run in Classic, which obviously you can’t do now…). I’m not holding out much hope for that though. Alas.
• Nice as it is, the default desktop background didn’t stand a chance against a Portal-related desktop set that Ash found for me. Oh well, space is still cool.
• Windows file and printer sharing is slightly janky and doesn’t seem to be behaving very well. Especially the printer sharing. More diagnosis is needed.
• Something is still causing my entire system to spontaneously shut down while playing certain AVIs in Quicktime using Perian. Strangely, this behavior is completely inconsistent: not every AVI will crash, not even two AVIs with identical encodings, and the AVIs that do crash never do so in the same place twice. I’d hoped this was something at fault with my cruft-filled Tiger install, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Anyone have any thoughts?
• MySQL, while somewhat of a pain to start and stop, works fine, as do the new versions of PHP and Apache I’m running. Development on DPWR is unhindered by the update.
• While I don’t have a drive set up for backups just yet, I got to play with Time Machine at the reseller during their Leopard release party. It is made of pure sex. The interface is gorgeous and far more crisp than even the guided tour implies. I’m saving pennies for a FireWire 800 drive to use for additional storage, so the USB 2.0 drive can be relegated to backup duty (my thinking here is that the additional storage drive would be used more regularly and for longer periods than the backup drive, so having the extra bandwidth for active file transfers will be more useful than leaving the bandwidth to the backup drive).

It’s Leopard Day, and I have a crapload of stuff to do. Unfortunately, I also have to actually do some work while I’m at work, so that puts a damper on my pre-Leopard preparations. I’ve got a number of things that need to be copied over to my external hard drive; the entirety of my user folder - minus some of the cruft in the Library folder, and the web server directory containing all of the files for the new version of DPWR. Plus, I need to do a data dump from the mySQL database so that I can retain all of the skin work I’ve done on the site during the upgrade. This is a not-negligible amount of data, so I’m planning on taking a slightly early lunch so I can get the file transfer underway as soon as I possibly can. Fortunately, two of the biggest offenders for space - my iTunes library and my iPhoto library - are already on the external drive, so really the biggest mess I have to deal with is the fact that I downloaded all 4 seasons of Mythbusters and haven’t moved it over to the external drive yet, so it’s taking up 84 gigs of space right now and needs to be copied over along with everything else. This sucks.

I also need to copy the applications folder over to the external drive; another exercise sure to take an hour or two. I’ll ultimately be lucky if I have any time tonight to actually install the OS itself, but by god, I’m going to try.

One thing that will help alleviate some of the tension is the fact that I’ll probably be out of the apartment most of the day anyway; if I start everything copying between 11:00 and noon, that’ll give it 4-5 hours of copy time before I even get off work. Two hours more before I can even acquire Leopard, and probably at least another couple of hours at Mac Odyssey for their Leopard launch party, complete with food, a live band, and the potential for freebies, up to and including a used Mac (great for Tiger, and fileserving!). That puts it at 8:00 pm or so, which gives me 8-9 hours of backup time. Not bad, but I’m still not sure it’ll be enough to back up the majority of a 250GB hard drive over a USB 2.0 connection. We’ll see. Mythbusters alone will probably take at least an hour, but that’s also an 80-gig chunk of space we’re talking about. I may just make it.

Anyhoo, once I get Leopard and make it back home, I’m going to be starting from scratch. A full clean install. I could very probably just do an upgrade and not have any problems, but years of bunged Windows upgrades and a recent bout of OS instability (i.e. rebooting at random while playing DivX AVI files, regardless of the program) have made me wary, and I think it’s best to just clean out all the junk and start fresh. So, bye-bye Tiger. It’s been a rocking awesome run.