Grant makes several observations about subtle changes in Panther (the upcoming release 10.3 of OS X), but the one I noticed straight away that he he didn’t mention: Print is back in the File menu for the Finder. Hurrah! It’s the little things, you know…

The movie Mel Gibson is working on sounds intriguing. I hope it’s released with subtitles, my Aramaic is quite rusty (ha!). It’s interesting to see the political and religious fervor over something that has yet to be released. But I like Mel. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt until I can see it for myself.

With the upgrade to Notes 6 (finally), I’ve shed my last Classic App and am living totally on OS X. About time. It’s nice, too. Things worked extremely well with classic apps running alongside Carbon and Cocoa apps, but the interaction between the two was always a little jerky. Now that “bluebox” (the Classic environment) isn’t running at all, my whole system seems a little smoother and snappier. Now I just need to clean up my hard drive of all the old classic apps I haven’t run in months…

OK, this woman is an idiot. Apparently in our completely overly leagalistic society we’ve lost all common sense. Breastfeeding your child while driving is stupid. It’s dangerous, of course, but it’s stupid too. And saying that the law that states that nursing is a valid exemption from having a child under the age of four strapped into a car seat while the vehicle is in motion applies to the driver as well as passengers just insults the intelligence of the general population.

Get this:

“It’s not like I’m trying to change a diaper while I’m driving, she pretty much just lays there on the pillow in my lap,” said Donkers. “I would certainly submit that talking on a cell phone causes far more distraction than nursing a child while she’s just laying there.”

Yeah, lays there on your lap physically limiting your range of movement and control of the steering wheel. And “talking on a cell phone causes far more distraction?” Did you notice in the video that she was doing that too? Geez.

Oh yes. Her drivers license was suspended, too. And so here she is, on national TV this morning, quoting states laws on nursing while driving (or the lack thereof). It aggravates me to no end that we need laws for every little thing because people have no common sense anymore. Argh.

NetNewsWire 1.03 is out and includes some very nice new features, the main of which is “combined view.” This allows you to view the synopsis of a news entry in-line with the headlines in a single view, instead of a more traditional three-pane view. After using it for a couple of days, I’m addicted; It’s faster to scan updated blogs this way. If you follow blogs, go get it. It’s on sale until next monday, too.

OK, so Steve didn’t disappoint today in his keynote at the WWDC. Apple introduced tons of new stuff, some we get to play with now, some we’ll get to play with soon. There’s plenty of sites covering the details, so I’ll just hit the major bullet points here:

• Panther, including a new Finder, Expose (very cool!), File Vault, updated iDisk, Fast User Switching (wow, very useful), updated Mail, very speedy new Preview, Font Book, and Built-in Faxing, just to get things started.
  
• iChatAV
  
• Xcode (incredible)
  
• iSight (gotta have one of those)
  
• Safari 1.0 Gold
  
• and Last, but certainly not least, the new G5’s. Woah. Drool.

Word has it in about 20 minutes at the WWDC, Apple will introduce the new hardware. We’ll see…

Home Again!

It’s been a hard week in San Antonio. Not bad, mind you, just hard. Voiceover work and simulation recording is tedious and laborious work, but I think we’re putting together a good product. We managed to get all the screen capture work done today, so all I have to do tomorrow (ha) is record the final voiceovers, and some video headshots for some of the opening and transition material. After that, it’s on to editing.

Cynthia and I had a good time. We went shopping last night at two of the more famous shopping spots in San Antonio: the Quarry Market and NorthStar Mall. Tonight we did the Riverwalk, eating mexican food outside and watching an amazing variety of people walk by.

Hopefully things will wrap tomorrow shortly after lunch and we can drive back home. We’ve both enjoyed our time, but missed the kiddos. It’ll be nice to be back home.

Give me a break. Doesn’t he get it?

Since deciding not to make another race for the White House in 2004, former Vice President Al Gore has been devoting considerable time to another dream, one he shares with many Democrats these days — creating a media enterprise that could challenge the dominance of conservative voices in cable television and talk radio.

Uh, dominance of conservative voices in cable television and talk radio? Dominance? I don’t think so. CNN, MS/NBC, ABC, CBS, etc. are all so left they’re about to fall off the table, and FoxNews is really more moderate than anything. I definately don’t think there’s any kind of dominance. And just because Rush and Sean are coast-to-coast, that apparently constitutes a dominance on radio. And let’s not even get into the print media and Hollywood.

Again, it just won’t work. The reason Conservatives can get a large audience is because Liberals don’t have enough in common with each other. Each sub-group has their own petty interests and they bicker with each other as much as they argue with the right. And at the end of the day, it’s about advertising. If people don’t listen, the shows won’t last. Since people don’t want to hear the continual whining class warfare rhetoric that the left spews on a regular basis, they can’t keep an audience, so they can’t stay on the air.

There’s nothing like the free market at work. Nothing.