I'm out making a Mighty run for the pregnant wife. :)

As we all know Apple released iLife ‘08 yesterday…and thanks to the glory of the internets it is available for download.

Some highlights:

- The new “organize by event” feature in iPhoto is fantastic. It took some getting used to but it’s really cool.
- My jampacks for GarageBand still worked in this new version. This is a good thing for those of us who use GarageBand.
- The improved photo editing in iPhoto is great. Unless you are a professional you really don’t need another program to tinker with your photos…this has it all.
- iMovie is going to be a lot of fun for everyone. I really didn’t have a whole bunch of time to mess with this but from what I saw I can tell this is going to take up a lot of my free time in the future.

I don’t have a .Mac account so I really can’t say too much on the improvements there.

Our long national nightmare is over: Brady Quinn has signed a contract with the Cleveland Browns.

Giants slugger Barry Bonds hits 756th career home run, surpassing Hank Aaron’s all-time record.

Visit CNN for the latest.

Barry Bonds just hit his record-breaking 756th career home run off Mike Bacsik. It was caught by a fan in a New York Mets jersey. Details to come.

UPDATE: Here it is with the crappy ESPN2 call:

The Fox Sports call is much better:

source file

And here’s the radio call.

P.S. Here’s a longer, but lower quality, version of the Fox Sports clip. It’s a saved copy of the streaming video that I watched live via Internet as it happened, so it’s a bit herky-jerky as the clip buffered and stuff. But it shows much more of the reaction after the home run.

source file

And here’s an audio clip of my reaction — I was using WireTap Pro to record both the Mac’s audio track and the sounds in the room (via the computer’s microphone), so you can hear the Fox call and hear me say, “Whoa! Whoa! … He did it!”

source file

UPDATE 2: Here are some photos:

Just wait till I have one of my own to indoctrinate… :)

Speaking of which, Becky is 19 weeks pregnant as of yesterday, which means that little Baby Loy now “measures 6 inches, head to bottom — about the length of a small zucchini.” From A(vocado) to Z(ucchini) in just three weeks! And if all goes well with the ultrasound next Monday, hopefully we’ll find out whether he’s a male zucchini or a female zucchini!

In a press event today Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the latest revision to the all in one iMac computer. The new machine looks similar to the previous versions, with the internals all mounted behind the LCD. Gone is the 17″ version, only 20″ and 24″ versions remain, but the prices haven’t changed (base prices are $1199 and $1499 for the 20″ models and $1799 for the 24″).

Apple also updated iLife and iWork, finally adding a spreadsheet app to the later, called Numbers that is compatible with Excel.

I want a Wal-Mart bear! ;)

I can't believe we're going to have one of these in a few months… :)

Recognizing the highly mercurial nature of my posting on this site, just a short note. From this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine section–an article I think is worth reading. It’s on poltics, and I think summarizing would do it a disservice, but I think it possess a certain amount of wisdom for those arguing and thinking on all sides of current political debates.

As I’ve noted, I’m a recent convert to the ways of the Mac, and I am becoming increasingly convinced that I waited far too long to join the club.

As I’m using the MBP as the lifeblood of my new law practice, knowing that I need to make sure I have a fall back of some sort in the event that the MBP needs to go into the shop, I’ve obviously been shopping around.

I know I could get a Mac Mini for a not-obscene price that would probably fit the bill, but I’m really trying to keep the cost to an absolute minimum, since the machine is likely to see only very minimal service.

It looks like the iMac I picked up yesterday may be a non-starter, simply due to the overall level of hassle it seems like it will be to get it usable, I’m trying to find another suitable used machine that’s on the relatively cheap.

My plan is to use an external hard drive with a duplicate copy of my MBP hard drive, made with SuperDuper, thanks to Bloy’s recommendation, and to use this alternate machine to continue my work during any absence of the MBP.

I’ve found a PowerMac G4, 500 MHz, 1GB of Ram, with OSX 10.4 for $100. It seems like it could be a viable option, within the price range I’d like, and that it could probably handle all I’d need it to for short periods of time. So, my questions are, 1.) Is it a good deal? and 2.) Is it a solid enough option for what I want it to do?

As always this Mac-neophyte thanks you veterans for your help.

The big moment occurred at 7:28 PM between mileposts 14.4 and 14.5 on I-71 North in Montgomery, Ohio.

Looks like we’ll be getting into Buffalo around 2:00 AM. Oversleeping sucks. :|

Mike Wiser e-mailed me last night with a stargazing query:

I don’t know what sort of view you have of the night sky at the moment, but if you’d got a good view, take a look at this. Jupiter’s bright at the moment. Tracing straight down from it, I hit the alpha star in Scorpius, which is flickering between red and blue, and seems brighter than I’m used to–though, admittedly, I don’t examine the sky often enough to really qualify even as a amateur in this anymore. I didn’t notice any alerts on spaceweather.com or on the near earth objects lists, so I was curious–can you see something unusual going on here, and if so do you have another resource you suggest I check to find out what’s going on? My brother and father say it’s been that way for a few days now, and that it appears to rotate in the night sky with the other stars, which would tend to argue against a comet…

I didn’t get a chance to look at it, as it was overcast last night. But I did do a little research. The alpha star in Scorpius is called Anatres. It’s normally the sixteenth brightest star in the night sky. Antares is classified as an irregular variable star, which means it has “variations in brightness [which] show no regular periodicity,” but I’m not sure if those variations would be substantial enough to explain the phenomenon Mike is describing.

A few days ago, Missouri State professor Jon Nance wrote in a newspaper column:

Antares’ core is hot enough to burn silicon into iron. But iron has the most stable nucleus of any element and is incapable of fueling any additional exothermic reaction. So a mass of inert iron is growing steadily in Antares’ core. Eventually, it must grow so large as to become incapable of supporting its own weight.

When that happens, Antares’ core will collapse in less than one minute into a black hole in space. A shock wave will propagate outward from that collapse and deposit so much energy in the star’s wispy outer layers that they will, for a few brief days, shine brightly enough to rival all other stars in the Milky Way combined. And then Antares will be gone — forever.

Antares’ end must come within the next million years, but we can’t tell when. Maybe it will be tonight.

What Professor Nance is describing is a supernova. If a supernova happens too close to our solar system, it could damage life on Earth — but according to Science News, a potential Antares supernova would be “too far away to harm Earth.” NASA confirms this: “at 500 light years it is a safe distance from Earth.”

Still, it would be close enough to cause an incredibly spectacular sky show. The last supernova in our galaxy, in 1604, caused a “previously unseen star” to suddenly become “brighter than all other stars” in the night sky — and it was 13,000 light-years away. Antares is 26 times closer than that.

Mind you, I’m not predicting that Antares is about to blow. But it sure would be interesting if it did. (Of course, if Antares is “about to blow,” that would actually mean it was about to blow 500 years ago, and only now is the light from that event reaching us.)