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Last night, my friend Dave and I got together for a sort of Geek's Night Out. It was a fun evening.

Yesterday, at 6pm was the big release of Apple's OS X Leopard - their new operating system. Both of us had been anxiously awaiting this for some time. Since we are members of ADC Select, we'd both already tried the early betas of Leopard, so we knew what to expect, but it was nice to finally be able to be 'official' with it. I left work and headed up to Boca to meet with him at the Apple Store up there. Why did I drive all the way to Boca just to go to the Apple Store, when there is an Apple Store located much closer to were I work? I did this because I wanted to get together with Dave to help him put an eSATA cable into his Mac (which I'd already done on mine), plus, we figured that the Boca Apple Store wouldn't be as busy.

I got to the Apple Store at about 6:30pm. Even though I left at 5:45pm, it took a good 45 minutes to get there, due to the bad traffic and the fact that it had been raining all day, so the roads were wet. Dave got there before I did, so he had already gone through the line, bought his copy and got his t-shirt. Since he got there before I did, he got an extra t-shirt for me. Of course, I didn't know this, so I got in line, bought my copy and got my t-shirt. Now Dave has two Leopard t-shirts! :) Oh well. The store was very busy, even for an Apple Store which is normally busy. I was surprised how few people seemed to be there to buy copies of Leopard. Maybe there were a lot, and the line just moved really fast. I don't know, but I was surprised how fast I got in and out with my copy. I don't think I was in there more than five minutes.

I left the store and met Dave outside the store. We walked over to the food court and grabbed some dinner. We chatted and sat watching the 'scenery' for a while and then left the mall. We headed over to a small computer store he knew of down the street. I was going there to pick up an external eSATA enclosure - the same one that he had bought previously that I tested on my Mac. His enclosure worked, but the one I had bought before didn't, so I wanted to pick up one that would work. I bought my eSATA enclosure and a cable to let you plug an internal HD in as USB. That's a very handy cable to have when fixing computers. We left the computer store and proceeded to our next stop - Best Buy. We looked around a bit in Best Buy. Dave bought a program for his computer. I didn't buy anything. Next, came Borders.

We went over to Borders and looked around for a while. Dave bought a novel and I bought another computer book. From there we drove to his house.

When we arrived at his house, I brought my toolbox in. I was going to help him put the eSATA cable into his Mac. I had the same cable and I'd already put it in my Mac, so I knew how to do it. It's a tricky bit of 'surgery' to do. I also had all the tools we needed to do it, so that's why I brought the toolbox. Granted that toolbox was way more tools than we needed, but I just brought the whole thing just in case. Dave brought his Mac down and we got the cable installed pretty quickly. It was much easier the second time around. The first time I did it on my Mac, I took about an hour to do it. I was very nervous about taking a part a $2500 computer, so i was very slow and careful with it. This time, it only took maybe 20 minutes to do, since I was much more familiar with it.

Next we brought the Mac back upstairs and installed Leopard! Dave was planning on installing it to a empty 500GB HD, so he did a clean install. The install itself went pretty quickly and with no bumps at all. Smooth as silk. Once the computer restarted, it offered to copy all his stuff from the old HD. He told it to go ahead and it started chugging. It was going to take about an hour or so do do that, so we just sat and chatted for a while. An hour later, the copy completed and it fired up. Dave was stunned on how fast it was running and how flawless the upgrade went. This new version of the operating system was running noticably faster on the same hardware than the old one did. As Dave said, "When's the last time you upgraded Windows and your computer got faster?" He was very happy. We played with Leopard for a while to make sure all his stuff got properly transfered over. With the exception of his iCal calendars, everything did. You can read his story of the evening here. With that, I left and drove home. It was an enjoyable evening.

I installed Leopard on my machine earlier today... I'm typing this on it now. I'll have another blog later with my impressions of Leopard, once I've had a chance to try it out for a little while.