Titans agree to deal with Matt Hasselbeck

The Tennessean is reporting that the Titans have agreed to terms with former Seattle Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck for a 3 year deal worth approximately $21 million.

Red State official trailer and movie poster

The Red State official trailer and poster were announced today on The SIRmon (The Official SModcast Internet News Portal):

This morning, we’ll get our first look at the first “Red State” official trailer and poster, as well as your first shot at buying tickets for the run at the great New Beverly starting August 19th.

In case you, like myself, aren’t familiar with “the great New Beverly”, coopersdell.com clears it up thusly:

Kevin Smith and SModcast Pictures are proud to announce a one week exclusive Academy Award qualifying run of RED STATE beginning Friday, August 19th at Quentin Tarantino’s legendary New Beverly Cinema. Each screening of RED STATE will be followed by a live Q&A with writer – director Kevin Smith.

Labor Day weekend can’t get here soon enough for me

Titans training camp to open Friday

July 29
• Camp opens for ten Clubs whose first preseason game is on August 13 (BUF, CAR, CHI, CLV, GB, IND, MIN, NYG, STL, TEN)

My experience with the OS X 10.7 Lion upgrade…

So I decided to upgrade my Macs to Lion. Ever fearful of Murphy’s Law, I decided to use my MacBook Pro as the test subject–even though this is the one Mac upon which I most depend.

First things first, I create an up-to-the-minute bootable backup1 and verify that the backup is, in fact, bootable.

Second, the nagging question: upgrade or “clean install”. Well, let me first give you a little background information about my MacBook Pro and how I use it:

  • My MBP is >4 years old (yeah, yeah, I know… but, in my defense, a 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM is–still–not exactly what you’d call a “slow” computer…) ,
  • The only “clean install” of any OS ever made on this MBP occurred when it was originally built and boxed,
  • The OS on this MBP has already been upgraded twice (from Tiger to Leopard, and from Leopard to Snow Leopard),
  • My MBP is absolutely my work horse computer. It is the computer that I “try things” on, from downloaded apps to custom settings to terminal hacks, etc. And, there have been hundreds and hundreds of apps that I’ve downloaded, installed and deleted over the years and not all have been deleted with the help of the excellent AppDelete by Reggie Ashworth.

Now, this is probably just an instance of me “thinking like a Windows user”2, but at this point I’m seriously considering doing a “clean install” of Lion. Honestly, though, the thought of reinstalling everything just makes me want to forget about Lion completely. So, I figure I’ll give the upgrade a try first–what the heck, I have my verified bootable backup, so what’s the risk?

So I download Lion from the App Store, the installer basically just asks me to authenticate (there are no installation options to speak of). Roughly 30 minutes later, I hear the Mac startup sound and BINGO–I’m running Lion.

Best of all, there are no incompatibilities reported. So, I download the Lion version of Xcode 4.2 Developer Preview 4, install it over the Snow Leopard version already installed, and I’m done.

My take on the whole experience is this: The Lion upgrade was the simplest and most trouble-free OS upgrade I’ve ever experienced on any platform.

yeah, in a minute…
1 Please don’t think that I make a backups–bootable or otherwise–only when upgrading my OS. I have a comprehensive backup strategy in place and you should too, but alas that topic is way beyond the scope of this post…
2 “Thinking like a Windows user” is one of unfortunate byproducts of being a multi-platform professional software developer…

Intuit confirms iPad-based personal finance solution

Intuit, makers of the uber-popular Quicken personal finance software, have confirmed, perhaps inadvertently, that they are working on an iPad solution. In a support document titled “Is Quicken for Mac Compatible with Mac OS 10.7 Lion?”, appears the following:

What are your plans related to personal finance solutions for Apple customers?

We are committed to supporting Apple products and our Mac customers. We are actively working on a personal finance solution for the iPad, as well as continuing to deliver the highly rated Mint.com iPhone application. In addition, we are evaluating options for Quicken Essentials for Mac.

[emphasis added]

Man on Moon +42 years

After the astronauts planted a U.S. flag on the lunar surface, they spoke with President Richard Nixon through a telephone-radio transmission which Nixon called “the most historic phone call ever made from the White House.” Nixon originally had a long speech prepared to read during the phone call, but Frank Borman, who was at the White House as a NASA liaison during Apollo 11, convinced Nixon to keep his words brief, out of respect of the lunar landing being Kennedy’s legacy.

OS X Lion App Compatibility

Roaring Apps has a comprehensive listing of app compatibility with OS X Lion, which will prove useful as I get prepared to upgrade; don’t want to lose any critical apps.

I know I have to Upgrade Drobo Dashboard to v2.0.3, and make my backup clones of my hard drives, but the big question for me is whether to do a “clean” install. It’s been some years since I did a “clean” install on either my iMac or MacBook Pro, I wonder if it’d be worth it…

Cars 2 = teh awesome

Saw Cars 2 with my son today. I must say that I haven’t a fucking clue as to why the movie is getting such meager reviews. As with every other Pixar sequel to date, Cars 2 is at least as good as the original.

Nobel Laureate: Science is a totally misunderstood subject

Harold Kroto, 1996 Nobel Laureate (chemistry), speaking to an audience of students yesterday at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany:

I’m going to talk about what science is because it’s a totally misunderstood sort of subject […] it’s the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliability.

[…]

The teaching of a skeptical, evidence-based assessment of all claims–all claims–without exception, is fundamentally an intellectual integrity issue. Without evidence, anything goes… think about it.

Common sense says the sun goes around the Earth. Who agrees with me? Look at it! Starts over here, ends over there. It’s uncommon sense that was needed to recognize that the Earth was turning on its axis. The uncommon sense of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, who burned to death. We have to learn to be very careful and to question everything.”

iOS 5 beta 2 is out

Didn’t see it yesterday evening, but Apple has released iOS 5 beta 2 for developers, along with Xcode 4 Developer Preview 2 and iTunes 10.5 beta 2.

This comes as a relief to me, because despite the constant warning from Apple that “[t]his beta version of iOS should only be deployed on devices dedicated for iOS 5 beta software development”, I don’t have any devices that are merely dedicated to iOS development, so if I’m to install the beta, I have to do it on my only iPhone and only iPad. I never had a problem with the iPhone OS 3 betas or the iOS 4 betas, but I found iOS 5 beta 1 just a little hinky. Will be glad to update to beta 2…