Just wanted to say, I’ve been using OS X Leopard for about a week and overall, I’m really impressed. The installation was a bit of a pain, due to my years of abusing the OS in ways Apple apparently didn’t forsee, but after removing a few toxic-to-Leopard files and directories, I was up and running.
First off — Leopard actually feels noticeably faster on old hardware. This is great news, since my beloved 12″ PowerBook G4 is in its fourth year with me, and I have no plans to replace it. (Seriously, if my PowerBook were to die right now, I’d go on eBay and buy another one rather than a newer laptop.) Now, this is not to say it necessarily is faster on the kernel level (it might be, I don’t know), but when I’m using it, all the UI parts are snappy and responsive. And that, my friends, is a whole lot more important than shaving a couple percent off compile or copy times.
The new Finder is a huge improvement on previous versions, and the coverflow view (where you can shuffle through previews of all your images) is surprisingly useful — I made a smart folder for all my PDFs, and use it to find papers I filed away but don’t remember where. Spotlight is finally usable on my PowerBook and so far has refrained from grinding my compy to a halt for hours at a time. And Spaces is already an integral part of how I work. The real revelation, though, is Time Machine, which is just a massive leap ahead of every other consumer-level backup system I’ve ever seen — so easy, my computer-leery mom can use it, and so powerful, I can’t imagine myself ever using anything else. So kudos to Apple — I was fully prepared for a minor upgrade to OSX with a couple of features I would ignore or disable, and instead I got an upgrade that has already become so essential, I’d have trouble going back to Tiger if I had to.
And yet, at the same time, the new Dock is so bad — and so aggressively, unavoidably, in-your-face bad — I can’t understand how it got through development. Stacks is such a terrible idea I keep checking the web to see if anyone has yet written the inevitable program to disable it and get regular folders back (a la Spotless). I mean, I understand that Leopard is a huge project and different teams might have different levels of competence, but this is like finding a room full of pinheads in a NASA lab.
Anyway, there’s a much better, much longer review over at Ars Technica that I may one day finish reading. But in short, I’m quite pleasantly surprised at how lame Leopard isn’t.
PS: Shut up! I am *too* great with pinhead analogies!
The 
I’m still hugely looking forward to my post-PhD trip across Asia in a couple years, but I haven’t had anything particularly insightful to say lately. The part of the route from India to Turkey will be interesting. I will either have to go through Pakistan and Iran, or through the Central Asian republics and Russia. I’ve been reading a bit about both. On the one hand, Iran has better transportation and I culture I’m very interested in. On the other hand, Central Asia has 
I’m still on Facebook, though all I ever do is update my status message every couple of days, which I see as kind of a creative exercise. I don’t even read the updates of people on my network very often. However, I still find it kind of fascinating — I think its genius is that it’s the first web page on the internet that is explicitly targeted toward the extroverted majority of human beings. The people who (unlike, say, me) honestly want to know what all their friends got up to last weekend, and who (also unlike me) typically do something with their free time that’s more sociable than watching DVDs or reading comics and books about statistics and economics.
“This totally fucking destroys!” 
Has a ship ever been more appropriately named than the HMS Terror? A mortar-launching bomb vessel converted to icebreaker, she sailed to Antarctica (a massive frozen volcano, Mount Terror, is named for her) before setting off with her sister ship, the HMS Erebus, on the 1845 Franklin expedition to chart the Northwest Passage. Terror and Erebus became frozen into the ice west of Baffin Island, where the crews slowly starved and froze to death over the course of two horrifically cold winters and thawless summers before making a desperate and doomed trek south. Only years later were a few traces of the expedition found, the bodies showing signs of lead poisoning, murder and cannibalism.
So I’ve started watching the “re-imagined” (and made-in-Vancouver) Battlestar Galactica the past couple of weekends, after having it recommended to me so many times that I was starting to feel like the last geek on the planet to get hooked on it. And I have to say, based on the miniseries/pilot and the first half-dozen episodes on the first season, it is not just good, but shockingly good.