Geek dad and Junior the geek 
At Fry’s this afternoon, where I bought two 500GB Firewire drives for $169 each.
Which it turns out I needed because after I got home all three external drives attached to my desktop were reported as damaged beyond repair by the new Mac OS. Coincidence? Lucky that I had exactly the hardware I needed to dig out of the mess? Who knows!
Funny thing is it’s taking over 10 hours to do the copying. It won’t finish until tomorrow morning, Murphy-willing. When the disks got big, all of a sudden restoring from backups takes a lonnnng time. 🙂
Terminal commands to nuke the 3D dock in Leopard
And recapture some valuable screen real estate and a portion of your sanity.
defaults write com.apple.Dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
Thanks to Mark Johnson for the tip. 🙂
Okay so it’s not user friendly
Scripting News Annex 
Posted by Jason Etheridge on October 28, 2007 at 12:45 pm
There’s something inherently cool about being able to do this via a Unix shell; you’d be hard-pressed to do the same using Vista.
Actually, any comparison between Leopard and Vista is a bad joke: the Vista UI improvements were pretty lame, leaving Vista lagging even further behind MacOS X. While I’ve never owned a Mac before, my next laptop will be from Apple; if only they’d make me really happy and bring out a tablet (an A4-sized iPod touch would be sweet).
Posted by Jim Forbes on October 28, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Re in the market for a dog..
thinkChihuahua.. extremely loyal, fun loving, great companions and relatively low maintenance. Mine is a long haired+mystery dog hybrid that weighs 11 pounds and is a non yipper (except when he’s happy to see me) and a great “road dog” on trips.
goggle “savanna cat” big 28 pound new breed that’s part cerval and part tabby. they’re bred down in Ramona next to Escondido. You’ll laugh when you see pictures of how big they are. they look like miniature leopards.
best
Jim Forbes
Posted by Bryan Schappel on October 28, 2007 at 4:31 pm
I’m certain that a “hack” will turn up to remove the menubar transparency. I know some people wrote them for the developer builds. I do have an easy pseudo fix for you though. Edit your desktop picture to have a white bar across the top. 22 pixels high should do just fine.
Posted by heavyboots on October 28, 2007 at 6:58 pm
There is an app out there called NTMB that is supposed to create a white menu bar. But it wasn’t working when I tested it on my last dev release before GM.
Until someone hacks it permanently, you can do the following:
[1] Scale your favorite desktop picture to be exactly the number of pixels high and deep as your monitor resolution.
[2] Select 20 pixels deep x the width of the picture and fill it with white.
[3] Save a copy of the pic and change your desktop to be that one.
Yeah, the hacks don’t get much lamer than that, but it sure helped me cope for my 5 or 6 hours of beta testing…
Posted by heavyboots on October 28, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Oh yeah, step 4…
[4] File a bug report! The only way we’re going to convince these bozos is if every single person in existence files a duplicate bug report…