Today is Friday, October 26th, THE day of Leopard! 130 weeks have passed since the day that Tiger hit the streets, and at 6:00 PM tonight, the middle digit of the current stable version of the Mac operating system will officially increase by one for the first time in two and a half years.
Some people have asked me about my Tiger-to-Leopard series this week, asking me why on earth I would take so much time collecting a bunch of facts from the last two and a half years. Do I have too much free time? (Believe me, the answer to that is a solid NO.) Am I just interested in bashing Apple because they delayed their Leopard release to October? Not really. What I really wanted to do was to capture the essence of just how fast our world changes today, and to highlight just how much things have changed in the last two and a half years to put the distance between Tiger and Leopard into perspective. When Tiger was released, not only did it contain the most updates of any OS X release to that date, it had been the first release to take a full year and a half to go public. Leopard has now trumped Tiger with over 300 new features and two and a half years until release, and so I think that it’s interesting to look at that. The reason that I’ve split it up into a five-day series this week is because I ended up having too many ideas to fill just one post.
Anyway, today, I want to culminate this series by looking back on my personal life. This may be the part of this blog series that you are either the least or the most interested in, but not only has a lot happened in the world (see the earlier four posts), but a lot has happened in my life as well, and here are some of the highlights from the last two and a half years.
I was in Sacramento the night that Tiger was released (similar to how I’m in Long Beach while Leopard is released) for the 2005 California State PTA Convention, the first one I’ve gone to. It was there that I got my inspiration for my participation in PTA. Indeed, since then, I’ve become involved with the State PTA, helped form 17th District’s Student Involvement Committee, became Parliamentarian at the San Mateo-Foster City PTA Council, and also volunteered for the Aragon PTSA, along with later doing my best to save it from being disbanded (and I failed in that attempt).
I graduated from middle school (8th grade) in June 2005, very shortly after Tiger was released and the very same week that Apple announced its plans to go to Intel processors. In fact, with the money that I got from graduation presents, plus the check that I got from an award I got during graduation (I got the Dr. Landucci Award for School Service, the only student in the 2005 graduating class to receive this award), I was able to purchase Tiger and get the necessary RAM upgrade for my clamshell iBook later that June. June 2005 is also when I initially launched the first iteration of my blog on Webmacster87.info.
Larry and I started the early series of PreviewCast in July 2005. Although we ended the show after the 5th episode due to disagreements between us, our two better episodes from this run were later re-aired in the new season as PreviewCast #019 and #020.
I began my high school experience in August 2005, following a short and relatively uneventful 2 month summer vacation. In October 2005 (two years ago TODAY, actually), I founded the Aragon High School Peace Club, however the rest of the school year was primarily busy yet uneventful.
During June 19-26, 2006, I went with the Peninsula Young Artists Orchestra on a week-long tour of Salzburg and Vienna, Austria (which was so high-paced that it was completely exhausting), which included three concerts.
Larry and I restarted PreviewCast in July 2006, and we actually kept it going this time. In September 2006, I was able to help start 17th District PTA’s first Student Involvement Committee, and that month suffered along with everyone else in my school district during their budget crisis (which was on my birthday, nonetheless).
In December 2006, Peace Club held our first “Cards for Soldiers” drive, where we asked students to make holiday cards to send to the soldiers in Iraq as an act of support. We were fairly successful for our first year, getting 90 cards which we sent out. Also, at the very end of 2006, I got the word that I had won the California Teachers Association Peace & Justice Caucus Student Activism Award, which I went to Los Angeles to accept in January 2007.
My first ever podcast on TalkShoe, phpBB Weekly, began in January. Later, in July 2007, David Lewis (Highway of Life) joined me, which really kicked up the show’s popularity, to the point where it has far surpassed PreviewCast in popularity.
At the end of January 2007, I FINALLY got my braces taken off. I had been wearing braces from November 2004 until January 2007 (even though they were supposed to come off in May 2006), and you can’t imagine just how happy I was to get my braces taken off. However, in February, not only did I get sick twice, but I broke my right big toe when I slipped and slammed into a door at school. I also took the California High School Exit Exam in February, and fell about three points shy of a perfect score (I DID have a perfect score on the Math section).
In February 2007, I received an Honorary Service Award from 17th District PTA, as well as a Commendation from the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. In Spring, I found out that I had been selected to be a student representative on the California State PTA Board of Managers. Also during Spring, running into May, I was campaigning to try to help save Aragon PTSA, and even decided to run for President of the group as well. Unfortunately, over my best efforts, the PTSA was disbanded in May 2007.
Summer 2007 was plenty busy. Not only did I go to my first State PTA board meeting in Sacramento in July, but in late June I launched the brand new Webmacster87.info 5 and survived the hair-raising iPhone launch weekend, plus worked on (and completed in September) the new 17th District PTA website.
Indeed, a lot has happened in my life during the last 30 months, and this article probably only covers about half of it (the significant half that isn’t as boring as the other half, etc.). Now, today, I get to install Leopard, and see how my life changes between now and Apple’s next release. If 10.6 takes as long as 10.5, I’ll probably have a really long article when Leopard-to-Next Big Cat comes along.
So that concludes my Tiger-to-Leopard series! Now, stay tuned on Webmacster87.info for my exclusive coverage of installing Leopard, and reviews of my initial experiences with Leopard, here on Webmacster87.info!
Tags: article, life, Mac OS X Leopard, Personal, School, Tiger-to-Leopard
