November on Webmacster87.info mostly focused on the Leopard Feature Presentation, which was my own way of reviewing the new features in Mac OS X Leopard, and since it takes time to write those articles, that was pretty much what I was doing on this blog for the month. However, there were a number of other things that happened elsewhere in my life, so let’s take a look at the past month on Webmacster87.info.

Personal Life
A lot of my personal life during the month of November was focused on things on my to-do list. At the Council PTA, we finally got together our Bylaws Committee and will finally be submitting a fresh copy of PTA bylaws like a good little council. As Parliamentarian at the Council PTA, I chaired the committee, which met on November 9th and presented the changes to the executive board on the 19th.

I also began (and finished) fundraising for myself to go on the Sojourn to the Past trip in February, and I will be gone February 14-23. (I did post a request for donations on Webmacster87.info.) As for the reason that I finished fundraising so quickly? Well, I’ve been asked to keep that a secret, but more will be coming in mid-December…

phpBB Weekly got a reorganized website which I worked on all day November 23rd. I’d say it looks much cleaner, if I do say so myself.

And finally, this past week (November 26-30) was Peace Club’s second annual Cards for Soldiers event, where we had a table at lunch every day this past week with supplies, asking students, teachers, and staff to make holiday cards to send to soldiers overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq. We’re still accepting last-minute cards, so final counts aren’t in yet, but we’ve done pretty good so far. Hopefully it won’t be necessary for us to do Cards for Soldiers again in 2008, but if it becomes necessary, we probably will do just that.

Mac OS X Leopard Madness!

Leopard Easter Egg: Find Path to This File
For the last few years I’ve been waiting for a feature as cool and obscure as this.

Review: OpaqueMenuBar
Well, it doesn’t make your menu bar opaque, rather, it dynamically adds a white stripe to the top of your background image. But hey, at least the menu bar is white and not distracting anymore.

Leopard Stacks Overlays
Cool drawer icons so that your Stacks have some meaning.

Video Grab: Macworld’s Leopard Tips Thanksgiving Feast
Be thankful and fulfilled with some awesome Leopard tips that you probably didn’t know about.

Review and Final Recap: Mac OS X Leopard
I spent $129 and wrote over 45 articles about this bundle of joy, so it better have been good.

Videos and Websites Highlights

WordPress Watch: San Mateo County Elections
You don’t usually associate government with Web 2.0, but my very own San Mateo County is giving voters a glimpse into the elections process, and they do it with a bit of a sense of humor. Very cool.

Sojourn to the Past Trip–Request for Donations
Thanks to everyone who donated, even though none of those people donated through my blog.

YouTube Grab: Rudolph Aflac Ad
“Gadzooks! You need a backup plan!”

YouTube Grab: Obviously Not The Daily Show With Obviously Not Jon Stewart
“We own these jokes, and they’re worth a billion dollars!”

Turkey Day Tip: Bird with No Tomorrow
If Country isn’t your style, I could always stuff this other eCard down your throat…

Operation Fruitcake
You can’t have your fruitcake and eat it too, especially if you hate it as much as these guys do.

Podcast Episodes
PreviewCast is still on hiatus, however I have been a pretty busy bee with phpBB Weekly this month. phpBB Weekly also had some upheavals as we had some TalkShoe issues and attempted to record somewhere else for an episode. However, we did produce five mostly good episodes.

phpBB Weekly #036
While I was catching up on sleep following a seven hour airplane delay, David and a couple of team members came together in an Official Podcast-esque style to talk extensively about various MODding topics.

phpBB Weekly #037
A yucky episode that TalkShoe messed up, don’t even bother with this one.

phpBB Weekly #038: Guest DavidMJ
This was a great (and long) episode where phpBB Developer DavidMJ joined us to talk a lot about various phpBB3 topics.

phpBB Weekly #039
This was a very informative episode during which we talked about permissions in phpBB3, and I gave a history lesson looking back at phpBB 2.0.11 and the Santy worm.

phpBB Weekly #040
This episode of phpBB Weekly probably sounded more like PreviewCast than anything else, as we rambled on about a not-yet-released phpBB3 RC8 for almost a full hour.

Google Status
Last month, during the Best Of, I mentioned that if you searched for “Douglas Bell” on Google, Webmacster87.info was #6. Well, here we are a month later, and Webmacster87.info has moved up to #4! (My WordCamp caricature still beats me, now at #2.) Now I just need to beat the #1 Douglas Bell, which is that computer game developer on Wikipedia, and I’ll be golden! We’ll see how long it will be until that happens…

Moving Into December
So what’s coming up? Well, as I write now, most of my classes are going to be wrapping up this week, as next week will be finals review week (aka “Dead Week”). Then, finals will be December 17th-20th, with vacation beginning on Friday the 21st. However, there’s plenty going on between now and then, including two school orchestra concerts, an oral exam in Spanish, three holiday potlucks, three meetings, a club card stuffing/holiday party, and a partridge in a pear tree. And then it will be the wonderful two and a half weeks of homework-free winter break! Woot!

One of the things that I like to do during the holidays is decorate–not the house, but my computer. Therefore, intermittently (meaning I don’t have a schedule or anything), I will be reviewing various Mac OS X freeware/shareware applications for adding decorations to your computer’s screen for the holidays as I work on getting my MacBook’s screen in the season to be jolly, so stay tuned for that and much more that’s bound to come this month! (On a side note, did you know that deep-fried pickle hearts are absolutely delicious with egg nog? Well, you do now.)

So here comes December, the holidays, and the end to an exciting and chaotic 2007!

Tags: article, Best Of, Mac OS X Leopard, Personal, Webmacster87.info