The announcement of the much-anticipated iPad made a fairly large splash. People seem to be very excited or very disappointed. My initial thoughts:

• iBooks and entering the e-book and e-reader space is a great idea. I've been holding off on buying a Kindle and now I'll buy an iPad instead. I love the touch screen of my iPhone and would love to have one that is better for reading.
• I would guess that upwards of 75% of my non-work time on a computer could be easily done on the iPad. Browsing the web, reading and sending e-mail, looking at photos, playing music and videos, etc.
• Some features are missing or underwhelming. But consider how much the original iPod sucked in comparison to what it does now.
• The price is right. If I had an extra $500-$1,000, I'd buy one right away.

Apple just makes cool stuff. I guess I know what my next machine will be: 15.4" 1.67Ghz Intel Duo Core MacBook Pro.

The name is lame, but the computer looks cool.

Update: maybe it's not so cool after all.

Let's hope that Apple avoids having to pay Microsoft royalties on its iPod sales. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

After upgrading to Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger), Mail 2.0 did not work correctly. I could not reply to messages or compose new messages. I looked through the Apple Discussion Forums and MacInTouch Tiger page, which helped me solve the problem. It turns out that PGP Desktop 8.0 is not compatible with Apple Mail 2.0. I searched for PGP, moved the PGPmail.mailbundle file to my Desktop and closed and restarted Mail. Problem solved.

w00p! iTunes Music Store for Canada. Finally.

Looks like the ITMS is delayed but imminent. Despite a sound warning about why DRM is bad, I'll likely download some songs via ITMS.

In the course of restoring my old data to my new machine, I ran into a problem with my iMovie projects/clips. Specifically, I couldn't import the clips into a new project, nor could I open the old project file. I solved the project file problem by adding the iMovie project extension to the file. The clip problem required Lennert's iMovie File Fixers. If you run into a QuickTime -2048 error, then you might be well served by trying these tricks.

Honestly, why isn't the iTunes Music Store available in Canada yet? It's in the USA, the UK, France and Germany. What about the other countries in the G-7? What about my wants?