It's too early to say for sure...

But Rock Band might be the best $170 I'll ever spend.

Just picked it up today, played for about four straight hours with my friend Tom. We laughed like idiots and rawked like kings. Not really kings. But perhaps a viceroy or something. This is NOT a game one should play alone. This is a game for people to play together.

(I'm taking a break right now, because my roommate just got home, and he's now perched behind the AWESOME drum kit)

OK - an hour later, I'm back to finish:

To catch up, I'm writing about how much fun I'm having with the new video game Rock Band. It looks beautiful, plays great (though it's not nearly so difficult as Guitar Hero III, particularly on the easy settings), and there are moments (even as early as the first night) where you become really immersed in the game. You really feel what's going on with the rest of your band (particularly the drums) and can enjoy "playing music".
As far as first impressions go, Rock Band is great. My roommate finished doing the drums for two songs and singing one and went right into how he's going to have a lot of fun practicing for our battle of the rock band party in a couple of weeks. It's already the most fun I've had playing a game this year (and I've had some REALLY good gaming experiences this year) and it only looks to get better.

Hello Kitty!

Having been a windows user and, more recently, an IT professional (semi-pro, really), I've always thought of operating system upgrades as a huge hassle. Upgrading to XP from Windows 2000 was a gigantic pain in the ass - the new OS demanded more memory, ran slower, and had so many issues with software and hardware that I had been running that it was smarter to just buy new software than worry about getting all the old code and drivers for hardware I was comfortable with patched up for XP.

Admittedly, this process has been made somewhat easier by the industry-wide adoption of the Internet and programs auto-updating but the few opportunities I've had with Vista upgrades (and even Vista new installs) haven't been much better. And Vista eats RAM like my niece eats Halloween candy. (Which is to say, voraciously.)
So I didn't have any hopes that Apple's new iteration of OS X, Leopard, was going to be any kind of cakewalk.

I could not have been more wrong. It has been yet another example of the fundamental differences between Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft seems to create new OSs to force users to buy newer hardware and re-up on their software. Apple's OS upgrade optimizes existing hardware and builds upon the strengths of its UNIX-based (now certified UNIX) OS to improve performance, creating satisfied return customers and evangelists for their Mac brand (you know - jerks like me).

Like a PC, it's smarter to do a clean install on a newly formatted hard drive, so I backed everything up to a USB drive (using "I can't believe that Apple thinks that Time Machine will supplant my love for" SuperDuper), wiped out my hard drive, and ran the Leopard installer, which took approximately forever. OK - it took about an hour and a quarter. It seemed longer.
Then it rebooted, asked if I wanted to transfer my user account, docs, apps and settings from the user account it saw on the external drive, which took a couple of minutes, then VOILA! OS X 10.5!

It was incredibly easy. I have had a total of two (TWO!) problem that continues to bother me (my old mouse manager wasn't Leopard compatible, and the new preference pane isn't quite to my liking). And Parallels, the virtualization program that I use to run Windows (for work stuff, mostly), needs to be upgraded to a new version to work well with Leopard (I might jump off of Parallels to VMWare's offering). Everything else was pretty seamless. All my other programs work with the new OS, even MS Office works alright (which is as good as that POS will get).

But here's the thing: it's all faster. It's not just the appearance of speedier performance. This is not a faster beach ball or a speedier spinner to pass the time while something loads. This is flat out faster. This is partially because I have an Intel-based Mac, and the new code must take advantage of that more than 10.4 did, but it's still surprising. And exhilarating. The new version of Safari beats the living daylights out of Firefox when it comes to speed - it's not as good at Ad-Blocking, but I haven't installed any plug-ins yet to handle that (as I have with Firefox).

I realize this is a really long and immensely boring entry now, but I say to whoever might be on the fence: If you have an Intel Mac, Leopard is a buy. don't think twice. Mail.app is better, Safari is better, and I'm only scratching at the surface. (Most recent tiny discovery - if I get an email that asks if I want to do something on November 23rd or "next Friday" - there's a dropdown that asks if I want to create an iCal appointment for that day. Cool.)
OK - enough of this. I look forward to hearing other people's experiences...