Last night, I took the family to the local Apple Store for the Leopard release party. All the kids wanted to go since they love playing on the computers and Apple was giving away free Leopard t-shirts to the first 500 customers. We arrived at the Brea Mall about 4:30 and settled into line for our hour and a half wait.My wife was really cool! She had an exhausting week, so I told her I would take the kids and she could have the night off and avoid the geek-fest. But she wanted to hang out with me and also got dressed up for the affair. So I was in geek heaven — a hot chick and a new operating system! Suh-weeeet!Later that night I installed Leopard. The install went smoothly, but I encountered a scare when my Macbook Pro rebooted. Leopard didn’t recognize my password. I was locked out of my own machine. When I realized that I wasn’t mistyping the password, I went online with my kids’ Mac and discovered that Leopard was not recognizing passwords over eight characters on the reboot. Common, Apple. That’s an amateur mistake for such an advanced operating system. Fortunately, Apple had already posted a fix-it. A few lines of code at the command prompt and I was in.I don’t have a large external hard drive yet, so I haven’t been able to play with Time Machine, one of Leopard’s major new features. But some of the minor features are really cool. I especially love Quicklook, which allows me to browse the contents of virtually any file in the Finder and without opening that file’s program. I can quickly browse documents, photos and movies right in the finder.So all in all, the night was really fun. I got to hang out with my beautiful wife, the entire family got free t-shirts, and I got a freakin’ cool operating system for my already cool computer.