A heartfelt thanks to all the dads at Apple (and all the moms, and all the other humans too) for making Father's Day gifts so unique yet easy with iMovie and iDVD. For this particular holiday, it took roughly half an hour to stitch together a couple-dozen video clips that have been accumulating on my phone and still camera, add in some (in hindsight probably much too sappy, but oh well) music from iTunes, some clever titles, and burn baby burn. Knock wood, my original, borderline antediluvian iMac still cranks these out for me just fine. What do all you majority-of-the-market-share Windows users do on such occasions, hmm? I'm reading JD's phenomenal book (he'll be my next guest on Sound Policy; here's an interesting related post), and he writes that in the latest rev(s). of iMovie, Apple "pushed the envelope again, integrating its digital hub to let users add a favorite band's music as a sound track to movies they create—without forcing you to navigate through the record labels' licensing sawmill—under the theory that fair use covers such personal, noncommercial projects." All I can say is it works well and is much appreciated.

Unrelated but fun: went book shopping this morning for Tyler and was thrilled to find Gerald McBoing Boing (complete with accompanying, presumably fully rights-cleared, sound).