Despite Apple's claim that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion can only be installed as an update from Snow Leopard, you can certainly install Lion on a clean hard drive. Once you download the Lion installation file through the App Store, you can create a boot disc on either a DVD or a USB drive.

Here are a few screen shots of the process.

The highly anticipated next major update of Mac OS X, Lion is given the Golden Master status today. The official build is 11A511 as shown. Developers can get their hands on this release as early as this morning on the first day of July. Apple is right on schedule with its promise of making OS X Lion available through the App Store sometimes in July. My guess is everyone will see this update in a week or two.

I'm off to check out all the new features Lion has to offers!

I had the chance to meet Rev. Tomkin Coleman this evening to help him fix the broken superdrive in his Apple MacBook Pro 17". He contacted me a couple weeks ago for help and I was able to point him to an online store that sells these OEM drives at a really good price. He proceeded to order it and kept me updated once the superdrive arrives so that we can set up a time for me to perform the replacement on his Mac laptop.

Normally this procedure of replacing an optical drive on a MacBook Pro would take over an hour to complete which I quoted Mr. Coleman through our brief phone conversation. However, he told me he would have to run in 45 minutes upon my arrival. He said I can stay to finish the job, but I felt that wasn't going to work for me. That put me on the hot seat to get it done in 40 minutes or so. Boy, was I glad to see it took me less than half an hour when I put the last screw back in the laptop.

A very interesting question was asked of me earlier this evening about how to print return labels using Address Book application in Mac OS X. A lot of us may have used this print feature before to do mass mailing and it does save us a lot of time, if we know what we're doing. I was caught off guard as I have never used this feature and didn't quite figure it out on the spot.

So on the drive home, it occurred to me that Address book would only understand there is just one return address associate to the main account. Thus when one tries to print this return address, there is only one return address and lots of empty space.

The goal is to fill this empty space up with one address, and creating a new group for this purpose is the right approach. I ended up making a new group and named it "return labels". Then copy an address to use as the return address, and paste it in this group 30 times (or as much as your labels sheets can print). This works great and takes about 5 minutes to make your mailing task a bit easier.