From MacRumors:

Apple, Inc's worth climbed to above $100 billion today in heavy trading. The company is now worth approximately double rival computer maker Dell's market cap ($59.4 billion), but still trails behemoth Microsoft by a hefty margin, whose worth sits at $294.94 billion.

Note that Dell does not compete in as many areas as Apple, and Microsoft competes in more, which helps explain some of the disparity.

AppleInsider attributes part of the surge of Apple's stock price to recent bullish forecasts by some financial analysts, who have raised the 'BUY' price of Apple's stock to $150. Perhaps also contributing to the surge were announcements today of iTunes 7.2 with DRM-free songs.

I've purchased two of the new high-quality, DRM-free albums already this morning -- Pink Floyd's Animals and Dark Side of the Moon. While I have never really had any problem with Apple's DRM strategy, I do like that they having bumped up the quality of their downloads while allowing people who had previously-purchased the songs to upgrade for a nominal fee. Hopefully more studios see EMI's surge in iTunes sales and decides to follow suit soon!

Just a quick update while I'm enjoying this extended holiday weekend... things have been extremely busy with two weeks of the semester done and only four more to go. I'm pretty anxious to get it done and move on to my next exciting adventure. We are officially less than one week from Kelly & Jared's wedding up in Bay City, MI and I can't wait! It should be a pretty fun time, and at the very least Cheryl and I will be stopping by two different microbreweries which always makes me happy. =)

I'm sure I'll have plenty of pictures and a recap of the festivities here once we return. Cheryl is going to be doing a reading at the wedding; I thought that was a pretty cool thing for Kelly to do. As long as I'm feeling relatively well Sunday, we're planning on stopping by the Birch Run outlets on our way home as well. I think I should probably buy some more dress khakis as I have a feeling I'll be getting into interviews here in the near future...

Instead of making two seperate sites, I've decided to make the Mad River Brews page a section off of this main site. While you can still visit madriverbrews.com and see all of my brewing information, you can also click the Mad River Brews button in the menu of the left side of this page. I'm still working on it and will be posting more info as I have time. It even has its own RSS feed, so you can subscribe to that if you like!

Also, Realmac Software has released the highly-anticipated update to its RapidWeaver software. This is the program that I use to design and maintain this website. I've included a portion of the announcement below:

Realmac Software today has released the much-anticipated new version of RapidWeaver, their powerful WYSIWYG software that does a great job of filling the gap between iWeb and Dreamweaver. This new v3.6 ushers in a significant list of new features, such as:

• Themes Styles - no more digging in HTML and CSS to customize your theme (unless you really want to)
• 6 completely new themes
• Snippets - manage chunks of frequently used code instead of copy/pasting or constantly re-typing
• New Flash Slideshow - completely rewritten and can now pull images from a Flickr feed
• Improved blog, including tags and inline comment support
• Easy creation of Lists
• Detailed Publishing
• And much, much more

Since no one (including myself) was able to catch my radio interview last week, the host of the show was nice enough to give me a copy of it so that I could post it here. Click the link below to hear the interview; I haven't listened to it yet myself, so I have no idea how it turned out. Enjoy!

Mary Beth & Rick In the Morning Interview

From AppleInsider:

Apple Inc. on Thursday received the official go-ahead on its first ever mobile handset, with the Federal Communications Commission giving the iPod maker the green light to commence sales of the device in the United States.

According to FCC documents obtained by AppleInsider, the "GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi" carriers model number A1203 and FCC ID: BCGA1203.

In an SAR Test Report conducted on February 6th, 2006, FCC Test Lab Manager Lothar Schmidt wrote the following:

"The Apple Inc. A1203 GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wifi, FCC ID: BCGA1203, is in compliance with the limits for general population uncontrolled exposure specified in FCC 2.1093. The device was tested according to the measurement standards and procedures specified in FCC OET Bulletin 65, Supplement C (Edition 01-01) and IEEE p1528/D1.2, April 21, 2003."

Per Apple's request, the test report omitted the following for "short term" confidentiality reasons: Test Setup Photos, External Photographs, Internal Photographs, and the iPhone User Manual.

Permanent confidentiality omissions included the iPhone's Block Diagram, Operational Description, Radio Schematic, Radio Bill of Material, Radio Tune-up Procedure, and Exhibit notes.

Apple has maintained that it is on track to begin shipping iPhone by late June.

I'm counting down the days until I can throw my Razr into the Maumee River!

With a pretty successful brew session over the past weekend, I went ahead and decided to purchase another kit to make my second batch in as many weeks. While I haven't had much experience with red ales besides Killian's, I have heard some pretty good things about this style being produced by some of the larger microbreweries and figured I'd give it a shot. Like the Lemongrass Wheat from last weekend, this one will be a mini-mash, although I hope to use what I have learned from the first batch to make some adjustments to my procedures in hopes of improving the overall efficiency and conversion rate. Hopefully things turn out well!

Just a quick note, I took the CompTIA Project+ certification exam earlier today and passed with flying colors! I wanted to get it done before the Summer semester started and had some extra hours from working all last weekend so I took the day off and got it out of the way. I'm planning on continuing my certifications with the CAPM exam from PMI after my final semester is done.

Off to see Spider-Man 3 tonight and have a mini-celebration dinner at South End Grille!

According to Fortune magazine, Apple is the 6th most desirable employer for new MBAs. Each year "research firm Universum surveys MBA candidates on where they'd most like to work." The list was topped by Google, with most of the rest of the top ten in financial services or computer related. Interestingly, Microsoft came in 7th right after Apple. Presumably, these MBAs don't actually know that much about what it would be like to work for these firms, meaning this is just a popularity contest. But since it's reasonable to suppose that a lot of them want to be where the action is, this does probably show something about broader perceptions of Apple, Inc. at this time.

I think I can honestly say that I would love to work for Apple starting in July. The #1 company, Google, would be awesome too (if they'd ever get the Ann Arbor campus up and running)!

Full list: Fortune Online

Well, the spring semester is finally over, and I made it through relatively unscathed. This semester ended up being my best yet as a grad student, with a final GPA of 3.78! I've got one more to go, and it starts next Monday and goes through June. It's not going to be fun; classes Monday-Thursday from 5:30-8:50pm. While I would have liked to relax over the weekend, we FINALLY installed the digital Toshiba handsets in the office. These were the phones (and the consultants) that I initially recommended over a year ago. While I anticipated the worst on Monday morning, everything seemed to go without any issues. It really makes me wonder what the past year would have been like if we would have followed the plan in the first place.

This week is somewhat relaxing, but still fairly busy. I've taken Friday off (thanks to those extra hours I worked over the weekend) to take my Project+ certification exam, and will hopefully be celebrating my passing Friday night (and hoping to catch Spiderman 3 as well). Tomorrow, I will be a guest on a morning talk show (101.5 The River) to discuss the NW Ohio Safety Council award I received last month. That should be an exciting, interesting, and potentially frightening experience; hopefully I'll make it through the interview without embarrassing myself too much.

I guess that's about it for now; more news as it happens!