Mountain Lion enables you to set notification alerts to remind you of upcoming birthdays, tasks, meetings and other important events you might have in your calendar.
If you are the kind of person you want to read what has been changed before updating an app you can disable the auto app update setting. Or enable if you want updates fully automated.
If you experience an Mac OS X program to freeze and you cannot exit it by clicking quit or using a keyboard shortcut, you can always force it to quit using the Activity Monitor.
