ASYLUM

* Short Fuse

Well. It's been power-cut city around here. No news on why, but the power went out around 10pm-ish last night, knocking out the whole street; it came back on a few minutes later, but went out again this morning and stayed out for hours. Tried ringing our electricity supplier ("Good Energy"), but they just bounced me to voicemail. Ugh. Finally came back around 1pm. I only hope it's staying that way...

The power-cut also knocked out the computers of a nearby estate agent, thus demonstrating that every cloud has a silver lining.

* Estate Agent Hell

Yes, I'm working on moving house. Yes, it's time consuming. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, estate agents waste your time constantly one way or another. Yes, they are all scum who will be eaten first when Great Cthulhu rises at last.

Here, go read a poem, I'm busy. Or play dress up with your celebrity lust-idol of choice.

Update — talking of Great Cthulhu, what the fuck is this thing?! I don't care what they say, star-nosed mole my ass, I recognise a relative of the Great Old Ones when I see it...

Oh, and a little something extra for the cold war/spy geeks out there: The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA — brought to you courtesy of the CIA themselves...

And finally, science marches on: Fucking with the goddamn aurora borealis. Rumours of a strange city becoming visible in the sky within are as yet unconfirmed.

* An Apple A Day

This is a post about Apple, good things and bad. This is because from time to time, I mention things to people I know, but the impression they get is going to be flavoured somewhat randomly by the most recent event :) So this gathers together the story together so that you get the overview.

So, some of you may recall that a little over 18 months ago my laptop got stolen by some "little shits" (as one of the fine police-constables described them), and I replaced it with a shiny white Apple iBook which I named Tunguska.

See, I've been using computers for about a quarter of a century now (eek) and have no fear of technology. As a teenager, I worked in a computer shop building computers from parts. I develop software for a living. For most of that time, I've used x86 PCs (and before that, BBC Micros, Amigas, Acorn Archimedies, Sinclair Spectrums [Spectra?], Atari STs, Amstrad CPCs and PCWs, and other 8 and 16-bit home machines).

But, generally, not Macs.

In the early days — 1984 And All That — they were strange, mythical beasts living in a more remote and rarified atmosphere than us mere mortals, the Yeti of the computer world. Apple were certainly onto a pretty good thing back then, but it wasn't a thing I could get my unwashed hands on.

Later, by way of universities and graphic design, I used Macs, but by that time it was too late: the rest of the world had moved on, but the Mac still struggled under the weight of 1980s assumptions. Those suckers were still black-and-white when I'd been working with full-colour photographic images for years. Even when the Apple Faithful (the MacHuggers, the acolytes who Drank the Jobs Kool-Aid) were laughing at the newly-released Windows 95, the Apple Mac OS still couldn't actually multitask properly. Were they that misguided, or was the laughter there to choke back the tears?

Those were the Lost Years of Apple, the decade spent on the road in a beaten-up sedan, cruising from one seedy motel to another. Sure, you'd sit down infront of a Mac from time to time and try to talk business, but you could sense the fragility under the surface, too much time spent out on the edge... the Apple Faithful were those who'd looked too deep into its eyes, seen the abyss looking back... some wander the bus-shelters still, shouting at the pidgeons...

It took NeXT to bring the Mac in from the cold and finally heal its pain. People like to talk about "blueberry" iMacs changing Apple's fortunes, but Mac OS X, released in 2001, made the machine into a Real Computer again, something that didn't just compete with the rest of the world but actually blew it away. OS X is a large part of why I got Tunguska.

The other part is because at the time (and to an extent, still) PC laptops only came in two models: the "desktop replacement", which weighs as much as a tank, and does Everything Evarrr, or the "palmtop clamshell", tiny and gorgeous, but probably has to be imported from Japan and could buy you a medium-sized failed state in the third world.

So I got the iBook, and It Was Good. I'm not going to wax lyrical about it, but I'll just touch on the three main reasons:

• the core of the OS is UNIX. Sure, there are better operating systems in the research laboratory, but it's a good choice nonetheless: relative to Windows, it's solid, secure and simple (by simple, I mean the interactions of the parts within it, rather than user-interface complexity).

• they made UNIX usable. Apple solved the problem that Open Source nerds have been failing to fix in Linux or BSD for years. I mean, I love OpenBSD and run it on The Hive 24/7/365, but mostly, it's just a whirring box that runs servers for me, and I can ignore everything else about it — if I actually had to use a GUI, I'd be gnashing my teeth.

• the "industrial design" has a lot of very slick attention to detail, from the way the case is designed to have absolutely no snap-off-able parts, right down to the way the power adapter has interchangeable heads for different countries — but if you lose 'em you can still plug in a standard figure-eight radio lead.

Unfortunately, Tunguska fell prey to the infamous logic board problem, which kills "Dual USB" iBooks made before winter 2003 stone dead. Apple did repair it free of charge, couriering it around and fixing it in under a week, hassle-free... but it happened again. And again.

Last week, my iBook died for the fourth time. Note only that, a post-christmas backlog of repairs means they were quoting a month to fix it. Since then, I've been in Telephone Hell with Apple Customer Service — outsourced to Buttfuckistan, I think. Wherever they are, they have a mighty poor internet connection, as they're never able to access "the system" to look up user details.

(Note that, by contrast, the people I spoke to at the Apple Store were impeccably polite, friendly and helpful — to the limits of Apple Corporate Policy on Repairs and Replacements, anyway.)

But, I finally got a result out of them today: they have offered to replace Tunguska outright, with a brand-new, pretty-much top-of-the-line iBook — about 60% faster, 30% larger hard drive, and vastly better WiFi. So we likes them. Well, assuming it arrives soon... :P

Now: Philosophical question. Is this new machine simply Tunguska 2.0, or shall I come up with a shiny new name for the shiny new machine?