My MacBook, the fourth most important person in my life (2nd if you measure it by time spent), is sick. She is suffering from Insulation Deficit Disorder, and has to go back to the nice people at Apple. Unfortunately she contained my work (as in work-work, not World of Warcraft work), so I’m currently scraping through my backups to rescue what I can. Sigh.

Technical Notes:
1. Yes, it is Claire’s really, but, you know.
2. The title comes from Up Pompeii, which is about as British as British gets, comedy-wise.

This has been posted in various places recently, but I happened to find it independently and thought I’d pass it on as though I was really cool. TinyAlarm sets an alarm for a time of your choice. It sits in the menubar of OS X (you do have a Mac, right?) so it’s always available, and has a very simple interface.

The whole idea is that it’s simple, and it is. Perfect for tracking when your dinner is ready, when you’ve blasted through an hour of work and are due 5 minutes of sudoku, or of course when it’s the earliest you could possibly leave work on a Friday.

My MacBook has what is known as a moo, a soft (though not so soft for some) breathing noise as the poorly managed fan kicks in for a fraction of a second several times per minute. Today Apple released a fix for this, which is theoretically good. In practice I have two fears. One, it will fix it by making the fan a little more likely to come on and stay on, with a consequent reduction in battery life. Two, and more worrying, I’ve grown to like my moo. To me it does sound more like a breathe, echoing the waxing and waning light that shows when a Mac is asleep. And I fear I may miss it.

…or vice-versa. Using the latest beta of Adium will kill your connection to AIM due to some sort of excessive polling problem. No doubt a new update will appear soon, but in the meantime fire up iChat 🙂

We went to the NYC Apple store this week. OK, everyone else went to FAO Schwarz and I went on my own. Architecturally it’s great, though the fact that it was raining outside and air conditioned meant that there was condensation on the inside. Two of the highly-trained sales consultants were busy welcoming guests; one to tell people to hold on to the handrail (the glass steps being slick), the other to sheath visitor’s umbrellas in…well, you complete the joke.

Inside was an impressive disappointment. More iPodia than you could shake a stick at, which is nice and profitable I suppose though not much relevance to me. The rest of the store seemed mainly to be an internet cafe; a little selling was going on, but mainly browsing in the electronic, not retail, sense. It took me a while to find the mice, a range so limited my local MicroCenter could humble it in their Mac section alone. In fact I couldn’t even find Apple’s own mice at all, products that I would have expected to be stocked.

Still, you don’t go to the Sistine Chapel and complain that you’ve got a stiff neck. I have worshipped at the church of Steve, and it was good.