New Laptop finally here, and despite SuperDuper acting like a martinet, the backup has finally restored. Now to get on with all the work* that has been piling up while I’ve been laptopless.

* And Spore.

I’m not saying that someone at Apple should be shot – something I have been told about staff on a magazine I’ve worked for when a reader spotted a typo – but I am genuinely surprised to see Apple, a company famed for meticulous, anal attention to detail, making gaffes like this one. The lack of an intercap B on MacBook, right on the www.apple.com/uk homepage, is weird. Was Steve personally proofing the pages before he took some time off?

I haven’t blindly embedded a YouTube video for ages, so perhaps you’ll forgive me this one. Premise: put a DV camera on a sushi conveyor belt, and let it wander round the restaurant. Charming stuff, and watching the different reactions of people to it as they click – or not – is endlessly fascinating.

Another Sooper Sekrit project at MacFormat has kept me occupied for a while, but that’s all done and dusted and the only thing* keeping me from blogging more regularly is, y’know, the actual day job.

Never mind; it’s all good. I have new laptop, our dishwasher will soon be plumbed in, and we have all sort of japes planned for the end of the week when I shall be celebrating the final birthday of my second decade.

We bin walkin’ some dawgs, too, though I’m not going to dwell on this because the dog we walked last week, Shadow, managed to cut her nose while trying to wrestle her muzzle off, and the thought of this makes Wife sad. Here she (Shadow, not Wife) is, looking chipper, though; she was so utterly dedicated to straining at her (new; we finally bought one) leash that for most of the first half-hour she was walking at this ker-a-zee 45° angle.


And today, I went up and took a mastiff cross called Maurice (Maw-REECE) out for a spin. Very aggressive towards other dogs, he also had a worrying habit of lunging at small children too; a short leash, to put it mildly, was called for.

Once we were about in the fields, though, he settled down and was a real sweetie. Occasionally he’d block me, snooking his head around my leg so I couldn’t move it forward. He’d then stare dolefully up at me and give a small wag of his tail until I hunkered down and gave him some love. If I dropped something and had to stop, he'd trot solicitously back; “Oh, hello, hooman, you appear to have dropped something. I have no opposable thumbs, but I'd like to help. No? OK, what about a wag? What about leaning against you; I’m not particularly heavy?”


* Apart from all the other stuff. And Twitter.