Proof, if any were needed, that MacUser is always ahead of the curve. Compare the front cover of the current issue of Digit with one of MacUser's covers from last century!

(1999 to be exact... )

Last night's excuse for a knee's up prestigious industry event was mucho fun. Too much booze + Cigars + Incredibly loud music + 4am = bleh. And croakey voice.

We also discovered a Fun New Thing, illustrated above, of taking pics of other people (or cats, obviously) with cameraphones and re-photographing them held over others' faces. Note: may only be funny in the wee small hours after a few glasses of cooking lager. Selected photographic evidence here.

“If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all its worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.” STEVE JOBS, FORTUNE MAGAZINE, 1996

I proofed the above ten year-old quote in the magazine today – quite telling, given Apple's current love affair with the iPod – and noted that it contained a mistake. Can you spot it?

(I know that at least two people who read this are or have recently been in the subbing business, so I'm rather hoping they at least will have.)

It's our old friend "its". Now, despite belonging to the generation that wasn't taught English properly, I read (and read; damned English syntax) a lot, particularly in my youth, and thus appear to have simply absorbed a kind of gut feeling for when things are correctly spelled and structured. Start talking about sub-clauses and the subjunctive and I'll nod politely, but, though I can't often tell you why, I can usually spot when things are wrong.

But even as my pen started marking the proof, I hesitated. Unlike with most proofing corrections, which are usually just plain wrong, it suddenly occurred to me that here, both its and it's were legitimate, respectively meaning:

...milk the Macintosh for all the worth it has
...milk the Macintosh for all it is worth

• Finally tracking down the original quote showed that my instinct had been right, but I'm glad I thought to check.

Regular readers may remember my wife's adorable habit of semi-waking in the wee small hours and uttering apparent nonsense. The other night, she snuffled herself awake, and calmly asked me 'Remember when you kept pretending to be the smallest man in Australia all the time?'

I was, understandably, hooked; it wasn't that I was the smallest man in Australia, I was only pretending to that exalted title. And doing it all the time, to boot. Surely the story could only get more interesting?

Thankfully, as she turned over, plumped her pillow, and prepared to return to full-on unconsciousness, she filled out the narrative: 'I was big,' she said – all without opening her eyes, but with a faint smile playing across her lips – 'I just kept saying "smaller and smaller".'

Despite not getting closure on this particular incident, I hope she never breaks this habit.

The sun is shining and I don't have any work to do this weekend – hurrah! The young lady and I have just spent a few hours soakin' up some rays in our local park. It was surprisingly quiet, so perhaps some sort of Foot Ball match was on. That's the great thing about the World Cup from my poncey, artsy, girly point of view: all the places that are fun to hang out at are dead quiet while everyone locks themselves in smokey, darkened rooms watching 22 men kick a ball around. Bliss. A few more pics from the park here.

Nothing else to do today but spruce up the flat a little, cook dinner – pork chops with cherry tomato and spring onion, served with Basmati rice – and see if today's investment in the Poor People's Tax has paid off. Toodle-pip!

I obviously grew up in the wrong era. *Sob*

Here's a little publishing secret for you: every time you see a screen grab in a magazine that includes a photo, it will almost certainly have been picked with great care and deliberation. They're usually chosen for one of two reasons: either the picture will contain a (usually young) offspring of the writer, usually looking heart-meltingly adorable, or it will be a particularly unflattering picture of an esteemed colleague. The above picture shows the enormous homage we created to Señor Stevenson of PC Pro fame, plus your humble narrator mid-hang. For added amusement, it makes its appearance in the Spanish edition of the magazine, sending the face of Dave "I am a pretty man" Stevenson spreading across the continent.

* The title for this post is just 'Receding Hairline' in Spanish. Or at least, in some sort of mangled Spanglish produced by Systran's automatic translations. It may in reality be a mortal insult. The same phrase is translated as below into various other languages – may not display properly if your browser/system doesn't play nice with non-Roman characters – but again, I can't vouch for their accuracy,

CHINESE (TRADITIONAL)
後退細線

CHINESE (SIMPLIFIED)
后退细线

JAPANESE
退くヘアライン

KOREAN
물러난 가는선

GREEK
Υποχωρώντας hairline [what a cop-out!]

RUSSIAN
Волосяный покров receding [ditto]

... and so on. Cope, Systran scandalously enough doesn't offer Welsh translation. Could you oblige?

The British Library is really quite a beautiful building, and on a day like today, when the sun was shining from the sky, the lavender and statuary looked utterly captivating. (I still can't get over the quality of the camera in the Sony Ericsson W800i phone.) Click for one more picture.

I have a new Mac. Correction: I have two new Macs.

My aged and infirm iBook G4 has been officially retired, and in it's place I have a rather lovely 2GHz MacBook, powered by the rather lovely Intel Core Duo chip. Performance is astonishingly good; Spotlight searching – especially in my huge Mail database – is lightning-quick, and it's just generally super-responsive. I know that part of this is just that it's A New Computer and so lacking the years of accumulated detritus that was slowing down my iBook, but still. And having started off hating the keyboard, I'm now a total convert; it takes a lovely light touch to type. Best of all though is the glorious gloss widescreen display, and it ability to drive a second monitor. I'm something of a fan, you see.

Mac number two is a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mac mini, bought with the proceeds of a sudden and unexpected little chunk of internal freelance, which sits permanently hooked up to our television and stereo, browsing shared media libraries and our movie collection stored on a NAS via the rather spiffy Front Row software. Even my lady wife is impressed with the mini, which, when not media centre-ing it up to the max (or Macs, possibly) is working for the good of mankind by running various BOINC projects. Everyone wins...

I am quite happy with this state of affairs.

essential ɪˌsɛnʃ(ə)l
adjective
1 absolutely necessary; extremely important : [with infinitive ] it is essential to keep up-to-date records | fiber is an essential ingredient. See notes at inherent, necessary .
• [ attrib. ] fundamental or central to the nature of something or someone : the essential weakness of the plaintiff's case.

ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense [in the highest degree] ): from late Latin essentialis, from Latin essentia.

Since I started at Dennis Publishing over three years ago, I've been making frequent visits to the greasy spoon across the road, Giovanni's. Me, I have an irrational fondness for this kind of caff, and Giovanni's twice-fried sausage sandwiches have seen me through many a drear morning. Tales of threats by health inspectors to shut the place down thanks to cockroach infestations never deterred me – "cockroach inna bun from Giovanni's, anyone?" – but today we suddenly discovered that this was the last day it would be open; the man himself was moving back to Italy. Quite why I felt I had to mark this occasion is beyond me now, but when I nipped out this afternoon to treat us all to an ice cream, I also bought him a bottle of wine, and got a teary, over-masculine handshake in return. How will I maintain my body shape now? To whom shall I turn to keep my cholesterol nice and high? Via con Dio, Giovanni...

I left my wallet at the office yesterday, and with it my bus pass. Just my luck: there were inspectors on my bus, but I just said I'd forgotten my pass and was reaching to pay the £30 fine. The inspector instead issued me with a ticket for the journey and told me to send in a copy of my pass and photocard later to prove I hadn't just been a fare-doging ruffian. In the act of copying my photocard, I appear to have switched races. Hmm...

really expensive cat toy on Vimeo

This video has had me giggling all afternoon; even Northern cat-haters find it funny.