Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

So Let’s say I’m sitting in a pub, writing this (which I am). I want to go out for a fag. Which I have to do, because ethically speaking I can’t smoke in a pub these days. But…. there are 2 guys sharing my table. Do I take my laptop with me? It’s worth nothing in terms of money, a little in terms of hassle if it’s lost/stolen/broken. What do I do? I took it with me.. When I sat back down, the chap (because this is a real situation I’m describing here) jokes with me that I could have left it. I have to come clean with him. I WAS wondering if it were rude not to trust them to look after it.

And the next time I left my seat… I left it. I asked them if they would mind, and left it with them. I then saw the chap, 2 mins later after I’d had a slash and was heading for the door for a fag - looking for me. He beckoned me over.

He said no. I can’t look after it. It might be a bomb. And he’s right. In the ethics of the modern age, he can’t take the responsibly of looking after my bomb-shaped satchel in a crowded pub.

The movie of my weekend was Videodrome. Having watched David Cronenberg’s most recent offering, Eastern Promises, lately I felt is time to revisit an old classic. A pre-internet film made in 1983 which foresaw may of the dystopian views of mind-control and perception altering properties new technology might bring way before it’s time.

There are no mobile phones in this film, no email or satellite surveillance. Just a disturbingly, creepily realistic psychological horror film tapping into the fear we all have about where technology could take us. Made in 1983, it couldn’t possibly have pred ictedwhere we’ve ended up and in many ways, such as the worship of the cathode ray tude, it gets it so wrong. But somehow….. it still makes you shiver. If you’ve never seen videodrome, bit-torrent it and watch it. It’s worth about 5 current new releases. Long live the new flesh.

If you like it, and you want more, try eXistenZ. A similar film made 16 years later, starring Jude Law, eXistenZ is just as creepy, but much more advanced- addressesing the burgeoning gaming industry. Death to the demoess Allegra Geller.

Plug both these films into your bit-torrent client now. You might regret it.

So when you get buy a mac you get the latest operating system chucked in free with your purchase. customers would be a little annoyed if that were not the case. But during the lifetime of the hardware you’ve purchased, the chances are that apple will release a newer operating system. When it comes out, you have to pay for it. It costs £50. Should you? Yes. And here’s why.

Apple launched Leopard (OSX 10.5) this week. As far as I can tell, there was OS 9, which was shit, and then OSX. Which was good. And there are various flavors of OSX you can have, all named after cool bigcats. But even though they have cool, cat names, they are really just OSX… plus a version number (I have version 10.4.10 - which was the default release on the intel-chipped mac-books.)

Herein lies the genius of mac marketing. I love good marketing far more than I love good technology (and I luuuuuuurve good technology) - I’m ALMOST willing to pay £50 to upgrade, if I couldn’t nick it off a mate, which I can.

Windows. You’ve had ….. Windows ‘95 (which I started on, soon enough superseded by 98 (which was shit), then 2000 (which was great). Then they realised that the year naming convention thing made them look silly. So we went to XP (which was ok). And now…. vista (which is shit). The Operating System is what we use everyday without thinking about it. It’s important, but frankly people will use any old shit. They have to.

Sorry - sidetracked - back to the leopard. So on Friday… on the first day of release, the mac-o-phile company I work for got hold of a copy of the new mac operating system. Now in the olden days….. when a new operating system came out, nothing happened. People waited for a while for two reasons. Firstly because they had to buy it, and anti-cracking security takes time to break. And secondly to find out if the thing actually worked. Try to ‘upgrade’ your computer and watch everything disappear, break and generally require you to ‘reinstall the operating system’ from scratch, loosing all your email, programs and data.

Here’s how you install leopard. You stick in a CD with a lovely design on it, and reboot your computer. If you have less than 5GB of free space, it will not let you do it. If you have the required free space, you click ok a few times and wait for an hour. Then…. you have the brand new leopard OS, will all the cool new features and a nice little american voice-over’ed video on the new features you should have a little shuftie at.

It just works. It’s easy. And it doesn’t break your computer and loose all your files. Your computer is totally intact, and simply runs on a new, improved (and it IS improved) OS. Brilliant. Genius. Nothing short.

There’s even a phrase for it amongst mac-o-philes….. ‘Trust the Jobs’. (Referring to Steve Jobs, the face of apple). I trust the jobs. I don’t trust those twats at Microsoft. Never did.

STOP PRESS!

Apparently the process isn’t always quite that easy. Here’s Tom’s less-positive account of his experience.

I’ve obviously been here for a while now. I was just walking through chapel market this evening and exchanged nods with 4 or 5 different people who know me by sight. Mostly they’re shopkeepers whom I see every day, but today I saw the old geezer I met in the pub when I was on  bender last Friday afternoon. He’s 45, lived in Islington all his life, and for the last 30 of those has worked in the market pushing the barrows about at the start and end of each day. Trouble is he had a heart attack in September. He was in hospital for a while and the doctors told him to take it easy and not go back to work for 6 months. As he happened to be at work when I saw him this evening, I brought it up with him. He growled ‘What the fuck else am I going to do?’. Fair point.