Lazarus

So the laptop's alive again. Having died on Saturday morning it remained silent when it was plugged into the mains and no amount of pushing of power buttons and other reset tricks had any effect for two days. As a last gasp test I charged the battery over night so I was sure it was full and gave the power button one more prod this morning, just to confirm it was defunct and that my appointment with the "genius" would have to take place tonight. It coughed a bit, spluttered and woke up, very dazed and confused but definitely alive. After a few minutes of spinning pizza of death it set itself back to the state it was in when I put it to sleep on Friday night. How bizarre, for truly it rose again on the third day. Perhaps my Powerbook is holy? Even if this is the explanation I'm still going to keep the "genius" appointment as I want to know if this was a portent of bad things to come, or to put it another way: "Should I back my data up more often?"

This will mean going to the Apple Store and speaking with a self-appointed "genius". I really hate that place. I have used Macs for a few years now because I got utterly sick of the constant driver/update/crap engineering that I seemed to suffer with Windows and whatever hardware I tried it on. Until about 5 years ago it still seemed as if this was a better bet than Macs, which I'd always hated using before OS X came out. I really like OS X. I like its Unix underpinnings - an operating system I've been using for well over a decade and have therefore got very comfortable with plus the user-interface of OS X is very pleasant to use and I haven't had a lot of the compatibility issues that my last three Windows machines exhibited. However I hate the smug gittishness of the Apple brand, its advertising, its homogenously blander-than-bland modernist shops and the messianic fanboyish genuflection whenever Steve Jobs opens his cake-hole. I like Apple computers (until something better comes along), I do not like idolatry. This evening I shall have to at least pretend to be one of the "true faith" even if I'm actually profoundly agnostic on the matter.