Iowa Rebuilds

Don't Upset the Roomba

Here is the back story. On Sunday Tinseltroos was out of the flat for of her regular Bollywood marathons so it was just Murphy and me. Murphy is a regular little trooper but he only has enough puff to vacuum half of the flat in a single charge after which he has to go and have a little rest. I needed to go and do some shopping so I set Murph off to do one half. Later on I went out again to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again (I make no apologies, I love it) so Murph got to clean the other half of the flat. The little guy did an admirable job and we had a nice clean flat.

On Monday Tinseltroos, not realising that Murphy had already done both sides of the flat, set him off to do the hallway and living room again. Murphy took umbrage at this, I suspect he felt it was slight on his workmanship from the previous day and duly when I returned home it was to a scene of a devastation. Murphy had scattered the neatly arranged collection of recycling everywhere. Cans, beer bottles and milk containers littered the entire flat. In a final, desperate act of self destructive rebellion Murphy had knocked his own power supply out of the wall and driven himself on top of it: a clear plea for help I think.

I carefully untangled the unhappy little robot and plugged his charger back in. After petting him a little and reassuring him that he was still very much loved and was a very good little robot I plugged him back in and went about the flat picking up the remnants of his day long bender.

We haven't had the heart to ask him to clean any of the flat this week. With luck he will have forgiven us by tomorrow.

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.

A Thousand Apologies

Dear Reader,

I have just noticed that the e-mail contact address on my profile page is wrong. When I set up the account for Mr Atrocity I'd forgotten that in the UK there's a legal squabble going on about who owns the gmail.com address here and therefore Google has made googlemail.com addresses until it's resolved. My real-life gmail address predates these shenanigans and is therefore gmail.com; Mr Atrocity's one is not. I had forgotten this. So if you've e-mailed me and been offended by the lack of response I can only apologise and say if you try it now, it does work.

Yours, very humbly,

Mr Atrocity