… with a motherboard and processor that’s almost exactly the same as the 1999 model that I was using before (except of course now it only costs $100 or so). About the only thing that tempted me to upgrade a bit was how much CPU power my desktop machine spends analysing spam. It’s like some devil mirror image of those worthy distributed processing projects: all those cycles being turned into nothing better than contributory global warming. There has to be some spin-off calculation that could be folded into this. Maybe we could track changes in people’s sexual proclivities through keyword analysis of pr0n spam? Maybe there’s some powerful thesis about word-recognition waiting to be deduced in all those viagra variants?
?
I went to the Jobs keynote, and didn’t tell you about it. I’m sorry. I started to write a blog entry, but it turned into a column. I’m writing too many columns; all my prose is puddling into the generic Flann O’Brien/ Beachcomber/ Richard Geefe knock-off is the end of all columnist’s minds.
I think the only bit that won’t go into the column is that I spent too much time at the keynote trying to work out whether Jobs was wearing the same jeans as last year. I don’t think he was. I think he has a million identical jeans, on a huge Matrix-style clothesrack in his flying Pixar palace.
My notes are full of this crap. Everyone else in the journalist’s compound was clattering into outliners about the H.264 and personal iChat servers and how it all interrelates with current market conditions. My notes say “iChat AV, 3 other people. OMG they ARE trapped like General Zod! Is woman he talking to wife? Wrong kind of flirty. Forced bonhomie. Are you killed if you fuckup Jobs demos? Maybe they have gunmen off unseen, off webcam. “But, darling, it was my net connection it was bursty I couldn’t hear what BLAM BLAM BLAMBLAM”.
I need to let this stuff out here more, before I go mad.