While I was not in line, technically speaking, I did have to lean against a display table while waiting for my repaired laptop to be brought from the back. It took a while because I decided to ask why the purchase date on the invoice was August of last year instead of January, which was when I bought it this year. Obviously they knew it was still under warranty because there was no charge.

The display was of iPhones. A customer was peering intently at one model, hunkering down to get at the right eye level. He wore an expression of intense delight. One of the geniuses was manning the greeter position at the door while the greeter was seeing to my laptop. I truly hoped the customer bought an iPhone, he was quite beside himself as he tried them out.

The answer to the odd date? It was probably the day the online store (not Apple) got a shipment of Macs. When I buy AppleCare, I need to bring this up so they will change it.

On the way to the car, I heard someone upstairs at Zibibbo’s singing in Italian. It was a balmy night, and my option key was fixed.

So there I was again at the Genius Bar, and it was a much busier night than Monday. When it was my turn, I had to lean in between a couple who continued their conversation as I tried to explain my laptop woes to my genius. I couldn’t hop up on a stool due to my back being thrown out of whack over the weekend. Sometimes I wish I were a larger person with extra jumbo elbows. The genius listened patiently as he fooled with my laptop while he monitored the talkative couple’s machines. He was annoyed but trying hard not to show it.

A family member picked this moment to ask the genius, ‘Say, can I get one of those Genius shirts?’

‘No!’ barked the genius. No glance up, no smile.

Apple stopped selling the shirts a while back. If you want one badly enough, you can find it at eBay and such.

My new but already beloved MacBook Pro is at wherever the Apple Store sends them to get repaired. The old PowerBook G4 is stepping in today, but since I took a heavy duty painkiller for my back, not a lot will be done other than to finish up the taxes.

Meanwhile, it’s going to get hot this summer, a few days anyway, and the G4 tended to heat up fast. If you have similar problems, here are some DIY ideas from Lifehacker via Engadget. A binder, a towel rack and a few corks - your laptop and wallet will both be happier.

The option key on my new MacBook Pro didn’t work right. It’s the closest I’ve come to pounding on the keyboard, and productivity plummeted.

So there I was in line with my name up on the big screen. My first time, but sadly, not the last. The genius pried off the top of the key, showed me what he thought was wrong, fixed it as best he could. It was higher than the other keys, and a part underneath was bent slightly. However, if the problem persisted, he said the Mac would have to go in for an extended stay.

This is actually okay, I have a backup, the older G4 laptop. Next time, maybe Cho’s will be open and I can get potstickers as part of the whole Palo Alto thing.

And I got to mess with the Air. Wow. But I do believe that the air (the kind we breathe) is better in an Apple Store.

I’m sure there were many preorders for the MacBook Air soon after it was announced. For a few minutes I thought about doing it myself. Such is the power of hype. Now that things have settled down a bit, some, like Paul Boutin at Slate, are saying the Air should have some of the features of the iPhone, including its ability to access the web with tremendous ease.

My old G4 Powerbook is showing its age. I need something that will process my ever-increasing photo processing needs, so I’m going with the 17″ MacBook Pro. The smaller screen of the Air would mean I would have to spring for a separate monitor. Don’t want to lug around a monitor from room to room.

It fits in a mailing envelope, and weighs three pounds less than my current Powerbook G4. Mighty tempting. Mighty. Tempting.

If the future isn’t here now, it’s coming very soon. The price? Why, compared to the Mercedes SLR McLaren (just under a cool half mil), it’s a steal. While some might argue that the Mercedes does indeed fly, we are talking flight in the aeronautical sense.

Buyers are apparently lining up. In case you’re reaching for your wallet, make sure you have a pilot’s license.

A reader asks if Pleo is available yet. I first posted about the playful dinosaur early last year.

On the 18th, Amazon will have him, albeit at a fairly steep price.

But it is Christmas after all.

Looking to cross a few items off your list re headsets? Here’s a review of some of the top choices, courtesy of Slate.

So you think your workspace is cramped and airless. (Mine has termites chewing through the ceiling above my head.) Check out the 12 winners in the Wired News Saddest Cubicle Contest.

Give them a pile of construction paper, a pencil, and wow. I love my Mac, but it has neither a ‘Food’ nor an ‘imediet Buy’ button.

The Andy Rubin phone perhaps.

An NYT look at the career moves of the man at the helm of the Google phone development .

In the previous post, I mentioned tirefly lights, which I learned about from the evilmadscientist site via a tip from son Chris.

Like the author, I found the lights at Target. ( Amazon is out of stock at the moment.) Aside from their Halloween uses, they seem to be handy aftershock detectors. Once in a while, one will start flashing, and I’ll assume it is telling me we are experiencing one of the numerous - 40 at last count - aftershocks of that quake we had.

It happened last year. The UK businessman was on vacation in Spain. Thanks to the pricey security system (16 CCTV cameras), he found out via a text message that a robbery was in progress back in his very expensive house. He watched the drama unfold on his laptop after calling the cops.

The only thing better would have been The Tick answering the call, and pounding the burglars before they were carted away.

Did you take awesome shots on your vacation, only to have some of the views marred with unnecessary clutter or obstructions? Maybe you got a breathtaking pic of a tropical sunset with your beloved in the foreground, and now he’s your ex. Whom you never, ever want to see again, especially blocking a nice sunset.

Help is at hand from a Carnegie Mellon research team using online photo library databases (like Flickr) and that algorithm.

Why is this necessary, you might wonder. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that many California drivers leave their brains (but never their phones) at home before getting in their cars.

Some call it browsing. Others might say drifting or wandering. But getting lost on the internet is now known as ‘What was I Looking For’ or ‘wilfing’, and we all know what that’s like.

Why, just now I was shopping for camera memory, and here I am at the Telegraph in the UK reading about Prince William and his ex-girlfriend. Isn’t that what makes the web fun?

They say that war drives technology. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of the bat bombs, there were a few problems in the plan, just as in the Russian anti-tank dog project discussed earlier.

A real possibility, according to Briefing.com, citing AppleInsider.

Serious dark smoke starting coming out of the brick around lunchtime, and I unplugged the thing. Then I got on the phone again, talked to two more Apple store people. The one in Palo Alto said the Valley Fair store usually had a few ‘refreshed’ adapters around. Did that mean the same as ‘refurbished’, I wondered. They assured me these had been opened by customers but returned unused. Now why would they do that?

A call to Valley Fair: they had two refresheds this morning, but they were gone now. Time to try Fry’s.

A very helpful salesperson (either they’ve all been whipped, or the old staff was fired, or they’ve been completely retrained) spent a large part of his afternoon searching for something that would work on my G4 laptop. First he found an adapter with too little wattage, then one that seemed awfully powerful. Finally, there was the Goldilocks moment. He would leave it at will call. Thanks, Jay!

Tonight I dashed over. There was no adapter at will call. My heart sank at the idea of doing this all over again with a different clerk, because wouldn’t you know it, Jay was gone for the day.

A guy in a suit tried to help. I could remember part of the name of the manufacturer and the price. He took me to some shelves where the products looked familiar from Jay’s descriptions earlier. Nothing. Then I said the magic word: universal. Jay had mentioned that it would work in cars and airplanes. The suit headed for the laptop section and within seconds, it was in my hand.

My battery was at 0 when I got home. Now it’s up to 43% and life is looking okay again. Micro Innovations. $70. I still have an Apple adapter on back order, I’m thinking it’s a very good idea to have two.

I decided it would be prudent to call ahead before showing up at the Apple Store. Good move.

Turns out there’s an unexplained shortage of their Powerbook adapters. The person at the Apple Store suggested I go search the shelves at Fry’s or buy the Kensington one that costs more. He added that he personally had gone through four (!). And that I should stop using my adapter because “it could burn my house down”.

Scary words. Real scary.

So I’ve had my nose to the grindstone without much relief for the past few weeks, hence the lack of posting. Before that I had the awful upper respiratory. That is still not gone, but I don’t cough at night. Not unless I’m out in the weather for more than a few minutes at a time.

My Mac started making slight crackling noises from time to time. Poor thing, it hasn'’t had much rest lately. Then one day in the thick of work, I saw that the adapter was not lit as it should be when it’s charging, and that the battery was really low. That’s when I noticed that where the cord goes into the adapter (brick, it’s called), there was some fraying. Yesterday, a couple of sparks appeared. After jiggling it a bit, the charging light came back on. I couldn’t stop working due to a deadline or two.

It gets worse. Soon I had to keep manipulating the cord to keep the light on, and the part of the cord going into the brick was disintegrating more each day. Sometimes when I picked up the brick, it was really, really hot.

Today after I moved the brick a bit, a puff of brown smoke came out. Tomorrow, I’m going to the Apple Store to see what they can tell me.

For models Qosmio, Tecra, Dynabook, Satellite and Portege.

Possibly swayed by the compelling nature of this recent incident at LAX , IBM and Lenova this morning announce the voluntary recall of 526,000 laptop batteries.

That’s the name given by U.S. intelligence to the Russian ekranoplan, a behemoth of a plane based in the Caspian Sea during the Cold War. It reportedly had the capacity to carry a staggering 1000 tons, and relied on the ground effect for flight.

Thanks to Google Earth, the folks at The Register have spotted a Chinese Sea Monster. Also discussed is the monstrous Boeing Pelican.

The obligatory video (lengthy) at YouTube is here.

Does your laptop or cell phone make you feel sick? Do you feel strangely warm, dizzy or nauseous around electrical equipment?

Perhaps you have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, the subject of a new study by the University of Essex. People who suffer from EHS find it next to impossible to work at their computers or use mobile phones without distress. Some resort to viewing their monitors with binoculars from a distance.

As we adapt to our high-tech lives, was this bound to happen?

If you feel you are lord of all you survey, then it’s likely you will have a selective eye. Virtual Earth sees neither Apple headquarters in Cupertino nor the place of alien autopsies.

I often joke that my Powerbook can double as a cooking device because it heats up so much. Now Apple announces that it is replacing the lithium-ion batteries in the G4 12-inch iBook, 12 and 15-inch PowerBooks.

But not the 17-inch.

When AOL goes looking for gold bars in suburban backyards, it comes up with some heavy duty loot. The kind of stuff most of us see only in caper movies.

Users of the service will be the ones with a chance at the gold, the vehicle and $75,000 in cash.

When my laptop gets hot, I elevate it on large juice bottletops at each corner. Not exactly a good match for my Powerbook, but it’s hard to find titanium lids. A son uses those large flat erasers. But when he actually uses his laptop in his lap, I start muttering about the genetic dangers of such a practice.

Enter the Lapinator, which weighs less than a pound, and is much cooler looking than bottletops. Plus it will help insure that there will be future generations.

Designed for use in hospitals and nursing homes, it looks like a Gund bear, but has cameras in its eyes, microphones in its ears, and a PC within its stuffing. Huggable can interact with its primary human, and give important information on its human’s condition to doctors and other caregivers.

If you suffered through a recent heat wave at your desk while the computer churned out even more heat, you can appreciate the U.S.B. Beverage Chiller from CoolIT Systems.

The people behind this device point out that chilling an entire can of soda or other refreshing drink is not the idea. What they want to do is keep the last third or so of the drink cold. The part that, when you come back to it, is lukewarm and therefore not that drinkable.

Unless you have access to crushed ice, as I finally do, and highly recommend. If your a/c is not efficient, and I truly know the feeling, a handful of such ice can be applied to pulse points for instant cooling. If desperate, a handful down the shirt always works, if only briefly.

Yesterday I popped into the downtown SF one, which was packed. Near the front was a display of MacBooks, which I’ve been curious about. My old 17-inch Powerbook and I are as one, but it gets heavy at times. I picked up the nearest white one, and the young woman next to me became agitated.
YW: Oh, you’re not supposed to do that!
Me: Why not?
YW: Oh, you can’t do that!
Me: I want to see how heavy it is.
YW: I’m supposed to be watching this display and you’re not supposed to do that!
Me, noting that all the MacBooks are securely attached and therefore imminently unstealable: Really?
YW (looks even more agitated, starts glancing from side to side)

I head to the other end of the table where I pick up the lovely black MacBook without intervention. Much more portable machine. As I go out the door, I turn to check, and the YW is gone. In her place is a scruffy young man who is handling the white MacBook with all the enthusiasm of a would-be buyer, holding it up and looking underneath.

She won’t exactly fit in your purse, unless you have a big one, or a man purse, but she’ll sure brighten your day.

My powerbook gets pretty hot these triple digit days, and a few days ago the battery died. Or so it seemed. (Heat alone does not make batteries die however.) One of my sons knows a fellow who works at one of the Apple stores, who advised him to zap the pram. It worked, except the little lights on the bottom of the laptop don’t work. I’ll look that up later.

For now, it seems that SF is hotter than the peninsula. Wow. That’s a switch. 95° there, 93° here, but it feels like 100° minimum.

For those who missed it earlier, here’s the egg frying on the back of a Mac laptop. Of course it’s a joke , but these things do get really, really hot.

The LAPD is trying out the StarChase system, which shoots a homing device on the back of a fleeing car. The cops can then fade back while a computer tracks the vehicle.

Seems like the bad guys would catch on fast.

There’s the kind you and I may have done back in elementary school, and then there’s the complex kind that Robert Lang does. He is currently perfecting software to ease the laborious folding of extreme origami.

Who does he look up to? Satoshi Kamiya, who can envision a finished piece, then unfolds it, bit by bit, all in his mind.

Since getting her own cell when she was six, the child has been sending up to 30 text messages each day.

From the mind of Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab comes a kit filled with the stuff of traditional crafts but juiced up with sensors, cables, sound boxes and a small, programmable computer.

The recipient of such a box of treasure will be able to create musical sculptures and toy figures that will interact with their maker.

According to Resnick, the kit appeals to girls as well as boys. I certainly wouldn’t mind having one of these.

Baseball or watchcaps with LEDs powered by 9-volt batteries are a great idea out of Finland.

Out of Kansas, a new approach to search with a social aspect.

Researchers have succeeded in generating hydrogen using waste materials from a Cadbury factory.

The day is approaching when traffic will be more bearable.

There have been five incidences, all involving Motorola phones. A spokesman for the company warned against using cheap replacement batteries.

The gas canister goes where the water bottle holder is. The special wheel fits in the front fork of the bike. It will work on any 26-inch bike. Not available till 2007, 200 mpg, $400.

Who needs a car for running errands?

A patent for gesture control of devices has been filed. The day is fast approaching when we can simply wave a few fingers in the direction of our increasingly intelligent small machines to direct their functions.

Google: Stop it.
Microsoft: Who, us?

In the world of search and online ads, Google’s growth rate was 80% and Yahoo’s 36%. Microsoft, chafing at its 7% showing, is rolling up its sleeves and planning to spend big.

There’s the doll. There’s a jacket. Put the jacket on someone you love. Or your dog, which of course you love. Probably not a good idea to put it on your cat.

Oh, and you must have an internet connection.

Stuck in your office late, can’t get home? Hug the doll. Whoever is wearing the jacket will feel the love.

Most cats would not understand, I’m guessing. You could prep your cat, and say, ‘Now look here, at 5:30 this afternoon, I’m going to send you a hug and a scratch behind the ears via this cute jacket. Got that?’ Tell him 200 times. At 5:30, he will still leap 3 feet straight in the air, possibly more if he was in the litter box, and his fur will not have recovered when you get home at 8.

The article says the doll records the same sensation that it receives. Does this mean that if you punch the doll, the jacket wearer will be beaten? Can you tickle someone this way?

One of The Register’s journalists received a most interesting 419 in response to his report on a laptop.

Last fall, I mentioned the Orion search engine. Yesterday, Google bought Orion.

This one is from China. It’s the creation of Professor Yan Lei of Peking University, and is powered by the sun. When will it be ready for serious flight? Look for it in a couple of years.

Back in January, I posted about Geoff Hatton’s saucer.

I want to miss a call.

Oh, and kudos to that funeral home in South Africa that packs extra batteries in the casket. You just never know.

How much to this rumor of a possible offer to backup users’ hard drives? Google won’t say.

In the future, sharks may be remotely controlled via implants, and used for spying purposes.

A new development from Apple, via Briefing.com.

I’m sure glad I don’t have to use one, much less try to use one while eating lunch.

Today’s lunch (leftover roast chicken) requires a knife and fork, which complicates things considerably.

I can understand most of the subjects of search for last week except for Sly Stone. Did I miss something? Sly Stone?

The billionaire founders of X-Prizes hope to speed up research by awarding huge sums of money to those who can solve major dilemmas.

One prize will be awarded for a solution to the oil dependence problem. Another goes to a company that can sequence the genetic code of 100 people in a few weeks.

Are you ready?

The treatment involves rebalancing the brain, utilizing technology formerly used on returning astronauts.

LiftPort Group builds a cable that stretches a mile up, strong enough to allow robots to climb up and down.

A Japanese professor, an expert in primates, sees many resemblances between monkeys and teenagers with mobile phones.

Imagine seeing twice the distance you can now with clarity. For those of us cursed with nearsightedness, it is hard to believe. Blum’s technology involves electronically-controlled pixels within the eyeglass lens that can be programmed to correct vision flaws.

Bracing the city for a possible future Category 5 hurricane means taking a good look at some innovative solutions. They include air-filled flood gates, amphibious houses, and replacing canals with an underground drainage system.

Did you drop it? Sit on it? Drop it in the tub? Expose it to freezing temps? Drop it again?

There are many ways to protect your iPod from mishaps. And many places that offer repair services.

Me: Arrrrrgh, this stupid software.
Computer: Ah, I sense your annoyance. Take a deep cleansing breath.
Me: Damn. I accidentally threw away the file.
Computer (dims screen, plays more soothing music, emits smell of freshly baked bread) It will be better soon.
Me: Oh crap! Why is the browser crashing over and over?
Computer: I’m so sorry. Let me order in some fried chicken.
Me: Actually, I want some freshly baked bread.

The makers, Ugobe, Inc., took their inspiration from a one-week old Camarasaurus. Pleo expresses happiness, fear, aggression, and sadness. He can also sneeze, sigh, cough, snore, hiccup, and yawn.

He is engineered to learn from his environment. If only he had been around when my kids were small.

The SHIFT bike, designed for young children learning how to ride, eliminates the need for a parent to hold on at the rear.

The bike appears to have three wheels, but the two rear wheels merge into one as the rider learns to balance.

It has begun here already, the allergy season. Before heading out for a walk yesterday, I made sure to take an antihistamine. The air is sweet with the scent of blooming trees, but inhaling deeply is not recommended if you are prone to allergies.

Decades ago, scientists noted that people with hookworms were free from asthma. Today, a brave team is setting out to prove that the infection caused by hookworms helps to tone down the body’s reponse to allergens. How else to do this but introduce hookworms to their bodies?

Perhaps the day is coming when I don’t head out for a walk without first strapping on my special allergy device, which fools my immune system into thinking it is infected with hookworms. Maybe it will be built into my iPod.