Hi all! Long time no see!
Yep, I know, I have neglected you, my dear readers, for far too
long, but so many things have happened that I rarely had the time
to sit down and share my thoughts with you.
As you have probably guessed, I have relocated. Again. As New
Zealand was just a tad far away from the best girlfriend ever and
commuting over 18000 km can be quite tiring, I dissolved once again
my household, sold off all my Macs (except for my trusty iBook),
and got my bum on a Quantas 747 Megatop back to Europe via
Singapore, avoiding picking up SARS on the way.
So now I live in lovely Cologne, Germany, and work three days a
week in a small market town in South Lincolnshire, UK. Thanks to
the new flock of cheap no frills airlines, this is cheaper than I
thought and works quite well (and the best girlfriend ever is
happy).
We now have just a little geographic problem with this column's
name: I am obviously not in NZ anymore, but as things look at
present, I'm not going to stay in Germany/UK either, so we have to
find a name for this ever so increasingly international column.
You guys gotta help me. I hereby invite you to send me your
ideas about the title for this piece of orthographic junk and, just
like last year, win a T-shirt in original Pilum design.
In the meantime things have happened: We have new PowerBooks
(nice), new iBooks (still no G4), Apple has turned into a Music
Provide (very cool), and Low End Mac is still running, apparently
without any major hiccups (hooray). The new iTunes service
especially will start to draw people who legitimately want to
acquire music over the Net over to the Mac, as it was never easier
to download that new track that you heard on the radio instead of
desperately trying to get it either from your local shop (where
it's sold out) or via opennap or Gnutella (where it's illegal and
all the hosts are busy or offline).
99¢ is good value, and the automatic synching to my iPod
makes the whole thing really sexy. So Apple is continuing to
broaden their appeal and trying to turn themselves into a hardware,
software, and content provider. I would presume that the
next logical step would be to upgrade the QuickTime trailer site
into a blockbuster movie download service with QuickTime Pro - and
with the help of iFood order your pizza and six pack directly from
Cupertino as well.
Bon appetite then. 
