The ‘unlimited’ service they promised will now be without any limits - a victory for pedantic semanticists across Great Britain. A great day for the modern world, and a surprising flip-flop on the part of O2. Alas, for them, it comes too late. I have already resigned myself to buying and hacking my iPhone, and living out the rest of my contract with T-Mobile, whose EDGE infrastructure is better anyway. Good effort, though, kids.

The night before Tiger was launched, we installed it on the in store machines. Having set a couple going, I began to notice that they were hanging on blue screens when booting up after the install. my first response was “Oh, shit. Tiger is fucked! We have to sell it tomorrow! Argh!”. Half an hour later, after we’d set all of the Macs we had DVDs for installing, the first one had finished booting. Imagine my surprise! What a relief! Phew!

As I write this, on my MacBook (which Leopard has rejected on the grounds that it isn’t happy with my partition type, given that I restored my hard disk from a Carbon Copy Cloner backup last year), my PowerMac has rebooted after Leopard’s installer finished. I’m staring at a big blue screen, and ever so slightly concerned. But every now and then, the Mac’s hard disk twitches, whirrs, reads, writes, and I know that somewhere down there, it’s doing something, and I’ll see it in the morning.

It’s just taking it’s time.

UPDATE: After four hours of staring, smugly, at my blue screens, I realised something was very wrong. I followed Apple’s instructions to no avail; and I don’t even have Application Enhancer installed.

I rebooted, did an Archive and Install overnight, and woke up to find that installation had failed with some vague error like APPLE_INSTALLER_NOT_WORKING or something. My startup disk is no longer bootable, so I’m nipping out at lunch to buy a MyBook to Target Disk my stuff onto via my MacBook, then I’ll clean install.

This is what I get for being smug. And, also, not taking John Gruber’s advice:

If you don’t back up daily - or at least very regularly - you’re foolish. If you don’t back up before upgrading your OS, you’re really foolish.

Once bitten, John. Once bitten.

I’m going to have to gloss over the glaring malfunction of British law that permits any organisation to advertise as ‘unlimited’ something that is clearly and openly delimited (’fair use’ notwithstanding, but we’ll get to that), because I’m more dumbfounded by the abject blinkeredness of O2 in perceiving the purpose and utility of the iPhone, and the mindset of the people who are going to pay for it.

As the ZD article highlights, O2 have reneged on their claim that users will be able to browse 1,400 ‘web pages’ a day - an unnervingly loose definition at the time by any account. That’s 1,400 pretty sparse pages, right there. Now consider the iPhone’s camera - you might want to (heck, Apple encourage it) snap a photo when you’re out, and email it to your Flickr. Granted, your 2 megapixel JPEG isn’t (I hope) going to impinge up on your bandwidth limit on the way up, but when you hit Flickr to see it in your photostream, you’ll choke down a good ~600kb page in doing so. Now we’re talking about significantly less than 1,000 pageviews.

Oh, and the YouTube iPhone app? Forget it. Just forget it.

But wait; O2 signed made a deal with The Cloud, ensuring that iPhone users get to hop onto their wifi networks on the fly, for free, right? The Cloud have capped usage for iPhones on their network at 60 hours a month and, I’m not certain how that’s gonna work, exactly. I have some questions.

Does this mean I have to sign in every time I enter one of their hitspots, and wish to use it? What if I forget to sign out? Do I find out three days later that my quota is exhausted, or do they start charging me? If, instead, The Cloud recognises me and logs me on automatically, does it start timing until I leave the hotspot? I work in range of their City of London cloud; will I run down my allowance in the first two and a half days of the month?

I felt a chill as soon as I discovered that O2 had won the iPhone; and I’ve been crossing my fingers since that they wouldn’t fuck it up. The price plans set off a few mental proximity alarms, but these data allowances are red alert calibre issues.

Here was O2 with a chance to demonstrate how current, innovative and open they are, even as a corporation, and even without the futureproof network backbone (I’m talking EDGE/3G here) a telecoms company needs to stay relevant, but the decisions they’ve made on this issue alone smacks of a company that just doesn’t get it, and will damage the reputation of the iPhone in the UK, permanently.

Now everyone in the country that goes to sell an item gets the chance to use ‘Easy Sell’ (I actually wanted to call it Sell It Now!), which is great, since I never did like the traditional method (’Sell Your Item’). Thanks to this, future generations won’t have to resort to GarageSale to get their old crap sold!

Y’see, I like not paying for things as much as the next Northerner, but if this software is anywhere near as cack as Notes is, Lotus are going to have to do more than give it away.

Perhaps they should consider paying people to use their software.

An idiot.

The cheque is not in the post.

The night we arrived, after the drive and the flight and the AirTrain and the NJ Transit, we staggered through a busy Penn Station, laden with luggage and already weary, I insisted we surface into the street.

So we did, and coming out of the ground at 31st St and 7th, the rush was totally new. The impossibility of it all, the height of the sides of the street, the lights, the yellow cabs, the steam from the sewer grates, all manifested itself in an understanding that at some stage, forty thousand feet over the Atlantic ocean, we had punctured some membrane between our known universes and something that had only, until then, existed to us by several degrees of separation. An apparition understood only through movies and television and comic books. We had somehow transcended a partition between the real, the mundane, the tired and the usual and were standing in the bright lit night of the day after Christmas in the city of cities, the source of all the simulacra of Gotham and Metropolis and Mega City One.

Working a job full time on a good salary is like marrying a beautiful woman. It’s comforting to know where your home is, and who’s cooking dinner, and that feeling of belonging and security and accomplishment, but you’re in for the long haul, come Hell or high water, sickness and in health. And divorce is a bitch.

Arriving in the United States of America for the first time ever, into the world broadcast to me in television and movies and music and books since I was a child, into the Land of the Free (now the Land of the Somewhat Secured or the Land of the Two Fifty Plus Tip) and the Home of the Brave (née the Home of the Braves), into metal detectors and ‘What is the purpose of your trip?’ and ‘Where are you staying?’ and ‘How long have you known your friend?’, into WELCOME TO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA then the dank, dirty and poorly lit subway. Fingering through the many dollar bills and tiny, useless loose change, with no numeral denomination, just a name; a nickel, a quarter, a dime. Feeling them in my hand and looking up out of the sixth-floor pre-war walk-up apartment’s rear window to the rooftops and the rooftops and the rooftops and the sky, speared by the Chrysler and the Empire State, I feel it. The abundant everything.