So we're back, for the most part. For those of you who were wondering why AtAT hasn't broadcast anything new since last week, you've got to read the News Flashes in the pink sticky above; we're moving into spacious new studios in order to serve you better. The transition from our old studios to the new ones is an ongoing process, but while it's been long and arduous, it hasn't been particularly painful. Well, okay, physically it's been pretty painful: scraped knuckles, bruised shins, aching muscles (hey, we're computer geeks, our muscles resent it when we make them lift anything heavier than a mouse), and all the other various and sundry ailments that accompany the Act of Moving, compounded by a pair of knees that function only about as well as one could reasonably expect after nine years of skateboarding. But psychically it hasn't been too bad. The power's on, the heat works, the water's running, and the cable guy showed up mostly on time and hooked us back up with eighty channels of eye-melting entertainment and high-speed Internet access. We managed to return the moving van a full three minutes before getting charged for another day. We have a washer and dryer which means we can do laundry any time of the day or night without having to scrounge for quarters and carve a few hours out of our schedules to spend down at the laundromat. Yes, we can produce AtAT while tumbling dry on medium. Pretty sweet.

So while we're not actually done yet, we're done enough where the new place feels more like home than the old place, and that's a good sign. Granted, we're producing AtAT without the benefit of furniture right now (definitely an uncomfortable process with the aforementioned knees), but the Macs work just fine sitting on the floor, and Home Is Where The Macs Are. In fact, the only real stress-inducing bump in the road so far has been our lack of a refrigerator, and unfortunately we have to blame Sears for that. See, we bought the fridge at the same time as the washer and dryer, and all three units were scheduled for delivery this past Monday. In fact, we scheduled our whole move around that expected delivery, since having a fridge is one of those things that ranks right up there on the "qualifies as a modern home instead of a cave" scale. Unfortunately, while we can launder to our hearts' content, the fridge was AWOL. The details of the phone call saga that ensued are better left unsaid, but expletives figured heavily, and after several incorrect transfers and disconnects (throughout the course of which we were repeatedly told that we never ordered a fridge, despite the receipt in our hands which clearly said "DELIVER WITH WASHER AND DRYER"), we eventually found ourselves talking to the salesperson who entered the order. "Sometimes our system loses orders," she apologetically declared. "That's real rough. Now when are we going to get our fridge?" countered Goddess of Minutiae Katie, who spends her non-AtAT time being a big, scary litigator. It's always nice to have one of those on staff.

In the end (at least, we sincerely hope it's the end) Sears promised us a better fridge at no extra cost, since the one we "never ordered" was now well out of stock. Unfortunately the earliest they could deliver the thing is this Thursday, which means three days with no refrigeration, unless we want to really crank the AC. Thank heaven for the Trader Joe's down the street, where we can buy various cold things in small portions and bring them back for immediate preparation and consumption. But it's still inconvenient, and the simple fact is that we paid to have a fridge on Monday and Sears utterly failed to deliver. And if the delivery van's a no-show on Thursday, things are going to get really ugly. Don't get us started on the Great Sears Kitchen Table Debacle of 1994, which ran for weeks before we finally took delivery. You'd think we had ordered a PC from Microworkz or something.

Anyway, to bring this back into the Mac sphere of reality, this whole thing got us thinking about how Sears is the Great White Retail Hope for the iMac and iBook, now that Best Buy is well out of the picture again. We seem to recall hearing that the 800+ Sears stores selling Apple's consumer goods aren't actually stocking any computers; customers who buy one presumably have it delivered from some big warehouse somewhere. Which means that customers may discover their iMacs lost in the same limbo that our fridge is apparently currently inhabiting. Granted, any store can make a mistake, but we've had no end of trouble with Sears over the years (it's only a misguided sense of optimism that keeps us trying them again once in a while) and we're really hoping that any poor customer service situations won't hurt Apple by association. If you have friends contemplating buying an iMac at Sears, we recommend you point 'em towards a reputable small dealer instead.

So since we've just been lugging boxes and bookshelves for the last four days straight, we're woefully out of the loop when it comes to what's happening in the Mac world these days. As soon as the Macs were in the new place, the first thing we did was get the main AtAT production system online to start feeling our way around again. It was nice to see that Apple stock was still trading over 60. The iMac's first birthday came and went, and while our own funky blue guy (purchased on August 15th of last year) will have to wait to celebrate until we're more unpacked, he's sitting on the floor a few feet away and getting acclimated to the new studios; other iMacs in a more settled environment hopefully whooped up a storm. Apple contributed to the occasion by posting comments of iMac owners from around the globe.

Overall, though, it doesn't look like we missed anything earth-shattering. We were more than a little worried that as soon as we pulled the plug on our connection to the 'net, Steve Jobs would announce that he'd be returning to his home dimension and leaving Larry Ellison in charge or something. Instead, most of the news and rumors out there seems to be the same familiar predictions of when new Apple stuff will debut and what it'll be like. The one particular upcoming Apple technology that really caught our collective eye, though, is this upcoming system software code-named "Borg." We're not big Star Trek fans, but anyone living in modern civilized 'net society should probably possess a level of pop-cultural literacy that includes a working familiarity with the Borg. So if you're not hip to the reference, a simple Sherlock search will turn up a ton of pages like this one; the two phrases to keep in mind are "Resistance is futile" and "You will be assimilated."

With an attitude like that, it's not surprising that Microsoft is the company commonly associated with the Borg, right? So what's up with Apple working on a Mac OS release with such an ominous code name? According to Apple Insider, it seems that the "assimilation" theme is key; Borg is a version of the Mac OS which runs on all Apple hardware based on the new "Single Unified Common Architecture," including the iBook, the new "Kihei" iMac, and the Power Mac G4. By "assimilating" all product lines into a single hardware architecture, Apple should be able to keep costs down while bringing new technologies to all of its systems simultaneously. So there's nothing scary about the "Borg" name. Unless it's just the first stage in Apple's ten-year plan to take over the universe...

Battery life! Along with weight and size, that's probably one of the Big Three when it comes to laptop attributes everyone's keeping an eye on. Apple's been pretty good in the battery life arena recently; the current "bronze" PowerBook G3, while being both smaller and lighter than its predecessor, boasts a longer-lasting 5-hour battery. Pop a second one in if you don't need the CD/DVD drive and you can work "up to" ten hours unplugged. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on which reality you're living in. We figure four hours per battery is probably optimistic; and nobody who's tried has actually been able to watch Austin Powers twice on a single charge, contrary to Apple's ad campaign. Still, that's a solid chunk of charge, and the upcoming iBook packs a "6-hour" battery to raise the stakes.

But that doesn't mean things can't get better. Faithful viewer Shane Burgess pointed out a CNN article which discusses a new laptop battery that provides a solid fifteen hours of juice. PowerBook veterans may recall older third-party products that took a similar approach; a battery that's the same shape as the laptop itself and clips onto the bottom, connecting to the A/C adapter jack. Since the battery's much larger than one that could fit inside the laptop itself, it can provide a lot more power. This new generation of mega-batteries, however, also uses the extra space more efficiently and increases capacity with new battery technologies.

Of course, using one of these clip-on batteries means that you'd have to tote around an extra couple of pounds, but for many people, that's a terrific trade-off. Now before you start moaning about how Wintel laptops are now going to have way longer battery life than PowerBooks, it's worth noting that the article lists Apple as one company whose products will soon benefit from these new batteries. Let's see; a PowerBook G3 with dual internal batteries and the clip-on should get up to twenty-five hours of runtime. Now that's a battery life to write home about.