Okay, folks, our apparent cosmic penance for the sin of not watching "The West Wing" is over: faithful viewer Reddish Hugh tipped us off to the fact that the new Yo-Yo Ma Switch ad eventually appeared on Apple's web site yesterday afternoon, so we've finally taken a gander or six, seen the famous cellist in full-on Mac-peddling action, and now we're no longer haunted by the gnawing emptiness of knowing that there's a new Apple commercial out there that we hadn't yet seen. Sure, we spent three-quarters of a day in an internalized Beckett play as our souls wandered the gulfs between Being and Becoming, but hey, who hasn't?

The only bummer, of course, is that said ad is not actually a Switch ad at all; the Musical Mr. Ma simply extols the simplicity of Macs and how they're "friendly" to the "technically-challenged" such as himself. For that matter, he never even mentions that "other platform," let alone issues an overt comparison-- his G4 is "friendly," not "friendlier." And he certainly doesn't offer up any useful smack-talk, such as that his dad's PC devoured his really good concerto, or that he switched to the Mac after waking up naked in a hotel bathtub full of ice with a phone taped to his hand and a note instructing him to call 911 because his Wintel PC had drugged him and then absconded with both his kidneys for sale on the black market. Or something.

Our point being, like we said, it's not really a Switch ad, per se. But then again, neither are any of the other celebrity ads Apple has broadcast. Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater, DJ Qbert-- none of these guys are talking about "switching;" they're just talking about how nifty their Macs are. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course, but we don't mind admitting that we were hoping for a stream of bitter anti-Windows vitriol spewing forth from Yo-Yo Ma's piehole. We somehow expect that witnessing such a thing would be intensely satisfying, but unfortunately we may never know, since Apple seems to have taken the moral high road as far as celebrity switching is concerned. Even overseas!

See, as faithful viewer Thorri pointed out, following hot on the heels of Apple's Japanese Switch ads comes the first of a series of Icelandic equivalents. (Yes, Iceland. Apple has Switch ads running in the U.S., Japan, and Iceland. You got a problem with that?) It's a celebrity variant starring Einar Örn-- or, at least, was, since at broadcast time the URL seemed to have stopped working. The hipper among you will recognize Einar as one of The Sugarcubes, namely, the one who sang when a very pre-swan dress Björk didn't. A kind soul in the MacRumors forums posted a rough translation of Einar's spiel, and while there's at least a definite implication that Wintels are "difficult and impossible and hard to connect," good ol' Einar apparently started out with a Mac-- so again, there's no switching involved.

But hey, we're not ones to complain. Well, actually, okay, yes, we are-- but not about this. Celebrities in any country getting on the tube and hawking Macs in any language is a-okay by us, whether or not they're actual "switchers." Still, we hold out hope that one day Apple will stick a fantastically recognizable famous person in front of a camera and let him go off on a thirty-second tirade about how Wintels spat in his coffee, stood up his sister at her prom, and foreclosed on his family's farm. Hey, Apple: we hear Santa Claus himself is an avid switcher. Maybe give him a call? We're guessing that his influence extends geographically south of the North Pole, especially around this time of year...

Are you one of those Mac users who just can't ever seem to get enough speed? Oh, sure, you've got a dual-1.25 GHz Power Mac howling away on your desk like a banshee all sugared up on mochas, and yet somehow it still just isn't enough raw power to fill that gaping void inside. The beast within you demands real speed, the kind of pure, unadulterated velocity that rips the flesh from one's bones and turns it into conveniently preserved and inexpensive jerky. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.)

So what are you going to do about it? Well, you could sit on your kiester and wait until Apple and IBM produce a Mac with a PowerPC 970 or two under the hood, but waiting is the very antithesis of speed, and surely the creature writhing in your gut wouldn't stand for that. You could overclock your system, which is more in line with what a "Live Fast, Die Young, Leave A Voided Warranty" speed demon such as yourself might attempt, but then you risk system instability and even hardware damage, and nothing stops a speedster dead in his tracks like a reboot-- or worse, a repair job.

Your best option, then, might be to do what faithful viewer Pedro Henriquez tells us the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory did: buy thirty-three Xserves, string 'em together with network cable and special parallel processing software, and thusly create a tidy little single-rack cluster capable of cranking out a measured 217 gigaflops of wind-in-your-hair processing power. So what are you waiting for? You've got $132,000 sitting around just taking up valuable storage space, right? C'mon, what else are you going to buy with it-- a house? Priorities, buddy.

According to Dauger Research, who makes the clustering software running on the JPL's Stack O' Xserves, the AltiVec Fractal Carbon Demo has indeed reached greater performance peaks on a Mac-based cluster in the past: 233 gigaflops vs. 217. But whereas 33 Xserves fit into a single industry-standard rack with room for nine more, 152 desktop Power Macs take up rather more space than that. So we're guessing that if you really want to set a new Mac clustering performance record without needing to buy an extra acre of land to house the equipment, you're best off just maxing out a 42-unit rack, which would then have a theoretical peak of 630 gigaflops and would probably hit real-world performance of over 270 gigaflops for what would be a new Mac land speed record.

But even if you somehow manage to channel all that power into the Mac OS X Finder, trashing more than a hundred files at once will still bring up the spinning rainbow cursor. Some things just won't ever feel fast.

Ah, the life of a hardcore Apple retail partygoer: jetting off every weekend to exotic new locales like Cincinnati and Greater Detroit; getting plastered with fellow Beautiful People from Paris and Rome in line before the grand opening; throwing up all over the imported Australian tile floor in the store bathroom after finally getting past the bouncer. Truly, 'tis living the dream.

Unfortunately, you must be suffering withdrawal and a profound lack of purpose right now, since certain factors have left you grand-openingless this weekend. As we mentioned previously, the Apple Store Bay Street in Emeryville was originally supposed to open its doors tomorrow, but circumstances-- specifically, being hosted in a mall that is still kindasorta composed of exposed steel girders and vast expanses of mud-- forced Apple to delay its grand opening until next Saturday, the 23rd. And since Bay Street was the only store slated for an opening tomorrow, that means you're going to have to find something non-grand-opening-related to do this weekend. Mah Jongg, perhaps. Or maybe needlepoint.

On the plus side, though, next weekend ought to make up for the inconvenience. According to Apple's retail page, a second store has popped into the On Deck Circle: the Apple Store Cherry Creek in Denver, Colorado is now also scheduled to make with the funk on the 23rd, thus giving you crazed retail party animals a choice of where you'd care to wear your togas. Isn't it wonderful to have a choice of what city in which you'll wake up in a pool of your own vomit?

And the really serious partygoers might even try to hit both shindigs-- though if you're planning to undertake such an ambitious project, here's a word of warning: as a road trip it's an estimated 20 hours and 43 minutes by car, so even with the time difference, you probably wouldn't make it from one store to the other before closing time unless you drive like Steve Jobs. Better take the Gulfstream instead.