Whoops, looks like we may have spoken a smidge too soon when we said that Safari is all that and a bag of Baked Lays. True, it is a zippy little browser, and it's got a healthy dose of that Apple fit and finish we all know and love, but apparently there are a couple of bugs still crawling around under the hood. "Big deal," you say; "it's beta software, after all, and bugs come with the territory." Well, yeah, that's true-- but when a product hits the public beta stage, any "issues" still remaining are usually relatively small potatoes. We're going to go out on a limb and hazard a guess that very few of the 300,000 people who rushed to download what Steve Jobs called "a very solid beta" expected to have their home directories wiped clean just by option-clicking a link, as MacFixIt reports.

Then again, as long as it's the same very few who actually experienced the bug, there isn't a problem. MacFixIt has only two confirmed instances of an option-click download nuking a user's home directory, and since that breaks down to two in about 500,000 (or 0.0004%), yeah, we suppose that qualifies as "extremely rare." Still, any bug capable of sending your home directory-- including your entire iPhoto and iTunes libraries, everything on your Desktop, whatever else you've got stashed away in your Documents folders, etc.-- to the Great Data Beyond should rightfully give you a screaming case of the heebie-jeebies. Shades of the iTunes 2 installer which exterminated data with extreme prejudice, yeah?

Meanwhile, folks over at Slashdot are also talking about a rather more common Safari uh-oh, namely the sudden disappearance of a Mac's /tmp directory-- which leads to, among other things, printing problems and the inability to run Software Update or Classic apps. This isn't nearly as dire (or, unfortunately, as dramatic) a situation as the aforementioned "gigabytes of your life have just pulled a Jimmy Hoffa" issue, and is apparently easily remedied. Still, since it seems to be biting a lot of people, we figured we'd mention it as a public service announcement. According to the judge, just three more and we'll have fulfilled our duty to the county, thus finally closing the book on that unfortunate misunderstanding with the noodle salad at the governor's ball.

The moral of the story, kiddies, is to remember that installing beta software should be undertaken with the same type of caution as befits the act of stuffing live wolverines down one's pants: there's always a possibility that you'll wind up losing it all. And heck, even if you shun pre-1.0 products as if they were lepers bearing vacation slides, you should still always keep your backups up to date, especially when installing new software; after all, that iTunes Installer of Doom wasn't beta, you know. Danger lurks around every corner! Run! RUN!!

It's the last day of the Expo, and we assume that things have wound to a close. Traditionally, when there's only an hour or so left before the show floor closes, savvy and/or attractive attendees can often score untold quantities of free stuff, just because the exhibitors really don't want to lug it all back home again. And at the very end of the day, it's not uncommon to see booth personnel swapping t-shirts with staff members from other booths, because if they have to drag a buttload of promotional stuff back with them, then it's at least going to be different promotional stuff, by cracky.

So we imagine that booth babes from, say, FileMaker Inc. and Aspyr are going to be heading home with at least a couple of free high-quality replacement windows and doors.

See, the thing we regret most about skipping this particular Expo isn't missing out on the feeling of camaraderie and oneness of being part of the year's biggest Mac love-in, nor is it even missing out on the free copy of Keynote we would have gotten had we been blessed enough to bask in the glow of Steve's presence firsthand. No, what we really wanted was to see just one specific booth with our own eyes: that of Kitchenworks, a Bay area outfit that sells windows, doors, and architectural siding. What does that have to do with the Mac, you ask? Absolutely nada, which is why the Kitchenworks booth was surely a placid island of contractory surrealism within a churning sea of high-tech.

No, they didn't turn up at the wrong trade show because they should've taken that left at Albuquerque; Wired reports that Kitchenworks knew exactly what it was doing. The company just decided that, as one of the biggest conferences in the Bay Area, Macworld Expo would boast a high ratio of local homeowners among its attendees (not to mention "well-informed, decisive people") who could maybe stand to buy some new storm windows.

Word has it that Kitchenworks was well-received and had a great time. So does this mean that we'll be seeing other off-topic booths at the Expo from now on? Because we're looking forward to learning all about the benefits of owning some really fine term life insurance.