I didn’t comment on Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) joining the Apple board of directors because… well, I don’t quite grok all this corporate stuff, but isn’t this just about one individual man whose capacities to make share prices soar have been recognized, and not two companies merging? What does it matter — it’s not like Al Gore joining the board has changed much for Apple, has it? (Well, he did release a 100-minute commercial for Apple in theaters. Was that an initiation rite or something to get his seat on the board?)

But everybody’s blogging about it, so maybe it does matter — and reading Rui Carmo’s post I realize he has a point: what if .Mac migrated to Google? I was actually thinking about it while writing about Google Apps: Google knows how to do that kind of stuff, while Apple seems to be as clueless as uninterested in making it work. What could be better than a Google-powered .Mac?

I’m still knocking on wood, but I’ve already waited for 48 hours so as not to jinx myself and it looks like my second power supply replacement is the right one. When I initially unpacked it I was heartbroken seeing the screw marks on the metal casing (for some reason the iMac’s design makes the bottom screw scratch the power supply), indicating that this was once again a refurbished unit and it might be as defective as the previous one. It’s only after I installed it and booted up the iMac and didn’t notice any flaw that I realized: the connectors were free of screwdriver marks, hinting that only the metal casing was refurbished, but the innards were brand new. And functioning.

I’m not sure whether that was just dumb luck, or they did knowingly send me an imperfect replacement unit the first time because they didn’t know if I had any valid reason to want a replacement, and agreed to send me a brand-new one when I could demonstrate that it did fix my random shutdowns. I’d like to think it’s the latter — I can’t blame them for not immediately trusting my judgment (even though, the way the iMac is designed, every power supply exchange bears significant risk of knocking off a couple capacitors from the logic board, so you don’t want to do it too often).

Scobleizer:

He was telling me how easy it is for someone to sit at a Starbucks, slurp off the local WiFi, and recreate almost everything you do, often gaining passwords and private conversations. […] I could be sitting next to you watching EVERYTHING you are typing across the Internet.

Nothing new, but it bears repeating. Over and over again.