I am the proud owner of a Macbook Air, and aside from all the flack I get for being a Macbook Air owner, it does everything I ever expected from it upon purchase.

Everything except not break that is

About two months ago I, as per standard notebook operating procedure, raised the screen of my MBA when without warning I heard a rather unpleasant cracking noise. That didn’t sound healthy, I thought to myself. Lo and behold, the right-hinge attaching the screen to the rest of the machine was now broken. There was a little piece of plastic on my desk that wasn’t there a second before and something that I could only invent as a storm of fury poured through my entire being.

If you know anything about hinges, they exist for a reason. The newly broken hinge forced the weight of the monitor onto the unfortunate, suddenly lonely left hinge. Overcompensation like this can only lead to further trouble, so I was forced to prop up the right side with whatever I could MacGyver at the time. This sucks, I realized, as I picked up the pieces and slowly went through the steps of making things right. (continued on pg. T4…)

Fanboy: (n) Technocratic zealots; evangelicals of geekery. Characterized by irrational advocacy of a particular OS, console, company, or franchise. (urbandictionary.com)

I’ve been a Digg reader for well over a year and consider it one of, if not my favorite websites (along with Wikipedia). As of late, however, I’ve noticed a steady increase in fanboyism in some topics that should be quite obvious to anyone who reads Digg regularly. Diggers are obsessing over Nintendo’s Wii (and conversely, hating on Sony’s PS3), they’re suddenly in love with every single Apple rumor ever published and to a much lesser degree, making the site a Youtube portal. However, everything does happen for a reason. Not allowing Digg conspiracies to interfere with my point, if the majority of Diggers are hugely fanatic over certain topics, so be it, but I’m going to continue writing regardless. (continued on pg. T3…)

Prior to the release of the Nintendo DS, few would have bet on Nintendo to continue dominating the handheld market the way they have. PSP was more powerful, had a larger screen, could play movies, and had similar games as were offered on the Playstation series of gaming consoles. A casualty of these extra features was the more expensive price tag (currently $199 (USD) for the PSP Vs. $129 for the DS). But does low price always predict high sales? Sony had long since dethroned Nintendo on the console market with their more expensive Playstation2 (outselling its competitor 5:1). It was beginning to appear that Nintendo was destined to follow the same path as SEGA when they walked away from the console market after a string of failures. But something happened, Nintendo DS is outselling PSP by a large margin and with more and more game developers are switching sides as a result. In this new era of Nintendo, they often claim that their success is a direct result of the emphasis they put on having fun instead of just looking good. (continued on pg. T2…)