EDINBURGH AIRPORT, YESTERDAY.

(1) Hey, cool, they have a Boingo hotspot with SkypeAccess! Cheap Wifi here I come.

(2) Meh.

Apple lost two sales today.

I’d been teetering on the brink of replacing my five-year-old MacBook Pro with a new one. I don’t really need it, but the new ones are shiny. My daughter is busily saving up every Pound, Ruble and Dollar she can, so that she can have a MacBook of her own to replace her ageing G4 tower.

Don’t need either now. Just put me down for a couple of these.

Marvellous news from Amazon that the Kindle will shortly be available in ‘over 100 countries’, including here in Russia, in time for Christmas. No blogs or browsing, though, and there’s no 3G here yet.

Just make sure you sign the Kindle License Agreement And Terms of Use. Or Gort’ll get ya.

(you shouldn’t need to scroll down, but just in case …)

No offence to Neville, but this amused me:

Perhaps a Google Reader thing – the clip works fine on his blog when not using a reader.

Around the time I arrived in Moscow, in mid-2007, Russia resumed long-range patrol flights by its fleet of strategic bombers. For a few months we had fairly regular media excitement as the Tu-95s embarked on a tour of the Frozen North – Scotland, Norway, Canada, Alaska.

Around the same time, thanks to the heroic efforts of the Vulcan to the Sky Trust, Avro Vulcan XH558 took to the skies for the first time in fifteen years. XH558 is a truly special aircraft, the last airworthy reminder of a force which once threatened some sixteen million Soviet citizens.

Both Vulcan and Tu-95 were technologically impressive. The Vulcan, with its delta wings and four Olympus engines, was hailed as being decades ahead of its time. And its Cold War rival, the ‘Bear’, remains the fastest propeller-driven aircraft nearly 50 years after its introduction.

Here, though, the similarities end. Russia currently has 64 Tu-95s in service, and expects to keep the type operational until at least 2040. India has another ten. The UK has one flying Vulcan, XH558. And if the Vulcan to the Sky Trust can’t raise £500,000 in the next three days, XH558 may never fly again.

Even in the current global economic gloom, there must be someone out there with a spare half-mil. And hey, the pound’s cheap at the mo.

via Theo

Too much noise on Twitter.

Stuff I like:

- Tweets that make me think, that are part of a debate
- Tweets that show me stuff I hadn’t seen before
- Retweets that introduce me to new and interesting people

Stuff I don’t like:

- Hearing that you’ve just put the kettle on. Save the mundane and the banal for facebook.
- Being told to read your latest blog entry. If I’m following you on Twitter, I already know you’ve got a blog. And if I want to read it, I will.
- Tweets like @BorisBorisovichBorisov: yeah, me too – that’s what DMing is for

So the PM says the web will be

as essential to our future prosperity in the 21st Century as roads, bridges, trains and electricity were in the 20th.

And he’s probably right.

Thought, though: In the digital age, will we need special task forces to engage with the minority who don’t have broadband?

Discuss.

FLORIDA – It’s worth interrupting my holiday to mention some good old American customer service.

I can’t, apparently, have AT&T’s tailored iPhone payg plan here because I don’t have a US bank account. Which is why I chewed my way through almost $30 of data in my first day here.

Enter Wayne, from AT&T’s call centre. Wayne rides a big Honda, hails from New Mexico but has British ancestry, and went to University late in life, ending up with a degree in British social history.

Wayne also spent almost an hour battling with AT&T’s bureaucracy on my behalf, and ended up bending the rules more than a little to give me an unlimited data bundle I’m not really supposed to have. But hey, willing buyer, willing seller – we’re both happy.

What a world away from the ‘computer says no’ culture we come across so often.

(Less impressed, by the way, with the service recovery at Universal when the ride we’d been queueing for broke.)

One of the consistently popular search strings that brings people here – such is the diversity and intellect of my readership – is “aftermarket MagSafe”, landing people at my ‘MagFoolish‘ rant of March this year. So for those of you whose boat is floated by third-party attempts to circumvent Steve’s vice-like grip on Apple’s proprietary technology, look no further.

No further, that is, than good old eBay. For less than the price of a new MagSafe adaptor from Apple, I got two: one made out of a Mac Mini ‘brick’ PSU, and a natty Kensington travel thing that makes a funny noise when used with my MacBook Pro (but not with our black MacBook), and works on aeroplanes and in cars, too. Joy.

Oh, and thanks to a tip-off from Gizmodo, I got the original replaced at the Apple Store while I was in London. Well done, Steve. Who said people only write about bad service?

Now, if only you’d been as sympathetic about my dead Airport Express …

Yes, it’s that election today. I’ll be off to the Election Night Party at the US Embassy in just under 24 hours.

In the meantime, some links to amuse and / or take your mind off the waiting.

Solve the Italian Job cliffhanger once and for all – RSC puts up a prize for the best entry. C’mon, we know they got away with it.

What’s wrong with Neil’s new MacBook?

Cool, we made Sky’s caption competition. You’d all have got better photos if you’d backed off like I asked …

See Obama, Hook Up! h/t Wonkette. Really?

Large Hadron Colliderscope – h/t Theo

President Medvedev and I share the same taste in hardware – according to TUAW

… and finally, some Plinkety Palin (and McCain), via Tim Ireland. Brilliant.

PS not entirely sure what happened to the ‘Scouting for Girls’ post – it was there, and then it wasn’t, and now it’s back again. Odd.