1. I like reading all the articles in the normally sycophantic Apple (AAPL) magazines promising to fix the 10 Things You Hate About Leopard.

2. I like to think about the meetings they had at Apple, in which the Development people fought with the Marketing people over whether the product was ready to be brought to market. Obviously, the Marketing people won.

3. I like to imagine what life is like for the Apple PR Department, which does such a good job positioning the company as an innovator and a creative force, and now has to deal with hoards of infuriated people who don’t understand why stuff that used to work, doesn’t anymore.

4. I like to hunt around for my wireless connection when it disappears from my Airport toolbar. Where did it go? Who are all these other people whose wireless networks appear, where mine does not? Should I get to know them? Do they mind me poaching their hookups when mine disappears?

5. I like wondering why my file sharing protocol between computers on my home network seems just ever so slightly kerflooey.

6. I like bumping into comments online and in the magazines confirming that the file sharing protocol in Leopard is a little kerflooey.

7. I like the mental picture of technicians at Apple working day and night to fix the teeny-weeny crazy stuff that people seem to care about — like whether certain features display their contents in alphabetical order from the top down or the bottom up, or why there is no built-in growl notification in I-Chat. How much dough is spent to correct issues like that?

8. I like realizing there are many, many people out there who are angry that the Dock has become transparent. There must not be enough problems in this world.

9. I like the idea that a whole little industry has popped up of third-party developers who are making money providing fixes to Leopard. That’s what I call stimulating the economy!

10. I like going back to my old laptop, firing it up and going back to the operating system that served me well for so many years. Give ‘em hell, Tiger!

Word comes from Megan in Chicago, one of our most valued and assiduous correspondents, that this humble blog has been blocked by the IT police of her company. Megan writes:

I can tell you one thing that is going the wrong way. Bing’s Blog page has been officially blocked at work with a code of “Social Networking”… Stanley baby - can you pull a few strings and help the numb nuts in IT understand that I need this site in my daily work life? How can I possibly put in a full 10 hours without a spoonful of delicious irony! I’ve explained that this is a very useful site which quite often covers business related topics. I’ve stated my case that while the site is not essential to doing my job, it does help me do my job better. They’ve claimed that they will review and let me know - *sigh*. I’ll miss you sweetheart…

I’ll miss you, too, Megan! It’s all so unfair! A social network? Us? Could that be? Every day we have as serious a discussion of current business-related events as the facts warrant! Sure, a lot of the time we focus on the ridiculous and outrageous, but that’s a direct effect of the times in which we live, right? Just look at the following issues we’ve dealt with in recent months:

• Guys who play golf and bridge while their city-states are flailing, and are then super-compensated upon their departure;
• The collapse of huge banking institutions that stupidly gave loans to people who couldn’t repay them when belts tightened even one teeny notch;
• The most aggressive Fed in living memory, moving dynamically to do who knows what?;
• Utter confusion on the part of experts and pundits of all stripes, and a general sense of incapacity and weirdness from all over;
• The usual insanity pertaining to mergers, acqusitions, divestitures and other organizational hooey in organizations from Apple and AOL to Yahoo and whatever companies that start with the letter Z you can think of;
• Intense activity in the digital arena, including the geometric growth of online retail while brick and mortar stumbled;
• The worst performance by the airlines industry since Howard Hughes attempted to commercialize the Spruce Goose;
• Other (your peeve here).

We’ve covered these terrific business trends and stories just like a responsible information source should, with aplomb, sagacity and no little amount of sang froid. We’ve also looked extensively at your bulls**t jobs and crazy bosses, and even occasionally offered some advice in our Ask Bing sector. And if, in so doing, we have also attracted a witty, savvy, saucy, snazzy, slightly snarky group that get together with some regularity to comment on the general situation? Does that make us a social network worthy of blockage? Well! All I can say is…

Thanks for the promotion, IT dudes! Now come on! Free the blog! Lift the blockade! Let freedom ring!

On Friday, I offered a little fable full of love and appreciation for the pet that has won my heart: my MacBook Pro. It was an homage to The Nightingale, a story by Hans Christian Anderson, which is a story about an Emperor who falls in love with a mechanical toy bird and spurns the flesh and blood warbler with whom he had enjoyed a long and happy relationship. I thought it was a sweet little fable, pathetic in its own way. I mean, what kind of fool falls in love with his Laptop? Shouldn’t I really get a schnauzer and lighten up on the emotions I’m investing in an inanimate object?

Be that as it may, my story contained some mild complaints about the new plaything in my life — my MacBook Air. I didn’t say anything really nasty about the thing. That would have been impossible. It’s a great little tool and I like it a lot. What I don’t like is:

I didn’t even get into the last bullet in my tiny parable, because I wasn’t sure if that was just me. Over the weekend, nerd that I am, I read a bunch of magazines and web postings on this subject, all of which revealed a host of angry people railing about this very issue and taking Apple (AAPL) to task for launching a new OS without proper testing.

At any rate, what was interesting to me about all this was how ferocious and immediate were the contemptuous, partisan, ill-tempered replys to my tender tale of affection and loyalty. Not all of you, no. Many actually wrote in to say that they wept when the narrator of the tale returned to his first love, the bigger, clunkier but more substantial Laptop.

But the rest of you, wow. You would think that I had stepped on a crack on purpose and broken their mothers back most heartlessly. Why didn’t I get the new migration route!? What am I, a moron? Hey! Didn’t I know that you could plug all kinds of peripherals into the supplied USB port? What kind of schweck was I to criticize this apex of contemporary achievement?! Dolt! Idiot!

This nation is right now embroiled in any number of screwups wrought by people who stayed the course when they should not have, who failed to listen to criticism when it was offered, who placed blind enthusiasm over judgment.  

Hey, people? Nobody is more immersed in the Mac universe than I. In fact, those who are close to me are frankly concerned about my tendency to solve problems by purchasing hardware from Cupertino. But that doesn’t mean I believe that those guys can do no wrong. The fact is, Leopard’s printer drivers blow. And so does the Air’s actual battery life.

There, I said it. You want to make something of it?

Once upon a time there was a Laptop (AAPL) that belonged to a mid-sized wazir of the realm. It was a rather large laptop as laptops go, with a big, roomy heart filled with all kinds of good things, an impressive collection of ports, and big, strong hardware that could stand the test of any situation into which its owner might put it.

The Laptop had served its owner well for many moons and was proud of itself. “There is no function I cannot perform should my master demand it,” it said to itself at times when it was charging, at rest after a long day at the office, on the couch at home, or on the road in a random hotel room somewhere. “Be it spreadsheet or word processing or even photography, I am up to the job.” And then the Laptop slept as its owner did the same.

One day, when the market was doing nothing and American business was slogging through another day of senescence, lethargy and malaise, its owner was watching CNBC at his desk when a commercial came on. It showed a slender, lovely hand inserting a notebook computer into what looked like an 11″x14″ envelope. This Notebook was so thin and light that it only took one little hand to slip it into that small enclosure, and was silver and carried a sexy logo to which the owner had already formed a symbiotic attachment.

“Wow,” said the owner, “Yum yum yum.” And so are major purchasing decisions always made.

And so the owner went to the online store that dispenses happiness for those who seek it in those quarters, and pre-ordered the bright and gleaming Notebook, along with the remote DVD drive that was necessary because the tiny unit did not have one built in. “That is a small compromise to make, given its amazing lightness and elegance,” said the owner to himself. He also acquired all the necessary chargers, since his older ones were not quite right either. “All new hardware requires these kinds of initial investments,” the owner added to himself.

Ironically, it was from the Laptop that the owner ordered all this new gear. “That’s all right,” the sad Laptop told itself as it conveyed the credit card information to the online store. “This is just a little Notebook my master can utilize when he’s making short trips to the coast. Due to its tiny size, it cannot do all the wonderful things of which I am capable!” And the Laptop felt sanguine, as we all do for some reason even when it’s not particularly warranted.

Then one day in the spring the new notebook arrived in a big box with the logo on it, the one for which the owner had already developed a drooling affection. And he opened up the box and there was the wafer-thin, juicy, sexy little Notebook. “Ah!” said the owner in a paroxysm of joy, and he held the thing to his bosom and the music swelled in his imagination and all was right with the world.

That night, the owner put the Laptop on a shelf in his closet. “Oh my,” said the Laptop, looking around at the shelf on which it had been placed next to an IBM (IBM) ThinkPad and an old HP (HP) printer with nothing but serial ports. “This don’t look good.”

Several weeks went by. The owner and the Notebook went everywhere with each other and for a while they were very happy. True, he found the lack of a firewire port very annoying at first, since it made the transfer of data from his other computers — once the soul of simplicity — into a complex wireless process that he detested. And his face fell when he also realized that all of his remote hard drives no longer worked with the new Notebook, making his photos and iTunes folders suddenly difficult to access.

But the Notebook was indeed very light and easy to transport, and people did notice it wherever he went, which made him feel very good about himself (at least for a while, until everybody else started having one). He barely complained when the wireless feature on the new computer had difficulty reading his existing network. After only two nights of cursing and yelling, that problem was solved as well. So he was happy for a while.

Then one day he took the Notebook on a transcontinental flight. For some reason, on this particular journey, he was not upgraded to Business and was therefore consigned to a Coach seat that had no power outlet. “This will be no problem,” he said rather smugly to himself, “since my new Notebook is advertised to have five hours of battery life.” As the plane took off from New York, he took out the silver platter and began working.

After about ten minutes, he saw the battery indicator slip from the original 5:00 hours quite abruptly down to 3:25. “Hm!” he exclaimed to himself. “That can’t be right.” He turned off the wireless feature and dimmed the screen in hopes of extending battery life but within a few moments the indicator had now slipped to 2:20. “Well,” he muttered to nobody in particular, “This bites.”

In the end, the owner got about three hours of use out of the Notebook, perhaps a little less. In the old days, he would simply have swapped out a new battery into his old Laptop, which was now languishing in the closet back in New York. But the new Notebook, as a concession to weight and overall bulk, had a built-in battery that could not be replaced with a fresh one and required a full charge before it could pop into maximum life again. The owner said nothing. But something shifted in his heart.

When he returned to New York, he put the Notebook on his nightstand and plugged it in. “You’re cute,” he said to it, running his hand along its sleek, smooth skin. Then he went to the closet and got the Laptop down. “Hello old friend,” he said to the Laptop.

He opened it up and remembered a few things, like how many tunes he had stored on its capacious hard drive, and how he really didn’t mind the old operating system, which somehow felt a bit more solid and well-baked, and how it was nice to have 30 gigs of photos at his disposal, and how much he appreciated the ability to watch movies and burn DVDs from a dedicated optical drive, not to mention how nice it is to have every port a person might need right at one’s fingertips.

Today, the owner still takes the little Notebook here and there, like when he’s going to Starbucks (SBUX)for a cup of coffee and a few hours on the web, or perhaps when he’s definitely upgraded transcontinentally to a seat that for sure has a power jack. The rest of the time, however, the Laptop is still #1 in his life and will be for quite some time to come… unless he gets really serious about the Big Mother Desktop he’s had his eye on for a while.

But that, my friends, will be another story entirely.

Just a look at the front page of cnnmoney today is enough to give even the strong of stomach the extreme willies. Next to a headline that says, “Wall Street Braces for Ugly Day,” and video featuring a scary dude warning about the dangers of inflation, is a deck of headlines. At this writing, here they are…

• Income, spending higher than expected
• Mortgage mess socks ex-Goldman stars
• MBIA says more writedowns ahead
• Wilbur Ross bets on bond insurer Assured
• Dollar sinks further/Oil hits $103
• The 10 best cars - Consumer Reports
• Toyota’s unknown business partners
• Banks could see $600B hit from credit crunch
• 3 steps for living well in retirement
• How Sony won the high-def DVD war
• Don’t panic: That IRS letter is good news
• Furniture company - or hedge fund?

Aside from the interesting tease that a letter from the IRS is good news, there’s not a lot to feel good about here, unless you’re Sony (SNE) and right now popping champagne corks over its victory in the high-def DVD wars.

Of course, winning the format battle for who will provide the DVDs of the future is very good news… unless you think that maybe in five or ten years nobody will be watching DVDs anymore.  I just upgraded my Apple TV (APPL) and up popped a huge menu of movies I might actually want to see, in both regular format and HD.

Wow, I thought. There goes Netflix (NFLX). There goes DVDs. There, in fact, goes everybody but Apple unless somebody hurries up and figures out an alternative to Planet Steve. My new MacBook Air is functioning really well, by the way. I can’t say what I’m really going to need it for, of course, but as King Lear said when questioned about the size of his staff, “Oh! Question not the need!”

Anyhow, just look at those headlines. And they were actually updated nine minutes before I copied them into this blog. When I woke up and looked at them, they were even worse.

I’m expecting to wake up sometime soon and see a headline in the stack that says, “World ends with both bang and whimper. Bernanke soothes investors with indications of additional rate cuts.”

When I was a whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school, I used to love Fridays because I looked forward to freedom from the tedium of class, to watching cartoons over the weekend, to dressing the way I wanted to and not combing my hair. I got nervous on Sunday nights, knowing that I would have to put my game face on the next morning, and that always hurts.

Today Friday feels different. I like it, sure. The weekend will be fine, I have no doubt. But I yearn for this day, I dream of its arrival, because I know that when it is done there is probably no more that the week can do to us. Or at least that tomorrow we really don’t have to pay very close attention.

Not paying attention right now may be a key strategy for survival in the next 18 months or so. Or paying attention to something completely different. I’m thinking of getting serious about my bird-watching, how about you?

It struck me, after my tale of the cute little piggies yesterday, how grateful some of you were in your comments for a nice upbeat story in which nobody got hurt. A welcome change from the gloom and doom was the general drift.

When you think about it, this should be no surprise. I think people are sick of all the negative stuff that washes over us every day, from the coming recession which may already be here to the pending inflation that is possibly coming along with it to the massive write downs sweeping throught the banking industry to the fact that more people seem to care about Britney Spears than about the War in Iraq. 

We want to hear some good news now and then, feel that world is a bright and hopeful place, not a bottomless sump pump of murk and schweck.

The good news is that there is good news — so much I can hardly contain it all. Let me give you some in case you need it.

Chairman Bernanke has just indicated that he intends to do whatever he can to stimulate the economy without making the same mistakes as his predecessors. I have no idea how he will do this, but then I’m not expected to. My job and yours is to feel a warm glow about his intentions and then take that jolly mood into our investment decisions. You know how much the fate of the market is determined by emotional factors. This could be just the lift we all need!

Sure, stocks have been taken a beating. But anybody with even a modest little portfolio of bonds is feeling all right. Shouldn’t the gutless conservatives like me who hate to gamble with our savings have a day in the sun now and then?

Think about our political process. It’s going great guns. There hasn’t been so much genuine fervor on both sides of the aisle in years. Young people are energized and enthused and voting their hearts and minds as never before. That’s terrific for our nation. Plus, for those with an eye on local economies, this ferment — not only the candidates but also on the issues — will pump millions of dollars of advertising into the marketplace as voters fight over the wisdom of casino gambling, for instance, as well as who should be the CEO of the world’s most powerful multi-national corporation.

And okay, it’s true that the housing market is in the privy. This has of course stuck a finger in the eye of a lot of dumb entities that loaned money to people who had more dreams than cash to pay for them. Bad? Not completely. First, it’s good when large institutions are punished for greed and stupidity, and their leaders are forced to depart in ignominy. Our entire ethical system is built on the concept of appropriately public disgrace, from the days of colonial Williamsburg, when they put miscreants into the stockade, to today, when TMZ, CNN and Gawker do the job.

Better still, a depressed housing market means that people who DO have a little bit of cash can now afford to move into that dream home whose price was formerly jacked up to ridiculous heights by the idiotic inflation of the market by morons weilding cheap debt. Last year, in my little California community, people were expecting to get $1.5 million dollars for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage with no property. Now these little bungalows sit there with their real estate signs hanging dementedly from one hook for months. Then they go off-sale entirely. When they return, I’ll bet they’re one step closer to people who might actually be able to purchase them with a little more equity.

A few days ago, Apple (AAPL) announced a whole host of new stuff, including tons of movies to be available on demand, a free upgrade of some kind for my Apple TV, and a new skinny-Minnie laptop that sounds super boffo keen. Every year, one of my happiest events is my bi-annual purchase of something I didn’t have before and didn’t know I needed until it was invented. Can’t wait for these, either! Thanks, Uncle Steve!

Beyond that? Consider this: every downside has an upside for somebody. When stocks fall, Warren Buffet does a little dance. For him, because he’s so smart, the moderation of prices represents a chance to invest in companies who are suddenly unappreciated for what they do. I hope he’s looking at mine. Hey! Mr. Buffet! Over here!

Let’s try to keep our heads about ourselves. As a wise man by the name of Chauncey Gardiner once observed, there will be growth in the spring. Until then, bundle up and try to enjoy the cold. I hear it’s good for the circulation.

Today I am writing my last blog entry for a little while. I’m going to take off for parts unknown for about 10 days, maybe two weeks. It’s possible that during that time I’ll lob in a few thoughts now and then, but I don’t know. My brain feels like one of those static electricity balls that shoots off sparks and bolts all over the place to no particular good effect a lot of the time. I need to get grounded.

Before I go, however, I thought I would like to unload a few of the things that are on my mind, stuff I’m nervous about, excited about, wondering about.

I’m thinking a lot these days about cloud computing. Google (GOOG) is talking about it a lot. You probably know more about it than I do. It’s a movement away from local storage of personal information, all the things we have normally come to expect on our own dedicated hard drives and servers, including applications and data. It feels very Terminator to me. Like, I think about Skynet going self-aware and destroying the future.

I also wonder in my own mind whether we are constructing what is, in effect, the Library at Alexandria. All the knowledge of the ancient world was located there, back when men wore skirts. Then it burned. Now we have a handful of plays from Sophocles where there might have been dozens for all we know. What happens if the cloud gets a massive wedgie?

As always, I believe that Microsoft (MSFT) is taking the rear-guard action and developing ever-more evolved servers for home use. I admit to feeling more comfortable with all my intellectual property tucked right next to my desk. It just doesn’t seem to be the way things are going. We are all melding slowly into a collective mind that connects via innumerable electronic nerves with Mother. But I wish the geeks at Microsoft well.

I also send out big hugs, in spite of what some of you may think, to all the good folks at Apple (AAPL), not so much for what they’ve done for us this year, but for all the good things they’re cooking up right now. I don’t even know what they are. But I want whatever it is they’ve got on their minds already. And that makes me feel very hopeful about this future of ours.

I’m also thinking about what kind of year 2008 will be, of course. There seems to be a lot of negativity around, some of which I admit, in my own small way, I grouchily contribute to. I’m sorry if now and then I bum some of you out. I’ll try to be more upbeat in the year to come. If, you know, the airplanes run on time, among, you know, other things.

Now I’m going to take a leap here, skip the Happy Holidays thing and just say Merry Christmas t