Standing in the barber shop for 45 minutes now. It's a Podunk little town, with 1 barber for 20,000 people. I can't get here in my preferred time slots, as I'm pretty sure they don't cut hair at two in the morning, at least not for drunk people.

So here I am with the rest of the sheep. I remember a time when I never hit the rush. I kept my hours out of phase with the rest of humanity, zigging when the sign said zag. I lived in the city and worked in the suburbs. I went to lunch around 4 in the afternoon. And I never, ever went out on weekends.

Life was good, and the lines were short. But a 9-to-5 life puts an end to all that. Why did I have to grow up and get a real job?

One thing I don't get, though: I've been here for an hour and a half, and there is nobody behind me. Was I really the absolutely last person who needed a haircut?

Ever since I saw my first Apple Laserwriter back in the late 80s, I've had a fetish for printers. There's nothing that lifts my spirits like the moments between hitting the print button, and holding that steamy, freshly-fused page under my nose, letting the scent of new toner waft over me.

The budget-minded Laserjet 1022 on my desk has become a cherished companion. I get the Matthewsian leg-shiver should I chance upon a well-maintained Laserjet 4. The 1200dpi IBM/Lexmark range from the Golden Age of Black-and-White (1994) will receive a gentle caress and a wink, should one attract my attention. And if left unsupervised with a Tektronix Phaser 780, well, the less said about that, the better.

Which is why I have to giggle at this page.

How could anybody be so insensitive to our greatest peripherals? The printer is the only piece of your computer that has any effect whatsoever in the real world. Without a printer, you could never print out a beautifully typeset handbill, imprinted on fine foolscap, to put under your neighbor's wiper telling him that if he parks his goddam piece of shit car right in the fucking turnaround again he'll be gluing the goddam mirrors back on. Precision placement of the page layout, as well as the crispness of the text, is essential in these situations.

In the 90s, Deskjets and Bubblejets start invading our offices. They solved the dot matrix-era's issues of ear-shattering noise and time spent tearing off the tractor feed thingies on the sides of the paper.

The original Deskjet was a fine machine. It wasn't much of a printer, mind you, since it offered only marginally better print quality than a dot matrix printer was actually slower; but the mechanical bits were fun to watch, and it was whispery quiet in the noisy office spaces of the 90s.

The problems inkjet printers brought with them, though, swiftly eclipsed any benefits. Lousy print quality was coupled with ink prices that would make heroin dealers shake their heads in disgust. People actually started believing they could print photos with these turds. I wonder how many people today have photos they printed at home in the late 90s, faded to nothing but vague grey tones.

But inkets are cheap, and apparently for most people they're "good enough". And ours is becoming a Good Enough world.

Document image cribbed from here.

The iPad! You probably hate it, but I don't really care. That's one sweet-ass piece of kit, and will look great next to my 4 iPods, 3 Macs, and gold-framed picture of Steve Jobs's scrotum that I have on my nightstand.

There was no way this thing was going to live up to the pre-release hype that everybody but Apple created around it. I have no idea what people were expecting, but a gigantic goddamn iPhone apparently wasn't it. And how in the world is anybody surprised that this thing doesn't have Flash support? It is a gigantic goddamn iPhone. iPhones don't have Flash; iPods don't have Flash; they both run iPhone OS. All Flash means to me is a crashy browser that locks up my sound card (damn you, Linux).

What I'm still trying to figure out, though, is how this thing is supposed to be synced up to your desktop machine or laptop. There's no way you can use it for a main computer: There is no file management that I've seen, and you can only run one app at a time. Also, using iTunes is bad enough on OS X, but on the iPhone OS it's just a miserable user experience; just try adding podcast subscriptions without at some point wanting to throw your touchy device through the floor.

So, you're going to lug this thing around, and then stick it into a dock on your desktop (at which point it becomes an enormous, expensive digital picture frame, apparently) and watch your content sync over. One assumes this happens via iTunes.

Also, just how connected is this new little gadget going to be?

• what about media streaming? Is it going to work with Apple's other stuff, like AirTunes?
• and Home Sharing?
• Is it going to be realistic that I load my photos directly into it without spreading my iPhoto library everywhere?
• Will I be able to copy PDFs over and read them?
• Will I be able to keep a local file repository for iWork?

I imagine the answers to all these questions will be yes, and I can't wait to play around with this thing for the first time. I'll probably head up to Regent Street Apple Store and punch some grandma in the face because she's trying to buy the last one. This ain't for you, you old bag, this is a man's 'Pad.

But didn't Steve look miserable during the keynote? I realize that he's in organ shutdown since a couple of years ago, but c'mon Steve, sell that shit. He looked bored to be up there, delivering this Magical Device. I'll probably be the only one who buys it; but honestly, that's AOK by me. It will be a fine Couch Edition for my beloved iPod Touch.

I can't wait to hear my girlfriend bitch when I read books after lights-out on this 400 megawatt handheld TV.

Somewhere, lost in the patchwork quilt of spaghetti code that runs this thing, buried under sedimentary layers of custom code used to workaround various upgrade problems encountered over the years, is a bug in my comment code.

This will probably never be fixed, so I guess this just became a one-way conversation.

Update: Comments fixed. Now if I only had some readers left...