I am sitting here trying to solve the mystery of the erratic dialup. Four or five minutes of blissful 56 Kbps browsing, and then *poof*! There is no more incoming traffic. I blame the iBook, because the cube in the other room stays online for long languorous hours.

iBook? Cube? No, this is not some ultra-hip chromed Architectural Digest fantasyland I inhabit. It is an ultra-hip rural paradise, with an employer who has a fondness for Macs and a surplus of cubes, and lets busy programmers take them home. But all the cubes in the world won't get you broadband in Brandon.

On the subject of cubes, have you noticed how the Apple design mafia has taken over? I was thinking about this when I went to see About a Boy — a truly excellent movie — where the main character has a cube tucked away in his swank apartment. It seems like every onscreen computer these days is a Mac, if the character is hip enough. Sex and the City, natch. There is a website out there somewhere with a wonderful theory about how you can tell who will be a secret villain on the X-Files based on whether they use a PC or Macintosh, but I have lost it and can't seem to get it back.

I look at these onscreen computers, and flat titaniums and Vaios in the soft-focus backgrounds of so many print ads, and can't help but wonder if a few years from now they won't look as silly as the picture I saw in the front of a 1988 issue of National Geographic, which had a stylish young yuppie stepping out of a doorway, talking nonchalantly into a cell phone the size of a toaster.

The process whereby technology becomes part of the culture - the way cars or railroads did - is a clever mystery. We have a whole set of cultural images and myths wrapped around those two inventions: Casey Jones, railroad hoboes, the ballad of the long-distance trucker, drag racing, motel culture. When will computers ever get their own folk heroes?

And for the computer folk ballads, what will they find to rhyme with 'Maciej'?