Steven Sinofsky bring that beautiful, bald head over here so I can give it a kiss. I’ve just watched Microsoft’s Windows 8 reveal and I’m happier than all 15 of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lawyers.

Last week I was whinging about how Ubuntu bored me. After promising bold reinvention, Canonical did the OS equivalent of rearranging its sock drawer. Well, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted Canonical to tip the drawer out; maybe throw some boxer shorts in there – hell, go mad, put the Spiderman Y fronts on hangers. Something, anything, that would make the OS market a little more interesting.

Well blow me down if Microsoft hasn’t done just that. Windows 8 in inheriting the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI, making it suitable for even the stubbiest of stubby fingers. (Incidentally, how on Earth has Microsoft R&D never got touch right in the past? Surely, if you’ve got the monstrous paws of sausage-fingered Steve Ballmer to work with, perfecting a touch interface everybody can use is a doddle).

Dave Stevenson on why Stuart Turton’s wrong: Windows 8 can’t work on desktops, laptops and tablets

There are other bits and bobs, of course, but in a funny sort of way I’m not interested in the feature list. What delights me is that a company of Microsoft’s size is beginning to do things that make me tingly in my tech nether regions. A company we long thought to have walked off the edge of the map is back and riding a bloody, big dragon it found in the mist. There’s ideas, innovation, a willingness to experiment. Most of all there’s a suggestion that Microsoft has a plan beyond wrapping its fat arms around that big pile of cash, and falling into an irrelevant, dreamless slumber.

Microsoft has a plan beyond wrapping its fat arms around that big pile of cash, and falling into an irrelevant, dreamless slumber

Of course, we’ve no idea if Windows 8 will actually be any good. But, it will though, won’t it? Apple’s too much of a threat these days for it to be awful, and Steven Sinofsky – who has begun dressing in jeans and black shirts, just saying – seems to have had a galvanising effect over at Redmond.

There’s also the fact that if you’re going to blow $8.5 billion on a company worth precisely 27p, as Microsoft’s just done with Skype, there’s no way it won’t find its way into your biggest product. My bet is that Microsoft’s laying the groundwork for people who own Windows Phone devices to effortlessly talk to people on Windows PCs and tablets, á la FaceTime – a name that’s single handily prevented me from ever using that feature simply because having FaceTime with my mum sounds so wrong.

Alongside this, you’ve got to believe that Microsoft’s app store thingy is finally about to hit the big time. After all, if you’re encouraging people to develop apps for your platform it helps if you’ve got something with the girth of Windows to flog them across. Still, I’m not saying Windows 8 will work. Microsoft’s taking risks. Microsoft. Beige, bland, boring, speccy Microsoft. It’s like finding out my dad spends his weekends skydiving into fields filled with swords and supermodels.

I’m also saying that from where I stand, Microsoft’s currently more interesting than Canonical, and that’s a very bizarre thought indeed. Perhaps, if Mark Shuttleworth was bald … it seems to be working for Microsoft and Apple.

I’m falling out of love with Ubuntu, which is strange because it’s as good as it’s ever been. And no, this isn’t one of those blogs. I’m not going to proclaim that it’s now too mainstream, or soulless or any other such tosh. It’s not. In fact, it’s very brilliant in many of the ways that matter, just not the one that matters to me. It’s simply not the Ubuntu I’d hoped it would become.

At the root of this statement is Unity. I’ve read all sorts of complaints about the new front-end, and to my mind they veer from wildly silly to outright daft. Quite frankly if you can’t suss out a new scrollbar, then evolution’s wasted on you.

My problem isn’t what Unity is, but what it represents. It’s a flashing neon sign pointing in the direction that Canonical’s taking Ubuntu – which would be very exciting, except that I’ve already been there. Twice. I currently use four machines on a regular basis. My work PC running Windows XP, my gaming laptop running Windows 7, my iMac running Mac OS X and my travel laptop running the various shades of Ubuntu.

My hope for Ubuntu was a bold new design built on reckless innovation. I wanted something totally different to current offerings — something fresh and new, something visionary

As somebody who happily straddles the Microsoft/Apple divide, I can say with confidence that I have absolutely no idea why anybody cares which of these last two they use. In terms of features they’re comparable; ideologically they’re inseparable.

Ubuntu stood apart: not just in terms of execution, but also in potential. When Mark Shuttleworth declared that Ubuntu would one day surpass Apple’s design by “doing something different and doing it very, very well,” I took him at his word – and why not? Ubuntu is built on the backs of thousands of passionate, talented people bubbling over with clever ideas. These are people dissatisfied with the Windows and Mac OS X treadmill, who are looking for something different, and are capable of creating it.

Design visionaries?

The day Shuttleworth told us he was “hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries” was the day Ubuntu became a permanent fixture on my laptop, because I wanted to see what they came up with the very moment they came up with it. This was an experiment I wanted to be a part of.

And they came up with a dock. Not even a pretty dock. Not even a dock that was better than the one on Windows 7 and Mac OS X. Really, can anybody tell me which parts of Unity are the work of “design visionaries”?

Again, the caveat must be hollered because otherwise it’ll be ignored. I’m not saying Unity is bad, nor am I saying it’s not a step forward for Ubuntu. The old GNOME desktop couldn’t have been any uglier if the default wallpaper was Gary Neville’s gurning Manc face (Liverpool fan, sorry). It does a lot right — most notably the context sensitive menu bar and notification applets — but by taking its design cues from its two better known siblings it inevitably opens itself to unfavorable comparison.

My hope for Ubuntu was a bold new design built on reckless innovation. I wanted something totally different to current offerings — something fresh and new, something visionary. I love Scrivener because it took a category of software I thought I knew and showed me that I really didn’t. Firefox pulled the same trick with browsers, as did Chrome. If Ubuntu doesn’t exist to do the same with the OS, then why on earth does it exist?

Build your own OS

What really puzzles me is that Canonical isn’t building on Ubuntu’s best feature: the ability to basically create your own OS. My copy of Ubuntu 10.10 was personalised with the AWN dock and Gnome Do, while the main menu bar was shrunken to one pixel, so that it was all but invisible.

I ran Scrivener and Office 2007 through Wine, and immediately installed Chrome, Dropbox, Calibre and Tor. It was an absolute arse to set up, and tended to break whenever the weather was inclement or I wore the colour red, but it suited the way I worked.

I always hoped that Canonical would take this idea – this sense of freedom – and make it central to Ubuntu

In my heart of hearts, I always hoped that Canonical would take this idea – this sense of freedom – and make it central to Ubuntu. Imagine being able to visit the Canonical website and tailor your own OS: so the first screen would ask whether you used your machine for web browsing or photo and video editing, or office work perhaps, with a separate option to discover what kind of machine you used. This information would be used to decide what software should be automatically installed.

The next screen would then offer a design screen with a visual interface allowing you select the elements that would appear on the desktop. So there’d be a picture of a dock with an explanation, or a Gnome Do-type text interface, or a menu bar, or something utterly radical that Canonical’s big development brains had thought up, and you’d be able to tick a little box specifying which of these you wanted. After that, you’d just click a button and your brand new, personalised desktop would be downloaded direct to your machine – and just work.

This is something Ubuntu with its wealth of free software is perfectly equipped to do, and something Windows and Mac OS X will never, ever offer. And this doesn’t have to be complicated. Throw in a few pictures and even my dad would get it. It’s one idea, possibly unworkable, but at least it’s different. It would mark out Ubuntu as distinct, interesting — not merely treading old ground.

Basically, what I want from Ubuntu is whatever Microsoft and Apple will never give me. I want a totally unique experience that’s true to the promises Mark Shuttleworth made.

Ubuntu could change everything; could still become the OS I always hoped it would grow into. But it can’t do that with Unity, and not because it’s too bold a reinvention, but because it isn’t bold enough.

That was my attitude until last night, when I took out my Kindle to discover the top two thirds of the screen had frozen, while the lower third of the screen worked perfectly. It was the Dolly Parton of eBook readers, and I rang Amazon fully expecting to be ushered onto the usual treadmill of pointless questions and obfuscation.

Instead I got Rose and Simon. Not together. They weren’t dueting support queries or anything – though that would be awesome.

Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first

After a few rings Rose picked up the phone and walked me through a hard reset of the Kindle, just to make sure that I wasn’t being thick, or holding it back-to-front or anything. Once she’d determined that I had an IQ over 12 (mistakenly in my case), she passed me onto Simon, who apologised for my Kindle being broken while managing to sound like he actually meant it. I swear there was a catch in his throat, like he’d just watched a puppy getting washed down the river. I can only assume that Amazon plays constant reruns of Bambi’s mum dying in their call centres, and selects its staff by throwing rocks at kittens to see who breaks down first.

Anyway, after wiping away his tears, Simon swiftly offered to replace my Kindle – just like that. No problems, no fuss, no drama. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ship a new one to my home in Dubai, though he extended the return period to 60 days on the broken one, so I have plenty of time to get it back to them. He even sent out a free return postage label.

After filling me in on the West Ham vs Liverpool score – at which point we had another little cry together – he wished me the best and hung up. It seems odd to celebrate somebody doing their job, but I doubt there’s anybody reading this blog who doesn’t have a tech support horror to share. As a customer and a journalist, it’s occasionally nice to write a blog that’s not whinging about something being rubbish, or demanding a company stop being awful. This is that blog.

The Kindle is great, and Amazon customer service is excellent. That really shouldn’t be such a rare thing to hear, and I only wish I could say it more often.

Nobody’s that poor, not really, because if they were that poor Bob Geldof would immediately start singing at them, and if that’s not reason enough to be upwardly mobile then nothing is – I mean, look at Ethiopia. The entire country gave up famine just to get him to bugger off.

So I’m waiting in this village for my lift to arrive, reading my Kindle to pass the time, and all of a sudden I look up to discover about 20 kids stood in a big group, just watching me: big eyes, curious expressions, ridiculously cute and all intent on the Kindle.

Now to be fair, I’m 6ft 2in and look like something a particularly stupid child would make out of Plasticine. I’ve travelled right around the world and been an object of fevered fascination almost everywhere I’ve visited. Having a daft face tends to draw the crowds, but these kids were enraptured by the gizmo in my hands, despite the fact that they couldn’t possibly know what it was.

I think a charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations

So I sat down on the kerb and showed them. Their reaction is the point of technology. It’s what every device maker should aim for, and what every owner wants to inspire in others. Their wonder reminded me just how much I loved it, and why. Just turning the page caused them to drag their friends over, and there’s no reality where changing the font size of your book should make you cooler than a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo.

That was just the warm-up act though, it was the text-to-speech feature that pretty much made me the best friend of the entire village. Old men, young men, a few old woman, it was a trick they made me repeat half-a-dozen times, drawing a few more out of their homes with every mangled vowel.

After about ten minutes, I let one of the kids play with it, but instead of trying to mess with the bells and whistles, he just started reading aloud. I was wrong before: this is the point of technology. Debating the implications of eBook readers on education is an entire blog in itself, but I think a charity could do a lot worse than to load a few up with dictionaries, school books and novels and send them to some remote schools in developing nations.

There’s probably reams of soul-crushing statistics on why it wouldn’t do any good in the long run, but I’m sick of charities telling me that by not giving them £10 a month I’m indirectly clubbing poor children to death with dolphins. Show me something positive for once and just maybe I’ll open my wallet and break my long-held embargo on sending perfectly good cash to people I don’t trust to scratch a moral itch I don’t have.

I considered leaving my Kindle for them, I really did. There’s a ton of self-justifying reasons why I didn’t, but the truth is that I’m just not that nice a person and I was really enjoying the book I was reading (Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey). Now that I’m back though, I think maybe I made a mistake. I like my Kindle, but for an hour on a miserably hot afternoon in Central India, an entire village fell in love with it. Sometimes technology is brilliant, and perhaps I should have let them discover that.

So without further ado, it’s the first annual STIAWPPBNOEBTAs! Drum roll, please.

This year’s “Beach Boys award for God only knows what I’d be without you” goes to … Scrivener!

The life of a journalist is not a difficult one. My most pressing decision on a daily basis is whether to get dressed or not. My mind says no, my parole officer says yes. Every day is a struggle. But choosing whether to give this award to the Kindle or Scrivener was like choosing a kitten to throw into the sea. Both have taken cherished activities and made them a little easier, a little more fun, and a little more convenient, but Scrivener wins because it’s the work of four people doing it out of love. And I’m a sucker for love. Also, bananas. But mostly, love.

And the coveted “headless chicken award for pointless rhetoric” goes to … the UK Government!

Anybody watching the Government smother its pre-election broadband promises with caveats and meaningless studies might have concluded that the Conservatives are a bunch of clueless, technologically incompetent nincompoops. This is not true. Just recently I had a chat with David Cameron who said “the internet, yes, yes, I’ve heard of it. We’ll have five. With chips. Do we want chips? No chips. (Aide whispers in his ear). Oh, the thing with the naked ladies on it, nope we still like that. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, we’ll have 500 mega bats broadband up the mountains by the end of tomorrow, (aid whispers again, bit more urgently). Fine, fine, next week. Did somebody mention chips, I’m starving?” So there you are, turns out we’re right on track.

In the hotly contested “you disappoint me and make me want to cry” category, the award goes to… Google!

Ah, Google. Remember them? Once upon the time, they were the nerdy kid at the back of the class. Nice, kind, polite – enough scruples to shame a martyr. Clearly, Schmidt and co have worked out that not only is Mick Jagger richer than Ghandi, but also a bigger hit with the ladies. Nowadays, in true bad boy fashion, Google’s ripping data off our routers and broadcasting our contacts. It’s making a stand over China, only not really because it’s still subtly suckling at the communist teat with Android. Even Mozilla’s had a pop, you know, the company dependent on Google for 86% of its revenues. Not so much biting the hand that feeds it as weeing on its shoes, then begging for a doggy biscuit.

The “Spiderman award for unfair stick” goes to … Steve Ballmer

Everybody’s favourite ballistic beach ball of bald-headed fun has not had a good year. After overseeing the launch of the excellent Windows 7, less excellent Windows Phone 7, unproven Xbox Kinect, and back to excellent Office 2010 during a global recession, many are calling for his gleaming head. This rather strikes me as unfair. The argument is that Ballmer isn’t visionary enough, forward thinking enough, or Steve Jobs enough. To this I can only respond: if the grass is greener on the other side, then you’ll probably end up tramping through manure. Bit of Christmas wisdom for you there.

Ladies and gentlemen, the “George Bush award for gross stupidity” goes to … the police

Blimey, if Paul Chambers didn’t exist we’d have to invent him. This is the man who jokingly threatened to blow up Doncaster airport on Twitter after the snow grounded his flight. The police took this as a real terror threat, arresting him under some dusty section of the Terrorism Act and questioning him for almost seven hours, which must have gone something like this:

Policeman: “Name?”

Chambers: “Paul Chambers.”

(policeman writing in his pad) “Paul, Bin Laden, Chambers”

Chambers: “Er, just Paul Chambers.”

Policeman: “Right, right. Arrested for declaring a Jihad on-

Chambers: “It was just a joke on Twitter.”

Policeman: “A joke Paul, a joke? You must have known that threatening a major international travel hub like Doncaster Airport, and sending the country into spasms of panic by broadcasting the fact to the 12 people who follow you on twitter would lead here. A joke Paul, it doesn’t seem very funny to me… Now, cave of residence?”

“The Ashes award for squandered opportunity” goes to… Nokia!

It’s this simple. When Microsoft has got a better mobile OS than you, you’ve failed. No wait, that doesn’t cover it. When your OS is less fun than running backwards through ten hedges while wearing a blindfold, and boots made of thorns, you’ve failed. Poor Nokia. Their act is so far from being together that there’s a better chance of the Beatles staging a reunion gig with all four members, than Nokia clawing its way out of the hole it’s dug for itself. Which again, is very much like using a Nokia phone, these days.

The “Royal Wedding award for pointless fuss over nothing” goes to the … iPhone 4 antenna scandal

News of the iPhone 4’s ropey antenna couldn’t have been met with more hysteria if the phone had come with Gary Glitter wallpaper and admitted to running Diana off the road. I mean honestly, if you’re unhappy return it, or don’t buy one in the first place. How hard is that? Quite frankly, until I hear the story of the mountain climber trapped in a blizzard with a broken leg who couldn’t ring for help because his iPhone signal cut out, this story will continue to cause me hot, salty tears of tech shame.

I’ve decided to fix the tech industry. All of it, right now. Here’s how.

If it’s been done before, do it better

Company exec: I have an idea for an eBook reader. It’ll be like the Kindle, only rubbish and more expensive. Happily, our customers have the intelligence of drunken sparrows and are easily confused by colour. The Kindle is white, ours will be white. They’ll never know.

CEO: Sebastian, you’re a genius. The money I was going to invest in research and development I can now use to buy another yacht, from which I can sip champagne and watch as my company goes down the pan quicker than the contents of a banker’s pockets after a knock on the door from the fuzz.

I guarantee this conversation is going on right now. And it’s not just confined to eBook readers, but laptops, all-in-ones, smartphone OSes, you name it. Monkeys exhibit similar behaviour in zoos, clapping their hands because the first monkey to do so got a banana. Only our tech monkeys aren’t even managing to clap their hands, they’re just wiping their bottoms, throwing the contents at the glass and expecting us to pay for the results. You know who you are tech monkeys. Now stop clapping and start dancing.

Appoint a common-sense officer

It’s my theory that like mobs, companies get stupider the larger they are. Decisions that would have been laughed out of the room in a five-man company appear messianic when preached by one man to five hundred followers.  To combat this, I suggest that every company hires a common-sense officer. Preferably British. Preferably northern. Preferably my dad.

The common-sense officer would sit around drinking cups of tea the colour of rust, and vetoing 99% of the ideas companies have. To give you an idea of the value of a common-sense officer, let’s imagine how this noble position could have prevented some of the tech world’s more recent gaffs.

2007:

Mark Zuckerberg: It’s called Beacon and when you a visit a website, Facebook tells all you friends.

Stu’s dad: [rolls up his copy of the Daily Star and smacks Zuckerberg over the head with it]. Next!

2009:

Phorm engineer:  It’s perfectly secure, but we do kind of know what sites you’ve visited.

Stu’s dad: Smear yourself in honey, find a bear and kick it in the face. The results will be the same.

2010:

Steve Ballmer: So it’s Window Mobile 6, except there’s some hexagons, and it was designed on the back of a napkin. We’re calling it Windows Mobile 6.5.

Stu’s dad: Just stay home and polish your forehead, Steve. Trust me on this.

Take the “chew your own face off” test

Large companies would have us believe they spend millions testing new software to ensure it’s friendly and intuitive. This is clearly nonsense. New software is as friendly and intuitive as crocodile dentistry. Which is silly, because making your software user friendly requires only one person taking part in the “chew your own face off test,” which runs thusly.

Stick a normal person in a room with your software for ten minutes. Once the test is concluded, if that user would rather spend the next ten minutes finding ways to chew off their own face than carry on using your software, you’ve failed. Alternatively, just fit them with heart monitors and measure their rage for the duration. A single spike represents failure. Either is acceptable, and either would make your software … you know, good.

Tell the truth

This is very simple. Every broadband provider should be forced to put up an interactive map allowing you to click on your area and find out what their average broadband speeds are at different times of the day, based on actual usage data collected from existing customers. ISPs should be forced to do this by Ofcom. Ofcom should realise its long held dream of not being hopeless.

Incompetence discounts

The vast majority of shop assistants will never be any good, so how about this instead? Every time they give you a factually incorrect piece of information, £10 is knocked off the price of your purchase and you get to hit them with a stick. This would encourage customers to swot up before going anywhere near the store, and shop assistants to spend less time lathering their head in product and more time learning what that shiny, bleepy, electronic thing in the corner is. The store with the offer on would probably find foot traffic increases tenfold.

The next step

Right, that should get us going. My aim is to publish a tech manifesto that will lead to a better world, full of better people using better gizmos designed by better companies, and I need your help. In the next few days I’ll offer up my rules for we the public. Feel free to post your own suggestions below and after we’ve all had a nice, old bicker and plenty of tea, I’ll pull them all together and see what we’ve got.

Bombast be damned, Scrivener is brilliant.

It’s a word processor. No wait, that’s like describing a waterfall as big, wet and noisy. Scrivener is a fundamental rethink of what a word processor should be. The idea is that instead of trying to plop all your text onto one page – like word diarrhoea on an endless sheet of literary loo roll – you create a series of smaller documents within Scrivener, then arrange these how you see fit, according to how you write.

Personally, I write random paragraphs whenever they occur, usually starting with a conclusion so I know where I’m going, followed by an astonishingly tasteless joke that will never be included, so I know what to avoid.

To each of these scraps you can attach tons of additional information, including notes, links to research and a synopsis of what’s going on in that chunk. Different viewing modes allow you to display these scraps as a single document, or view them as flashcards pinned to a corkboard –the synopsis showing for each – so you can instantly see if you’ve successfully led readers through your prose maze, or tossed them into a Kafkaesque abyss of conflicted meaning.

Research – including videos, text files, pictures and web pages – can be imported into the Research Section of Scrivener and opened within the program. These items can also be cross-linked to the individual scraps, so that opening the section that deals with tasteless jokes immediately leads off to an article on Manchester City… for example.

There’s loads more. Scrivener is a big, tasty word pie seasoned with great ideas. My favourite is the ability to set a word-count target, which then appears as a progress bar that creeps up as you work; nothing like a bit of software bullying to shame you into finishing a chapter. There’s also templates and tools for every sort of creative writing, from screenplays to poems, giving you a scaffold in which to assemble that masterpiece.

Scrivener does what the original Firefox did so many years ago. It takes something you thought you knew, and shows you how much better it could be. Even more impressive, it’s the work of a handful of people, which makes supporting it essentially the same as adopting an orphan, or rescuing a drowning kitten.

Scrivener has been knocking around for the Mac for ages, but it’s now in a free beta for lovely PC folk. I suggest you go play with it, and see how much happier your life could be.

One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

I’ll be honest, at that moment Tristan was the software world’s Tom Jones and my knickers were mid-flight. Three years later and things are a little different. These days, standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue. We have the browser ballot – Opera’s work, but Mozilla celebrated loudest – bookmark syncing across multiple machines, private browsing, hardware acceleration. The list goes on.

Standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue

Internet Explorer is learning how to play nice with others, Safari gets prettier every iteration, Opera’s on feature steroids and Chrome goes whoosh. Do we still need Mozilla keeping everybody else honest? If not, then what is it that Firefox still offers? What is the outstanding feature? Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

My lord, if looks could kill I’d be stabbed, shot and dropped off a bridge by now. But bear with me, ferocious internet creature filled with malice and wrath. I’m not suggesting Mozilla give up on Firefox, or that the company’s rubbish at creating browsers. It’s not. However, given the resources available to rivals, and their renewed impetus, Mozilla’s beginning to look like a pantomime horse with a 100,000 people inside being asked to race in the Grand National.

Roaming troublemaker

I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

And in the finest traditions of “did you hear what that bloke just said about your mum” I’d like to suggest that it crash Microsoft’s cushy Office party. As it stands, Office 2010 and Office 2007 are brilliant, and all the rest are rubbish. I’m sure the community behind OpenOffice.org work very hard, but pretending the last seven years never happened is no way to make an office suite. Similarly, and I’m looking at you Google, pretending hard disks don’t exist isn’t exactly healthy, either.

In fact I’d rather carve words into my own flesh than ever use either again – a point rammed home every time to use Ubuntu for an extended period. (Just imagine how much more attractive Ubuntu 10.10 would be with a decent office suite pre-installed.)

This is a market that desperately needs somebody to be brave. Look at Scrivener on the Mac, an utterly brilliant piece of software chock full of ideas that deserve a bigger audience. I’ve written before about the implementation of tabbed documents in a word processor, and that’s only the beginning. There’s so many things that could be better.

I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment. Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?

Yet, when it comes to writing reviews there are few finer. The reason being that deep down, like myself, he’s a cynical and unsentimental troll of a man who would happily bench test PCs by actually dropping benches on them if editor Tim Danton would only avert his fiery, unblinking eye. It was for this reason that his review of the 27in iMac caught my attention. He liked it, he really did. Reading his words – as I suggest you do – I almost blushed, so evident was the raw emotion escaping like radiation from the containment facility of his impossibly tiny heart.

Now admittedly, placing fun-sized Bayon in front of that enormous 27in screen was a little unfair. He probably spent his first day with the iMac laying fruit on its stand and praying to the metal god for a ripe harvest. Nonetheless, his words made an impact and I’ve bought one. With my own money and everything, which is saying something considering I’m basically Scouse.

I must admit, I went a little overboard. I originally planned to buy the base model iMac featured in the review. Unfortunately, I find components moreish. There was also the problem that I was buying from US site B&H, which lists prices in dollars. As everybody knows, dollars aren’t real money and as a result are impossible to take seriously. The real reason the economy went boom, I think you’ll find.

Thus when the site pointed out that the difference between the Core i5 and Core i7 was a hundred dollars, well… it was like plonking another hotel on Mayfair. Extra 1TB of hard disk space, yes please. Better graphics card, why not. Thankfully, Apple’s desire to charge me $200 (£120 in proper money) for an extra 4GB RAM swiftly jerked me from this rampant consumerism.

In the end, though, the spec’s still meatier than a cannibal’s Christmas lunch. The Core i7 is complemented by 4GB RAM, a 1TB hard disk, and a Radeon 5750. These things are excellent and most agreeable, but mostly background noise, like the ginger one in Girls Aloud. The Cheryl of this scenario is that glorious 27in screen. I’ve become used to a two-monitor setup, which is fine in the office where there’s plenty of space, but not so great in my study (okay, my bedroom when my back’s to the bed).

The iMac should put an end to this faffing. More than that, I just hate wires. Passionately. The way Ghandi hated guns, and David Bayon hates Willow (he auditioned for the part of the baby, but was too small). It’s actually dawned on me that these plastic lumps of mobile clutter are so annoying, so repellent to me, that I’ll probably never own another computer that isn’t an all-in-one again. After years of chasing the fastest graphics card, this sudden lapse into middle age is ominous.

Here’s the thing, though. The beating heart of the matter. The iMac costs $2,199. Shipping to my address in Dubai with UPS costs an additional $374, with the possibility of a 5% import tax on top. All told it’s going to cost me $2,683, assuming I get charged that import tax, of course. In real money that’s around £1,736. In the UK the same model costs £1,808 (inc VAT, which admittedly accounts for a fair slab of the US/UK price discrepancy). Delivery time is the same, and my local Apple centre has confirmed it will honour the US warranty.

I know we talk a lot about rip-off Britain, but the idea that I can buy a computer and have it shipped halfway around the world for less than it would cost me to buy in the UK is dafter than David Bayon’s attempts to wear adult-sized clothing.

In an effort to keep the people of Dubai from gouging themselves on the suggestively shaped thorns of this porn plant, the UAE has locked it behind a firewall. Actually, the wall metaphor is a bit strong. It’s more a pair of ratty, old curtains that have been hastily closed to keep the kids from seeing naked Nora the next-door neighbour. A firecurtain, if you will.

In theory this should prevent clean-living souls from stumbling across illicit content. Illicit content being everything you’d imagine, plus Flickr and Skype oddly. (Click here to see a full list of what the UAE considers to be off limits.) The problem with sticking up a big wall is that people always want to know what’s on the other side. Make the wall higher and sooner or later they’ll find a ladder. Make it higher still, and they’ll find dynamite.

My dynamite was handed to me by my ISP, specifically the young woman who answered the phone when I rang to ask why Flickr was blocked. I wasn’t expecting any sort of sensible answer to this query. I never am when I ring complaint lines. Psychologically they exist alongside that desire to drop stones down wells. I don’t do it because I expect anything to come of it, I just like to hear the splash.

She calmly recommended that I install Hotspot Shield, a free piece of software that ensures your computer flashes a US IP address to any website that comes asking. Unfortunately, Dubai was wise to this particular scam and had blocked the website so I couldn’t download it, along with all other websites offering a similar service. Undeterred, she pointed me towards The Pirate Bay, which somehow remains open for business. I mean how, just how? The UAE has blocked Flickr because there are bottoms on it, and just occasionally, the suggestion of other dangly bits. The Pirate Bay – which offers a range of bottoms to suit every need, including midget and donkey bottoms for anybody having a really slow afternoon – remains blissfully undisturbed.

It boggles the mind. If you’re going to throw up a firecurtain at least do it properly. It’s been a long time since I tried to look at, erm … Flickr in China, but I like to believe that the second you try somebody abseils through your window, kicks you in the unmentionables and shoots out your screen. That’s what censorship should be. That’s censorship we can all get behind. Dubai’s efforts just seem clumsy, like I’m being blindfolded with an eye patch made of cling film.

The very fact that my ISP was telling me how to circumnavigate Dubai’s ridiculously inept restrictions was one thing, the fact that my local friends thought this advice odd only because Hotspot Shield is rubbish, was quite another. They swiftly offered a list of their favourite alternatives, at which point I discovered that when you live behind a wall, everybody has their own favourite shovel.

I haven’t signed up yet, but Lamnia is currently the frontrunner. For eight pounds a month, I get a UK and US IP address letting me access Spotify, iPlayer and Hulu, and browse anonymously. Of course, there’s a performance hit, but that doesn’t matter in Dubai, because the internet works. When I lived in central London my connection was so slow I started to believe the entire thing was a myth. In Dubai most homes are fibred from the get go. My ISP offered me a choice of three internet connections when I signed up: 8, 16 and 32Mbits/sec. They all do exactly what they say on the tin. My 16 Mbits/sec connection, landline, Sky Plus and Sports package costs £50 per month.

The bundle was activated within two days and there’s no download cap or fair-use policy waiting at the bottom of my contract like a tripwire. It’s the strangest thing, but I’m sitting behind a firecurtain accessing a porn plant and I’m finally using the internet the way I always imagined it should be used. I can access any service in any country, download things at a decent speed, and not worry about cracking a glass ceiling nobody told me about.

Ultimately, I’m quite glad the UAE’s authorities block websites, and thrilled that they’re so inept at it. Just like everybody in Dubai, all they’ve done is made me a master of internet chicanery. Censorship, eh? It really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.