Despite my concern about satellite radio's impact on Canadian radio, I have long been a fan of, and a listener to, the programming of XM and Sirius Radio. I recently had an email exchange with Greg Bell, the programmer and host of XM's Radio Classics channel, which has been my good and steady companion for many, many nights. The channel's programming is really from my mother's youth, not mine, but I got hooked on "golden age" radio when CBC broadcast the occasional program to fill summer hours in the 1970s. Greg obviously loves his job, and I can't blame him.

However, it's hard not to be a little apprehensive about the future of Greg's channel, and others that do not mimic a terrestrial radio format. Sirius recently lost Public Radio International, a channel of mostly thoughtful non-commercial programming. XM has discontinued many of the channels that attracted me to the service in the first place, including both of their world music channels (World Zone and Ngoma), a lounge channel (On the Rocks), and a blender filled with strangeness that was called Special X.

These channels have been replaced by various pop and rock formats that to me tend to sound a bit much like the same old thing. Sirius even replaced its world music channel with wall-to-wall Rolling Stones. Do we really need more of that? I'm hoping that XM keeps its remaining unique content -- channels like Fine Tuning, Cinemagic, and Audio Visions -- or I'll be buying the next big thing a little earlier than expected.

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I remember the day I first encountered Apple's Macintosh computer in 1985. Craig and I were working with the Flamingo boys on a magazine, and it was Craig's idea to do the layout using this new thing called desktop publishing. Off we went to some strip mall on the outskirts of the city, and there was a Macintosh 128K. When I saw that first Mac I could feel the revolution coming, because it created what I ended up calling the empowerment layer -- the first real intuitive combination of GUI and hardware -- a layer that sat between the code I had learned in high school and the user I wanted to be. Macintosh became one of my passions.

Zoom ahead 20 years. I still love reading about Apple, tracking the rumour sites, and watching the Jobs keynotes. But I don't use a Mac in my day-to-day work, and I haven't purchased a new Mac in ten years.

What happened?

Most people don't remember the difficult period for Apple between those first insanely great Macs and the 1998 iMac. During that time Apple produced what can best be described as some very uninspiring stuff, like the buggy System 7 operating system and the boring beige-box Power Macintosh 7200, my last Mac. That was also the time when the Mac stopped being a great platform for games, and with the launch of Windows 95, the Mac lost a few of its unique qualities.

But I decided a few months ago that my next PC is going to be a Mac. With the introduction of Boot Camp and, more interestingly, Parallels Desktop for Mac, most reasons one might have had to stay with purely PC hardware have been banished. The Mac has gone beyond simply being flexible to become, again, very much about empowering the user to focus on what they want and need within the context of using technology.

Today's evidence of the Mac's Renaissance is the My Dream App event, a sort of collaborative creation of what look to be some amazing Mac apps. In particular, Atmosphere takes the weather forcast gizmo and turns it into a work of interactive art. Portal looks to be amazingly useful, and I'd love to try out Whistler. Looking at the shortlist of six apps, I hope they all get made.

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Saturday afternoon I was able to attend some (though not enough) of the Alternative Telecommunications Policy Forum organized by my colleagues at CRACIN. Great comments on what I missed by Allison Powell, Sascha Meinrath, and Ile Sans Fil Co-Founder Michael Lenczner.

I did catch a particularly interesting talk by Ben Scott of Free Press, an American media reform advocacy group which has been leading the charge to save Internet neutrality. After that session there was a lot of great energy in the room. The challenge will be turning that energy into effective political action.

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Donna and I had the joy yesterday of meeting Sacha Johanna Cook, the brand spanking' new daughter of my old friends Iain Cook and Katherine Morrow. Iain has already set up a Sacha blog, the first entry of which is a snapshot of the world on her birthday, October 19th.

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She was something of a silly creature. Little black strawberry nose, little black lips. A curious under bite, perhaps normal for a shitzu. But she was a great dog.

Donna rescued her from a breeder who had worked her too hard. She nursed her after spinal surgery when she had fallen off the bed, took her for long morning walks along the canal, carried her down the stairs when they became too steep for her. If you loved Donna, you loved Sissi.

I thought I was a dedicated cat person, and often chaffed against the structure and uncompromising affection of the dog. But Sissi was relentless. She wanted to be where we were, and she wanted to play: not Frisbee (unfortunately), and even the cat could fetch better, but rolling around on the floor, nipping and grunting, full of life, full of dog.

She loved going for a drive. Once during a walk she took off down the street and jumped into someone else's car through an open door. Her adventure lasted only a few minutes before she was rescued, quite reluctantly.

We let her chase chickens, but only once. She chased squirrels more than that, but didn't know what to do with them when she got close. She wrestled with the cat, with whom she had numerous cross-species misunderstandings. She snored on our beds, she wanted chicken from the table, and we all watched "Six Feet Under" together.

And then she was fifteen. As sometimes happens, her age crept up on us until she couldn't find a comfortable way to sleep, and our play with her was infrequent and laboured. We had a good walk with her last night, her last as it turned out. It was like the old Sissi was back for a few moments, and she nearly pranced and led the way, as she had done so many times before. But she paid for it today. There was blood on her face this morning, and she vomited something black after I went to work. Donna called me crying. When there is no good time for something, sooner is better.

I stroked her chest and felt her heartbeat, and then it faded away, but Sissi is still strong in us, strong with her dog love, which must be the purest love of all.

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