Then, Epica. I think they are still holding on to the throne of best symphonic metal act by far. Their musical mastery is only second to their humility. And Simone is breathtaking. Oh, we also got to jump around to the disco-ified The Phantom Agony again.

Does this mean they finally added a mobile-friendly version of the e-ticket site? Did they release an app for smartphones? Well, actually, none of the above.

This only means one thing: instead of using a card, you can enter a phone number, to which a text is sent, to which you have to reply ‘ok’ – at your own expense! – and then the ticket price will be added to your mobile phone bill. So much more comfortable.

Because, I’m sure, what prevented people from buying train tickets at the notoriously user-unfriendly e-ticket site of the Hungarian Railways was the fact that they didn’t have a debit card.

Dear MÁV, you’re doing it wrong.

I hope I did the text justice.

Somewhat Dreamlike

by Viktor Juhász

They step out into the dark. Somewhere far through the dawn there must be a city but in front of the airport terminal there is only a lit up coach, the night bus.

At night every foreign land is dreadful. This too, the smells are all wrong and they cannot make sense of the signs. The bus slowly fills then starts its journey through sleeping suburbs, houses, gardens and derelict buildings, then takes a steep turn to a no man’s land resembling a disused railway station and there it stops for good. The mustached man stepping out from the driver’s booth keeps repeating something articulately and loudly. They take off, because everyone else takes off, then the bus leaves and they just stand there in the nondescript street of the unknown slurb, on a concrete strip adjacent to a pair of rails. By the time they get confused though another bus appears, old and battered, but this must be it, so they get on. Bungalows are replaced by dark concrete towers. At one of the stops suddenly some like a dozen thickset men in yellow visibility vests board the bus, with IDs hanging on neck straps, and tickets must be repurchased even though they have no idea what was wrong with the ones they had. ‘No! No! No!’ reply the controllers to every inquiry, shaking their heads and pointing animatedly while talking loudly and hoarsely to each other, in general looking quite frightening. The problem with the tickets is never revealed but in the meantime the bus arrives between tall buildings bathing in the morning light where there are people and cars in the street, so downtown does exist after all – they have really arrived to Budapest. They take off in a hurry.

I know you still remember and I still remember you know.

I don’t wanna lie anymore, it wasn’t you.

But I don’t know you…

Drums – Kristóf Gulyás
Bass – Áron Farkas
Guitar – Dániel Kardos
Saxophone – Dávid Ülkei
Piano & Vocals – Marge
Guest – Mc Zeek

To recap the issue: ever since 10.6.3 some Macs produce video freezes where the computer remains running but cannot be interacted with. Screen can black out, white out, show stripes or just an endless beachball. The only solution is to hard reset or – occasionally – use ssh to log into the machine and issue a reboot command. The kernel.log is usually flooded with a particularly disgusting GPU dump.

There is a fairly extensive discussion about this problem on the Apple Support Communities board which started in March 2010: 24″ iMac Screen Freezes since 10.6.3 update – pls help!

People in the thread determined that something in the video drivers cause the freezes and that the relevant kernel extensions can be swapped to their 10.6.2 counterparts which stops the lockups. Of course one loses two years worth of video driver updates this way. Regardless, I’ve been doing this for every OS X update since then.

Feeling that I exhausted all available options one day in February I was just fed up enough to exasperatedly email Tim Cook. After all some people did get a reply…

To my huge surprise I did actually receive a response from an Executive Relations representative who forwarded the issue to a Senior Apple Care Specialist. Although the warranty on the iMac has long been expired, they agreed to deal with the case based on the assumption that it is a software problem. I was quite hopeful we could finally find out the cause of this issue together.

Over the phone I was instructed to set up a separate partition with a fresh install of OS X Lion to prove that none of my installed third party software are the culprit. For weeks I was trying to reproduce the freeze on that installation with little success almost losing belief that it would occur until finally it did freeze out on me, classic rainbow cursor style. Logs and system information were gathered and sent over in hope.

Only the reply I got a week later was a major letdown: the engineers allegedly determined that the root of the issue is malfunctioning hardware. I was told that since the warranty had expired they are unable to offer a replacement video card or any other free solution. What’s infuriating about this is that my iMac is an early 2008 model; 10.6.3 came out on 29 March 2010, meaning I was most likely out of the 1 year warranty when I even had the chance to find out about the problem. Along with several others I was sold a computer with allegedly faulty hardware, with said fault well hidden during the time covered by warranty. That, or everyone’s video cards just fried the day 10.6.3 came out…

I seem to recall that replacement programs have been started for much less. Also we are talking about a company with enough cash to buy my home country’s national debt. And I still get to use a computer with a broken video card.