My MacBook is dying. There's a short in the hinge that knocks out the backlighting at various temperature-dependent angles. But worse, it has now started spontaneously powering down. One second it's on, the next it's off. And with increasing frequency. Twice now in the last 24 hours. That sucks.

Yesterday I had an hour worth of notes from the revenue forecast hearing in a TextEdit document that I had stupidly failed to save, when ZAP... my MacBook shorted out. So I powered up, waited for the OS to load, and then launched TextEdit to try to reconstruct what I could from memory, only to find my unsaved, untitled document pop up in a window, completely intact.

I'm not sure when Apple made this change to TextEdit, but this is how all software should behave. All of it. All the time. See, there is no such thing as a stupid user. Just stupid software that doesn't anticipate our needs and accommodate our quirks. That many computer users, even savvy ones like me, fail to explicitly save our documents and back up our hard drives nearly as frequently as we know we should is as clear an indication as any that we shouldn't have to. Our computers should do this for us.

That's the part of the whole cloud thing that strikes me as the most enticing, the idea that eventually, not just our songs and photos, but the very state of our workspace will be automatically saved and universally accessible from any device... devices that serve as a means of accessing this workspace rather than as its repository.