All morning there were two tech guys here to fix the PC that controls the RIP station for the color printer. (Because it takes two guys half a day to replace and reinstall a hard drive on a PC. A Mac probably wouldn't have died in the first place. I'm reminded of a very good Daring Fireball entry from a couple weeks ago.) Their topics of conversation, as they stared blankly, with deadness in their eyes, at the grey bars crawling across the screen, were Madonna kissing Britney and Ben splitting with J Lo.

I thought that this had to be the definition of something. Two 'tech guys' discussing hackneyed gossip and the banal publicity stunts of waning celebrities; it had to be emblematic of some great societal woe, but I couldn't really put my finger on it. All I know is that this afternoon, after a brief period of working fine, the RIP station now sports a blue screen filled with a jumble of cryptic letters and numbers and a rather Gibson-esque message that reads, "Beginning dump of physical memory. Physical memory dump complete. Contact your system administrator or technical support group."