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Just back from my high school reunion in Glasgow last night — as usual, not great food, but good company (sitting between Gareth, an old acquaintance who is now a jeweler, and Mike Thomson, Finance Project Manager at DC Thomson).

The guest speaker was "Charles Falconer, Baron Falconer of Thoroton", a former Cabinet member. Probably the most memorable moment was his reference to having "achieved something no other Cabinet member, in either the Blair or Brown administrations, had" — he paused for dramatic effect at this point, during the answers "competence" and "literacy" were suggested. He was actually referring to having every major newspaper call for his resignation on the same day.

Before catching the train home today, we had lunch at a Mongolian restaurant, Kublai Khan's: Wah Ho, Gansukh and Khoor Shoor to share, various vegetables, meats and sauces from a buffet cooked in front of us for the main, then Yum Tum, Gwai Ho and Hung Yum for dessert. All delicious, certainly somewhere I will visit again!

(We actually tried TGI Friday first, but even at 2:15 they were reporting an hour's wait for a table, so we decided to give Kubai Khan a try instead. Very fortunate.)

A beautiful low-speed approach to a very short landing strip in Fife.

Disturbingly, almost every single so-called "Superdrive" (the same rebadged Matshita drives you'd get from any no-name box-shifter, but with a bigger marketing budget) I know of has failed, including my own. However, since mine is still under warranty (until the end of this month) and we now have an Apple Store just an hour away, I thought I'd take it to the Genius Bar.

Initially, quite a pleasant experience: online booking of an appointment time, directions to the store in case I needed it, all very good. I arrived on Saturday, a few minutes early, was seen straight away by a helpful 'Genius' who confirmed my suspicions and ordered the replacement part, which arrived in the store on Tuesday, at which point I was told by phone that they were ready to install it.

That's where it all went wrong. Installing this module would somehow entail my laptop being with them for a ridiculous seven to ten days, during which time I would have no computer. Since it's my primary work system, that is of course out of the question - rendering the warranty effectively worthless for me.

For comparison, I have had two other systems repaired under warranty at work this week, one Dell, one Compusys. Both were repaired on site, one the following day, without any effort beyond making a phone call or online repair request. One was out of action for the 24 hour wait (the faulty power supply meant the machine wasn't usable until repaired), the other was out for the hour it took the engineer to replace the laptop motherboard - not the week or more Apple wanted.

It's a great shame: OS X is a very good desktop operating system in most respects, but comes shackled to some of the least reliable hardware I've encountered - battery recalls, more dead 'Superdrives' than working - and worse warranty service than any of the PC vendors I've used. They've managed some very impressive transitions in the past, from the dead-end 68000 CPUs to PowerPC and then to x86, from a rather flaky old-fashioned operating system where the most trivial of application bugs could bring down the system to a rock-solid Unix core - now, can they get an adequate repair service going? If not, my next "Mac" might just have to be a Dell with OSx86, where getting a warranty repair doesn't mean losing the machine for a week or more.

For some reason, I woke up an hour early this morning. Lucky, since I'd forgotten to put my laundry in the dryer last night...

So, after a more relaxed start to the morning than usual, I headed round to the station to catch my train, which was running late due to flooding (almost every other train being canceled entirely) - more good luck, as it turned out, since the staff put me on the replacement bus instead, saying not to bother about a ticket, saving me £5.

Later, I had a very nice Christmas lunch with my grandfather, mother and brother. Normally, we dread lunch with him: his first choice of restaurant is an expensive poor-quality Indian restaurant - we all like curry normally, but make an exception for theirs! This time, however, they have a nice set menu with edible non-curried options, so we all enjoyed it!

On the downside, my MacBook's U key seems to be getting reluctant, and the train disruption meant I didn't go to the meet-up for my old school down in Glasgow as I'd planned. To make up for it, though, I saw someone mention a restaurant called Buzzy Wares in Glasgow. Apart from sounding like a website distributing legally questionable software, the menu sounds pretty good to me!