The US Embassy, who charge a premium-rate of £1.20 per minute to speak to them, were entirely un-fucking-helpful. They won’t advise the airline as to what to do as it’s not in their jurisdiction, and they won’t assess my case over the phone. I’m having to go down to London on June the 14th (yep, some three weeks after I was supposed to fly - this is the earliest they can see me) to formally apply for a visa which will then take five days or so to process. Apparenly it’s at the discretion of American Airlines as to whether they’ll let me fly or not, and even if they do there’s no guarantee that at immigration I won’t be refused entry into the US.

They did give me the email for some department in the US who I can contact to try and expedite my case in some way, but I won’t hold out much hope.

To top this all off, and as seems to be standard procedure for airlines these days, they’re unwilling to let me re-book or offer anything on my flight. The cancellation fee is the full price of the ticket less tax, which comes to about £600. Great.

I should be some way over the Atlantic as I type this, but instead I’m sat here back in sunny Manchester Atherton due to the fact that I’m apparently inelligible to fly to the US under their visa waiver program.

At the check-in gate at Manchester Airport the security bloke leafed through my passport and noticed a stamp from the US Embassy in London, dating back from circa 2002. This was the result of an application I filled out for a six-month visa that was denied owing to a lack of “strong social and economic ties to the traveler’s place of permanent residence”. I didn’t think much of this at the time, and indeed flew to the US for three months not long after. I’ve even been twice since then - another 3 month stint in San Diego and a two-week stay near Washington D.C with Sun.

Anyway, AA wouldn’t let my board my flight as they’re liable to be fined if I’m ‘found out’ by INS at the other end, so that was that. They’ve re-checked me onto a flight on Tuesday, so now I need to call the US Embassy in London tomorrow and hope that I can sort this over the phone.

SGI, the company that had the greatest logo ever, is definitely on its last legs:

Silicon Graphics, the incredible shrinking workstation maker, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to news wires. In court papers filed today, SGI said it had been “challenged by delays in introducing new technology, a focus on more specialised markets and more intense competition from larger rivals”, Reuters reports.

Sad stuff indeed. I’ve long been a massive fan of Silicon Graphics kit, be a real shame to see them just disappear :( I reckon it’s all because of the rebranding. If they’d kept the name and logo….

This is a boring as fuck post that certainly doesn’t compare with Fletch’s car crash trauma, but I thought it’s worth mentioning what I made of Apple’s service when it comes to having something repaired.

So yeah, some time ago my Powerbook developed a fairly common fault whereby one of the DIMM slots suddenly stops working. As it was originally populated with 2 x 512MB sticks this meant I had to work on 512MB only, and if you’ve ever used OSX you’ll know how much that sucks balls. I ordered a 1GB stick from Crucial to keep me going as (at the time) I pretty much couldn’t live without my laptop and carried on as usual.

Anyway, as I’ve now finished work I figured I’d get this fixed and sort out some AppleCare before I go to the US. I dropped my Powerbook off on a Thursday at Apple’s new store in the Trafford Centre (having 30″ ACD screens on display = massively unfair), spoke to the ‘Genius’ there and he advised that it’d take “about a week”. Fair enough thinks I, and I left it at that.

The turnaround was actually just three days. They shipped it to their service centre on that day, it was fixed and sent back the day after. If it hadn’t have been a bank holiday weekend I’d have had it sooner, as it was I had to pick it up on the Tuesday. That’s not bad going considering they would have had to replace the entire main logic board to fix this problem.

On the back of that kind of service I purchased AppleCare (which ain’t fucken cheap, let me tell you) so I’m sorted should anything b0rk whilst I’m outside the one year warranty and outside of the UK. Treats!