Apple has gone and confused people (not that difficult) by naming the 2009 iPod event after a Rolling Stones song on the same day the Beatles are re-releasing all their albums.

That can only mean the perpetually rumoured Apple Tablet is coming. Except not really. The only thing certain – a professional pundit will complain afterwards that it was not announced, despite almost everyone else (besides shareholders) knowing that it wouldn’t be.

Will Steve Jobs be giving the keynote? Will the iPod Classic finally die the wretched death it deserves? Will the Apple TV get a Take 3 and become useful?

Pretty standard bunch of questions really, but regardless I’ll be on hand to relay the answers to all these questions as the keynote unfolds – answers laced with just enough vitriol to create the impression I’m not some kind of apple fanboy. Which I’m not. Or at least I won’t be after tomorrow if Apple does not announce HD television for the Australian iTunes store!

Seriously Apple. Fuck you. I can see it sitting there on the American store. If I wasn’t so lazy I would buy an American gift card from eBay.

So there it is. If you only read one live blog of this event, then I strongly recommend Arstechnica’s. Because that is what I’ll be plagiarising reading. But if you read two you could probably read Macworld’s because that is generally excellent. I won’t mind because strictly speaking mine won’t be a live blog. More like a delayed-by-ninety-thousands-of-minutes blog.

I’m sure as hell not getting up that early.

There are some things in life that I’ll just never quite understand. Grown men enjoying Pink. Owning more than two pairs of usable shoes. Rugby.

Today I have added Playstation Home to the list.

Apparently it’s a bit like Second Life, which I’ve never looked at. In fact, I always had the sneaking suspicion that Second Life was invented by cultural studies students so that they’d have something in cyberspace more interesting to talk about than chat rooms. So it’s a little disturbing to take a step into this peculiar world — a world which for all I could see was completely pointless. A step into the unknown. How exciting it would be.

Well, first I pressed the button that said “Playstation Home”. That was pretty exciting right there. I’d previously downloaded the program when it was released, attempted to run it, and found that connection issues prevented me from even entering. Not a good start. Now, months later, I try again and find that there’s a system update. No worries I think, lulled by the efficiency of updates on the Xbox 360. Hah. 5 minutes I wait for the progress bars to dance their merry yet predictable dance across the screen. Then we’re in. Right?

Well, no. Then I get to go to a new and entirely different progress bar when I eventually launch the game. It’s caching vital elements, or somesuch. I can’t argue with that. Vital elements are vital. Any fool knows that. More minutes pass. It’s just as exciting as I knew it would be. Finally the caching is finished. Thank goodness. It’s time to enter Playstation Home.

Oh no, wait on. Another progress bar. I appear to be downloading my home, which is a studio. Sounds swanky. More minutes.

It turns out my room is swanky. It is also very small. I have entered a thrilling virtual world to find out that my house is pokier than my actual house, and lacks a bedroom, or kitchen, or any sort of room. It does have a sweet view, I can’t deny that. It also has some very bland furniture. I try to put a TV in — my first instinct in any house — but it appears I don’t have a TV. Dear god. I’d slit my virtual wrists if I could find the right button. After wandering up and down my porch and moving the couch to and fro, I decide it’s time to go outside. The helpful door informs me that the world outside is about 40mb and needs to be downloaded before I go out. It kindly suggests that I could download it in the background.

I kindly suggest that it could have started downloading it in the background while I was wandering about my tiny tiny room. Where else was I going to go? But it’s not listening, because it’s a door.

I eventually go outside. There’s a poster which I can look at, but it’s blank; completely black. Let me get this straight. You spent three minutes downloading 40mb of outsideyness, and that didn’t even include the posters? I keep walking. I see a bowling alley in front of me. Ooooh, I’ll wander over there. Ah. More downloading. Background please. Thanks. I wander further. I’ve got time to kill. My movements are jerky and strained for a while, as the download of the bowling alley appears to be taking priority over simple movement. This makes me grumpy and I’m thinking of turning off the console when a virtual person walks past.

“Hi fatso.”

I’ve been in Playstation Home for about 10 minutes, and my avatar is already getting bullied by random people. I’m not even fat; I only slightly raised the weight of the avatar above the median default value. I’m just big-polygonned. It’s enough to make you want to start taking cultural studies. Which is how you know something is wrong. Just as the bowling alley helpfully advises me that it’s ready for me now, I turn it off.

I’m sure once you’ve downloaded a whole bunch of Playstation Home, it becomes a lot more seamless. I’m just not clear what on earth would make someone want to keep exploring after a first-run experience including six progress bars and no discernible entertainment. So: it’s just one of those things then.

An update to Xbox 360s everywhere has been pushed out today, which brings the thrilling ability to buy more hats for my teeny little Xbox person. Woah, you might say, that’s pretty exciting right there. And I say to you; hold your horses. This thing’s not over yet. We can now buy entire Xbox 360 games online! Not this pissy old Xbox stuff we used to get.

And of course, because these are games which have been out for years, and they don’t have to sell them to retailers, hold stock in stores, make cases for them, make books for them, or transport them anywhere, obviously they’re… more expensive. I haven’t seen value this good since Village Cinemas started charging me a dollar extra for doing my own ticket-booking online. Mass Effect, an excellent game which you can get for $89.98 on JB Hi-Fi Online right now, is $99.95 through Games on Demand. Phwoar.

I’m done being sarcastic now. Maybe I’m just out of practice, but I’m finding it quite difficult to maintain. Perhaps you can get nasal injections for that.

Anyhow, it turns out that the prices are much more reasonable if you’re not in Australia. Which of course makes sense; the tubes to Australia are much longer and clearly Microsoft’s Australian division will need extra money to suck the content all the way to us.

But I reckon they don’t need it, because as far as I can see, they’re sucking pretty good already. Ba doom tish. Oh yeah.

There are actually some good, if subtle changes, like better sorting in menus and a rating system for content which could get very handy. I feel I should point this out in the interests of balance. Also, some games are only $49.95 and much much better value. On reflection, it’s almost not worth writing about, but there hasn’t been anything posted here for over a month so I’m hardly going to go around slashing perfectly adequate paragraphs now.