I have this tendency to space out occasionally, especially if I’m tired, and leave valuables like credit cards and phones and shopping bags in stores and cafes. (I used to be much worse when I was in my teens.) Three days ago I left my black leather bag with my 13″ Macbook Pro inside it at LASC, a stylish gay-man’s clothing store on Santa Monica Blvd.

When I called the next day they said they had it somewhere in the back — relief! — but when I showed up an hour later the bag had disappeared. It was apparently nipped by a customer or an employee. The good news is that LASC has theft insurance so I’ll be covered in a month or two.

In any case I had to buy another Macbook Pro yesterday, a slightly improved unit compared to the one I purchased last May. One of the differences is that Apple is no longer offering their “spaces” app (which allows you to separate and organize various websites into four separate squares) as a stand-alone whatsit that can be put into the dock and opened at a second’s notice. Now they have it embedded into the top-right tool bar, and the only dependable way to expand and use it is to hit Function + f1 — a thumb-forefinger maneuver.

There’s also a new command that brings up the “spaces” boxes if I push the cursor into the top-right corner of the screen, but it only works when it feels like it.

I love it when developers improve perfectly good software so it isn’t as user-friendly as before. Now I’m looking around for third-party software that (a) offers the exact same 2010 “spaces” functionality that I’m used to and (b) can be dropped into the dock.