Of bootloaders and boiling seas

Bootloaders. What, pray, is a bootloader? Oh you are not sure? Here, read this. Now, in the normal course of events, when your Windows system does something terrible, you usually pray that your backup DVDs are not lost, or your trusty passport drive is still alive and well and thank your lucky starts that its just the last week worth of porn (sorry, work) which is lost. You might buy (beg/borrow/steal) an install disc and voila! Back to lolcats! With a Mac, well if you have Applecare, good for you. Or else, it might just be a 1500$ hit. Now with most flavours of linux, there usually is a way.....

That way goes through the bootloader. This is something that makes strong men curl up and cry. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to rid my computer of the unused Ubuntu partition, and extend Win7 to the liberated space. I also have a Kubuntu partition (totally useful, with tonnes of data). Anyhoo, I did something horrid to the MBR and it refused to boot into anything. Back in the day, I would have enlisted the expert help of mah boys Padala and/or Nandi, or gone seeking the sage advice of Tony the Wise (our sysadmin, a person of Godlike powers). These days, well.. I was forced to walk the path alone. Until helped by Kamerad Kovalsky! Another one of them Wizards.

So... short story shorter - hard disc recovered, and I think I am slightly better equipped to do this myself the next time around. Woot!

So, about Last.fm and other online players

My laptop has gone kablooey. After 5 years of more or less loyal service (yes, Deep Thought, we shall not speak of that one time. Or that other time. Or the third time, when I had to enlist the assistance of our Godlike SysAd at Ann Arbor). [They hire good people at the U of M. And I have always held that while 'one should never meddle in the affairs of sysads, for they are subtle and quick to anger' - the man we went to was like the White Wizard reborn].

Anyhoo, the dear old Macbook having gone the Vashangshi jeernani way, I have decided to invest in a desktop. Prolly (and yes, do gasp) from Walmart. Apparently they sell nice computer deals - Athlon X2. 5 Gigs DD3. ATI Radeon and also 1TB. Sounds good, no?

But my music collection, as eclectic and awesome as it was has also gone to the great beyond of randomized ones and zeros. Hence, last.fm also this cool project called Bollywood Production (go ahead, Google it.You know you want to). But as clever as Last's algos are - in that it can send from one member of the 27 club to another in 3 steps or less - it more or less screws up with Desi music. Why else would Kishore Kumar radio start playing Bhangra. Yech!

Office suites

I feel the need to express my disappointment at MS Office. The version on the lab iMac is the Office for Macs 2008. The Powerpoint package is somewhat unstable and crashes easily. This has happened to me before, but I was usually running multiple things and Office is something of a resource hog. But this iMac was running almost nothing else, just a Safari window. Strange? Yes.

But that can be dealt with. Coming from the Linux world of OpenOffice, which is nowhere near as snazzy as Office (but gets the work done), I am used to hitting Ctrl-S or Cmd-S every ten seconds. (Back in the day, OO used to crash ALL the effin time). HOWEVER, and this is a huge lifesaver, OO has a file recovery system which kicks in when you restart the suite, and should recover your files from the last autosave. Does MSO not have it? Am I missing something here?