andrewlighten.com

Remember a few days ago I said that when I needed to reinstall my laptop I’d consider a Kalyway (Mac OS-X hacked for the PC) partition?

Well, I lied.

The gods of hard disc reliability didn’t take kindly to me last weekend when they decided to kill the disc in my laptop. It was running fine all last week, but when I opened it up Saturday morning it was behaving very strangely. A reboot or two later and a plain, simple I/O error was all I got on boot up. Dang.

I didn’t lose anything of value but extremely inconvenient timing. I think the only thing I didn’t have backed up was the last few days of photographs – so I’ve lost maybe 50 shots.

Given that I have to be productive with this thing right now I don’t have the luxury of spending time working out hacked operating systems that don’t earn me any money. So, it will have to wait until next time. Right now I’ve reinstalled pretty much everything I need, although as usual, the next few days will reveal all those little things you forget about.

Small aside: Picked up a 250gb disc for $115 at CPL. Sweet. Much, much more room than before. The disc that died was 80gb.

Long time readers of my blog will know that I’m not exactly a huge fan of the American political machine. A number of my good friends (especially in the online world) are American, and they are all great people, but they are ruled by idiots. Most would probably admit as much.

Despite this, my absolutely favorite podcast is This American Life, produced by Chicago public radio.

If I were ever a guest on the long running British radio programme Desert Island Discs, instead of picking 8 recordings I’d like to be marooned with I’d pick this podcast as my number one and not even bother with the other seven.

Every single week, This American Life is interesting, insightful and extremely entertaining. It’s well written, the editing is tight, the linking of stories is perfect and the presentation is spot on.

It’s presented by Ira Glass, and here’s his take on why it’s so good.