Crikey, that’s long.

Emergency situations require emergency actions. I had to get up and running to continue writing. After recovering some data, I still needed a way to actually read and write to the DOC files of my thesis. (Yes, I know about LaTeX, but I didn’t find it until 2 years into my PhD, by which time, there was no way I was going back to rewrite all my work in the format. With hindsight, I probably should have done. But hindsight can kiss my face.)

Nope – the easiest solution was to desecrate my Mac with the version of Microsoft Office for Mac – Mac:Office. I’ve used various other Office clients for Mac, such as NeoOffice, but my experience is they don’t render my existing doc files correctly. So after acquiring a copy, it was time to install. For those not in the know, installing and uninstalling software on a Mac is a beautiful process. There is no registry, there are no ugly configuration setups. After mounting the software image (which you do by double-clicking the item), there is only one step. You copy the software to your applications directory. And that’s it. To uninstall it, simply delete it from the applications folder. Lovely jubbly.

And whilst I’m not in the habit of bashing Macs, I was little surprised to get this window, whilst expanding the install file to get at the software image to do the copy:

Needless to say, it didn’t take 230,000 years to install the software (though considering it is essentially Microsoft, I wouldn’t have been surprised) and we’re now back up and running, surveying the damage caused by the disc failure in my laptop.