Neuroscience

It's all getting a bit cyber: They grew a rat brain in a dish, and taught it to fly.

No, really...

I'd really like it if things would just work out for a change!
I took my bike in to have a new rear tyre fitted, and for the fork seals to be replaced.
The place rings me up at 5pm to say that they've just discovered they ordered the wrong ones, and of course my bike is dismantled so I can't ride it home..

I have persuaded them to give me a loaner, a Pegaso 650 thumper, although I have to admit it's a bit of a lemon. However I'm not complaining, as it's better than catching the bus. I'm just hoping it starts better tomorrow morning than it did this evening in the shop! (The guy eventually manages to start it, then pegs it at 5000rpm for a minute "so it can warm up". Mmm, I hope they don't treat *my* bike that way!)

Tonight, my plans are to sit around with a stack of 30 DVDRs and burn as much as I can off the corrupted harddrive so I can send it off tomorrow.
I don't suppose anyone knows if the following is a valid way to backup a windows partition? (ie. One containing a bootable WinXP install)

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=- | bzip2 | split --bytes=4699m

The Linux partitions are easier, as I can just do it all with tar.