Dual boot

A few weeks ago, a work friend's daughter had a bit of a disaster. She was writing up her final year dissertation on her laptop, saving it on a portable hard drive as she went along. The drive crashed and she had no backup. A number of us tried to recover the data without success. A commercial firm failed too, though they thought that they might be able to do it for £500.
As a last resort, I said I'd take it home to try it on my home PC. For reasons I can't quite remember, and which are probably best summarised by the geek catch-all "because we can", I'd made this machine dual boot. In other words, I could start it up in either Windows or the free alternative, Ubuntu Linux.
Trust me, Ubuntu is brilliant and proves that Linux is no longer the sole preserve of the computer enthusiast. There's software out there for almost everything, and it's all free. A bit of research pointed to some file recovery programs. Atypically for Ubuntu, the application I chose had a hilariously bad user interface but it did the job.
I quite like the idea of being a dual boot person. Certainly, when I spoke to 150 odd (make your own jokes) teachers at the Institute of Physics Meeting in Stirling a couple of months ago, I booted into an alternative version of myself, the one that wouldn't rather have been on a bicycle ten miles from the nearest other person.
I read 1984 in 1977. Aged 17, I still doodled motorbikes in the margins of my jotters, but I was greatly affected by the concept of Newspeak. This language was designed to be so restrictive as to prevent dissent by making it impossible to articulate such ideas. It stayed with me, so when the revival of the Scots language began, I was only too happy to be involved. Admittedly, this was by writing about vomiting budgies and dogs with bahookie faces, but I still held dear to the belief that if you restrict somebody's language, you restrict what they can think.
As my adventure in Mandarin continues, I wonder about the effect it is having on me. I don't know any bad words in Chinese, except perhaps "ugly", the most useless word in any language unless applied to an idea. Sarcasm, easily reached for in English or Scots, is outwith my reach in Mandarin.
Supposing I reboot into Chinese one day. What will life be like? That peach is ripe and soft and our neighbours have two cute dogs.