I'd like to take a moment to remind everyone that hard drive failure can strike at the worst possible times.

Like it did for me, today.

I'm sitting here writing a paper on Leibniz and Berkeley, and their views on God's role in day-to-day life. It's due tomorrow at 5 pm, so I was down to about 22 hours left to work on it ... when all of the sudden, my network connection dies. Turns out, the system drive on my router/fileserver failed, taking with it a bunch of random stuff from my past that I'd have liked to keep around, but only had there, figuring it was a newer disk, so it'd be unlikely to die.

Well, wrong! The disk bit the big one, can't even mount the main partition on it anymore.

So ... let that be a reminder to everyone ... if you have data you don't want to lose, make sure it's in more than one place.

Fortunately, I had an older disk lying around unused, so I swapped that in and rebuilt my OS on that... but what a pain in the arse. And at such a bad time.

Now I'm going to be awake and hammering on this paper for the next 18 hours, writing incoherent babble instead of a decent paper. And why? Because my disk died! The bastard!

So, to keep me from going insane and slaughtering the masses in an orgy of blood and fire, I figure ... this has happened to other people too. So tell your story of catastrophic hardware failure! Join in the fun!