Denial is the first stage of grief

It is very possible that I just lost everything I've worked on for the last year in a massive hard-drive failure.

I am not panicking.

Have perhaps attained zen.

Luckily, the total boot failure happened about fifteen minutes after I uploaded a jpg of the MESS art and sent myself the text file.

Gonzales: health report

I still don't know how much if anything I lost from the harddrive that went kaput. My dear emony42 advised against trying it with another drive as boot until she, her recovery software, and her computer named Gandalf were in town (which is tomorrow).

So I gave Gonzales a lobotomy.

Oh, lower brain-stem functions were still there, but with both his hard-drives sitting on the desk he wasn't doing much thinking.

Today I tracked down a new 500 gb drive. This was harder than expected. Because of the flooding in Thailand, drives are hard to get and way more expensive than they were six months ago (which is why I bought a 7200 rpm and not 1000 -- that would have set me back over $200). The local computer store didn't have any internal hard-drives in stock, period.

The plan (again, with the advice of my dear Lyns. Some people don't have a Lyns*. I don't know how they get by) is to use the new one as the system drive and set up two matched drives in RAID for data... once the prices drop a bit. This should be an excellent work around for my "Skellington is too scatterbrained to back things up or remember to set-up a program to do so" problem.

So, I've just convinced Microsoft I didn't steal windows 7, and downloaded Firefox so IE can sit down and shut up. I think I'll save all those updates for tomorrow.

*When I mentioned this to my housemate madalchemist, he said "But did you ever work out the joint property agreement with her husband?"
Skellington: "Yes, the last time it came up R said he always knew she was just on long-term lease from me."
MadAlchemist: "Huh... y'know, 'long term lease' is a healthier view of marriage than some I've heard..."

M, L, and I have been friends since we were 7 or 8. What's a few years of marriage compared to that? :P