Life and it’s little intracacies. Just as work started to slow down to “Barely Manageable”, I strolled in from walking Photon to find my computer—which should have been asleep—running all of its fans at the volume of a vacuum cleaner. The hard drive had failed.

From there, it has devolved into a series of episodes much like Fortunately, a book I loved as a kid: Fortunately, the computer is fine, unfortunately there is a mechanical flaw and physical damage to the hard drive. Fortunately I do backup, and had backed up important work files relatively recently; unfortunately I have been not as rigourous at saving my email and iPhoto library with all the family snaps in it. Fortunately there is a reasonably priced data recovery service in our neighbourhood; unfortunately reasonable price means something different in the data recovery world.

You get the idea. I’ll learn the extent of the loss in the next day. C’est la vie. But let me be a lesson to you. Oh, I had excuses too, I had a big pile of DVDs out to back everything up. I put it off one day too long. Don’t be me. (Brought to you by the National I-Told-You-So Council.)