A few weeks ago, my external hard drive became corrupted. The data itself was still there, I think, but the registry was corrupted and the data was inaccessible. I attempted several efforts at restoration, but ultimately concluded that it would be easier to reformat the drive and recover what data I could elsewhere. All I kept on the drive was music and video, and the music was easy enough to recover from my iPod. Unfortunately, only a very small percentage of my video library is on my iPhone at any given moment, and while I'd considered various means of backing up that large amount of data, I never got around to it. So most was lost; since this is mostly video I ripped from my own DVDs, it's not a catastrophic lost, I simply have to rerip the video.

So that sucked. I had access to my music on my iPod, but still the loss of the hard drive really threw me off my rhythm. As I attempted to recover my data, I stared at my computer monitor numbly, my expression I believe reminiscent of the way Tanner looked at me after I picked him up from the vet, without his testicles. Once I accepted that I had recovered what I could and what I hadn't was lost, I was able to move on, and have regained something close to normalcy. And I purchased Jungle Disk and started backing up online to Amazon's S3 service. For the time being, I was relatively whole again.

And then today, my computer wouldn't turn on. I believe it's given up the ghost. Which, I suppose, was to be expected. But again I find myself unmoored, my digital dock obliterated by the hurricane of, um, static electricity or something. I dunno. All I know is it's time to buy a new computer. This is the one I picked. A bit more than I wanted to spend, but I feel the extra money was well-spent. I'll pick it up from Best Buy this evening; unfortunately, only the Chula Vista store had it in stock, but if I wait for traffic to die down, it shouldn't be too bad a drive down to pick it up. I was hoping to delay the transition to Windows Vista as long as I could, but I'll survive. And it will be nice to have a machine that can handle multimedia better than my old system. In the long run, a new computer will be a good thing. But I'll be feeling lost for a few weeks, methinks.