My hard drive was dying last week. Any time I tried to access data on the drive it would make little coughing noises like this: *grind grind* *wheeze* *cough* *grind* *cough cough* *grind*. The poor little guy was dying, and still I made him slave away, storing and retrieving my data. "Don't worry," I told him "You're gonna make it! Now, just load Call of Duty so I can make one final push against the Nazis before they swarm over your platters and add little Hitler mustaches to all the faces in my digital photos." But then I took pity on my hard drive as he wheezed and struggled to retrieve data - he was in no condition to fight off the Wehrmacht - and so I shut down my PC for the last time.

Well, it turns out my hard drive wasn't dying, it was just sick. But now I'm pissed because I went out and bought a new drive and installed windows on it and everything, all due to a hard drive with a case of Spring time allergies. Okay, Mr. hard drive, you've had your rest in the relative paradise of the rear echelon - now report to the front line at once!

By the way, I think if I could recover only one thing from my old and dead hard drives it would be the IRC chat logs from when I met Shelly back in 96. Here's an excerpt of what the logs might look like:

<Raevyn> I thought you were a girl.
<Feda> noooooooo!
<Raevyn> Feda is a girl's name.
<Feda> I got it from a magazine!
<Raevyn> Glamour magazine?
<Tynee> LOL
* * * Feda has left #kona_hawaii