The pain of the loss of a hard drive

Last week, the hard drive on my four month old thinkpad died. I've used nothing but thinkpads for nearly five years now, and this is the first problem I've had, so I'm hoping it was just a fluke.

For most people, when a drive dies it's a time of high panic. Of course, I freaked out a bit, but as I sat there thinking about the work I lost, I realized that I hardly lost anything. In fact, I don't think I lost anything work related - I lost a few visual studio projects. One is a utility I use at home only, and since I have a copy of the binary on another machine, I can re-write the code fairly quickly. The other project was my source for the math problems at project euler. I probably can't recreate my work here (and I wrote some cool stuff here too), but I'm not too bummed since I'll spend less time solving psychotic math problems, and more time doing ...anything else.

I'm using live writer again for this post. I downloaded the sdk and took care of my biggest gripe. It's not as full featured as word 12, but word has one or two bugs that annoy me even more. I'll wait until both products get past beta before I decide on a favorite.