Sunday ________________________________September 29th, 2002

(In case your volume is turned down, turn it up a bit)

As you may have noticed, this is the first time I have posted in over 2 weeks. This post will serve as both a memorial of sorts, as well as a partial explanation for the delinquency of this update.

On September 19th, 2002, Sloanie experienced a personal tragedy. While happily ripping a newly purchased CD to my hard drive, my hard drive started making a clicking noise, and my computer froze. Upon rebooting my computer, the main hard drive was no longer recognized, and the system was unstable. I tried a few things to get it to work, to no avail- the hard drive would simply click and the system would hang. So I unplugged the hard drive and set up my secondary drive (a new 120 GB hard drive) as the main drive, and proceeded to reinstall Windows XP. I was up and running before long, and began to research my problem. It didn't take long to figure out what was wrong... my main hard drive that was having problems had suffered physical failure (it was somehow damaged physically), and was no longer usable. Why was this so sad? It was just a 60 GB hard drive that was still under warranty and could easily be replaced, right? No... while the hardware is replaceable, it is the data on that drive that was of value.

I lost all of the digital photographs I had taken over the last several months (everything from March 2002 to September 2002). On top of that I lost all my e-mails, all of my graphics that I had done for school in the last 2 years. Everything was gone except my music collection, which resided on the surviving hard drive. All of my graphics software was installed on that drive, as well as the software I use to edit this web site.

Though a handful of images were preserved online at this site, hundreds and hundreds of pictures are gone. I did some research to see what data recovery costs (there are actually companies out there that can extract data from damaged hard drives). The average company would ask around $2000 for that service! That's worth my that my whole computer. There was one place that will do it for up to $1000 (less if it takes them less than 8 hours to do), but I still don't have that kind of money... so I will keep the hard drive in it's current condition and perhaps consider one day paying to get those personal creations back. It feels like on Princess Bride where the man in black is only "mostly dead"... I just can't afford a miracle from miracle Max.

Anyways, it has been a gradual process to get all my software reinstalled and to update this site-- time is something I'm incredibly short on these days. So I dedicate this post to those lost in the 9-19 tragedy, and to the heroes that helped me get going again (special thanks to Heffe-- you're the best, man.)

Well, now that I finally have everything running and have gotten over the initial hill of getting everything set up, hopefully I will be able post on a more regular basis.

"If there's anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us... " it's to back up your precious files on CD periodically so that when your hard drive dies in a freak, gasoline fight accident, you don't have to lose that time and heart you put into your work...