After rolling out of bed this morning, I walk to the computer to check my email. Having received nothing, I put the computer to sleep and go get something to eat. I come back to the computer a couple of hours later and wake it up. It starts lagging on me, and I look over at my external hard drive and the light on the front is just blinking at me. I turn off the drive and proceed to restart the computer, hoping it would resolve itself. I turn the drive back on after the computer loads and the computer just completely goes to crap. I can’t get it to do anything, and the stupid drive is just blinking at me. I’ve only had this drive for a year, and it is a really good drive…a Lacie 250GB d2 drive. Well, it turns out that it is kaput…completely. I can’t get anything off it. So I have lost just about everything on my computer. My system drive is still fine, which allows me to run windows and everything else, but I don’t have any of my photos, music, or any other media. Luckily I backed up most of my photos last summer. However, I have lost everything from the past year. Basically, anything created over the past year is gone…papers, research, photos. Gone. So the lesson learned is….back up your computer!!! Please!! Don’t make the same mistake I did. I bought the best possible equipment, and it still failed on me. So I have another drive in the mail, and if I can’t recover the old one, I’m going to buy another so I can have them mirror each other. Anyways, it was a sad day. Maybe its an omen…for me to forget about the past year, which was pretty pathetic from a creative production standpoint. hmm