I know the saying goes “end with a bang”, but in this case, it was a crash.  This happenstance also explains why there haven’t been new posts in a couple of weeks.  I could make this an extensive story, but I will sum up for your convenience.

Basically, the hard drive containing Windows 7 in my main computer crashed.  At first it just started running slower, then there were some obscure errors, and then upon reboot, it continued to reboot, never even attempting to load Windows.  This was quite the inconvenience.

Fortunately no important data was lost, so all the blog posts in progress and the cache of funny pictures are still waiting to be published.  It’s just taking time to backup data and rebuild my system.

I did have an external hard drive for real-time backup, but it died a while back.  I never expected to have 2 hard drives die in the same year, but it happened.  Now I’m paying for my procrastination of fixing the backup.

So the moral of the story is — always maintain a backup.  Hard drives do go bad, even solid state drives (SSDs), which is what my C: drive was.

Sorry this isn’t very funny.  I did take a minute to find a couple of amusing pictures for it, though…  (And no, that’s not how it broke.  Maybe it’s what should happen now, though…)