Anthropologists and photographers both know well the veracity of Murphy's Law. From the appropriately named "phantom mikes" to frozen leaf shutters; equipment always seems to fail under two conditions:
1. You have no backup - or it's located 400 kilometers away.
2. You desperately need it to work.
True to form, on the eve of my trip to the States, I decided to make a backup of my laptop which contains my entire life. My laptop harddrive failed with a hardware failure before the backup was half done. As soon as I arrive in the States, the laptop is off to DriveSavers....
This is all by way of saying that I'll be offline for about two weeks until I can get this fixed.
Update 2005.02.02: All of my data was recovered successfully using a software program. See this blog entry for more details.
Karen Nakamura
