The hard drive in my server finally died. I won't bore you with the technical symptoms, but I will say that I made a backup a day or two ago, and the data changes infrequently, so it's likely I've not lost anything except maybe a day's comic strips. Tomorrow I'll work from home, head to Fry's and get a new drive to put the OS on. As it happens, I already have a pair of new 750GB SATA drives I've been slacking about installing as a RAID-1, which will act as its own backup. The lesson for everyone else, as always, is to scrape up $100 to buy an external USB drive, and use it often. Because your hardware will die. And then, if you don't have a backup, even if you don't lose a bunch of money or anything, you will be very, very, very sad.

Work is picking up, since I identified some large, long-term development needs we have, and it turns out they're mostly my job. We have a distributed computing cluster, with a hundred nodes each doing separate computations, and how the nodes are managed badly needs to be revamped or rewritten. We also have a bunch of work to be done on our database layer. Luckily, my co-worker wants to do the database work, while I've had enough database work to last me another decade; and I want to do the cluster work, and he doesn't want to touch it. So that's working out well.