I would like to take this opportunity to give a very long-overdue shout-out to Kristy, who, several months ago, randomly decided to give me a 120-gigabyte external FireWire hard drive that she had lying around her apartment (!!).

That hard drive has improved my life in so many ways, but never moreso than right now, as it has given me somewhere to put all of my documents, photos, MP3s and porn other important personal files while I take my PowerBook to Chicago to have the Apple Store geniuses wipe its hard drive clean and install Tiger on a clean slate.

Never fear, backup nazis: I have also made an additional copy of my most crucial files (recent iPhoto libraries, e-mail archives, really good porn etc.), so I have redundant backups. That way, if Kristy’s hard drive randomly commits suicide sometime in the next 48 hours, I won’t suffer the sort of massive data loss that might tempt me to follow suit!

But anyway, the point is, none of this would be possible without the awesome hard drive that Kristy gave me, a.k.a. “genius hard drive of death” (no really, that’s it’s official name). It’s the only data storage device I own that has more space than my 80-gig PowerBook hard drive, so it’s the only one up to this task. And an important task it is — my computer has been acting oddly buggy lately (almost like a PC! perish the thought!), so I’ve really been wanting to reinstall the OS from scratch. And thanks to Kristy’s hard drive, I can! Woohoo! KRISTY ROCKS!!! :)