Bah! My hard drive seems to have died as of a few hours ago. Fortunately, I'm well-prepared, so the computer is back online again with a small replacement drive that I've got handy for just such an emergency. My last data backup was made a month ago, so the loss is stinging, but not staggering. You'll notice that the diary entries in the past 30 days or so have disappeared, and that is why. If anyone happens to have copies of those old diary entries saved somewhere, I'd be happy to accept them. If I'm lucky, I might be able to pry some data off of the old drive, but it's not to be counted on. This sort of thing is still very annoying, no matter how prepared you are.

Yikes! I've been tagged by Steve, so now I must participate in this silly game. Apparently the rules are as follows:

Like Phil!, I think tagging other people borders on obnoxious, but I'll encourage anyone who thinks this is cute to reciprocate. And also, I'd replace "lj" in the rules with "web log of your choice" to be a little less ethnocentric.

1. I prefer to sit in very unusual positions, such as with my legs folded right up against my body so that my knees are at my chin, or with my legs folded in any number of odd ways, really.
2. I write in a very non-linear fashion, jumping back and forth between the various components of a composition, concurrently growing them from initial stubs and skeletons, swapping sentences and paragraphs in and out and around. This applies both to writing in English and to writing in formal computer languages, though the habit may be considered less weird in the latter case.
3. When I type something like parentheses or HTML tags or anything else which has both an opening symbol and a closing symbol, I'll type out both the opening and the closing symbols before going back to type the content in the middle. I think this is mostly motivated by a strong drive to maintain correctness when the nesting gets deep.
4. I prefer text-based computer interfaces, as opposed to GUIs. By this I mean "verbal" interfaces in which I communicate with the computer with words strung together according to well-defined syntactical rules instead of by pointing at pictures. When I feel like being insulting, I'll refer to GUIs as "playing charades".
5. I'm mildly synaesthetic. Mostly with respect to music that occupies my attention, but potentially to anything.