Somewhere at the beginning of the holiday madness, which seems like a long couple of weeks ago, my laptop crashed and came up with a bad superblock. That's Not Good, but fsck fixed it, and I was too busy preparing for company and parties and trips and stuff to do anything about it. And forgot about it.
Of course it died. Right before new years, and with only 5 minutes advance warning from SMART before it started spewing IO errors and corrupting files. I have a new drive on order, and am running diskless from NFS over wireless, which is an amusing way to use a laptop, but acceptable if you don't plan to go anywhere for a few days. Maybe they'll be snowbound days.
This seems less of a disaster than other times a laptop's disk has died on me. When did it start to become routine? Maybe this will be the second to last time -- I certianly hope that my next laptop has a flash disk. The Debian Live CDs were quite helpful before I set up the NFS, and I even managed to use the default gnome desktop for an evening with them, without utterly hating it. My mr and etckeeper setup made it easy to check everything back out from revision control. So the tools for dealing with a dead laptop disk are improved, though d-i still doesn't support installs over NFS, which would have saved me some time setting that up.
The first snow is starting to fall..