The worst part about losing your machine is having to piece is back together. I spent a bunch of time on Friday and this weekend trying to make my operating environment at least somewhat close to what I had before the crash. Now, I pretty much have all the application I use installed and running somewhat well. There are still a number of glitches and inconsistencies, but it's getting there.
My next step on this piece is to get Fedora Core 2 installed. At least that is Linux 2.6 and Gnome 2.6. Linux 2.6 is somewhat necessary on this machine, as I would like to be using ALSA and ACPI. Gnome 2.6 is just a nice piece, but I was getting used to it. Also, I need to get evolution 1.5 back up and running and get my snapshots back. Lastly, straw is still a version behind and lacking some features I used somewhat extensively.
The other HUGE problem now is the missing data. My aggregator has maybe a quarter of the feeds it used to have. Been slowing looking at my blogroll and adding pieces back. Figuring out what to eliminate and what to keep. Also, figuring out what I have added since I last updated my blogroll is rather difficult.
The other ugly half is that all my contact information is missing. I am WAY too used to typing 3 characters and having an e-mail address come up. Also, lost lots of birthdays, home addresses, etc. Slowly I will get this all back together, but it will take a while. I figure a mass e-mail will go out if I find some free time this week and get that all worked out.
There is also lots of little stuff. Getting my TODO list back up to speed is taking some time. Trying to remember the little things i had on there is not the easiest thing in the world. Slowly getting that back, as I remember things.
The loss of my MP3 collection is hurting somewhat these days too. I had lots of rare and live stuff on there more than just albums of artists I had.
Next time I get some money, I really am going to have to invest it in getting all the little pentiums I have sitting around the house back up and running with lots of disc space, so I can set up some automated backups and stuff. I have had lots of plans over time to do this, I guess now I have proven why it needed to be done.
I think the best way to do some of this is do de-centralize. I really want to set up a LDAP server, some sort of bookmarks server, a music server, a file server, etc. Make it so everything is out on servers which data can be pulled from and pushed back to rather than having everything in one place. I think the de-centralized idea is a much better one anyways. Plus, I can than access my data from anywhere, instead of just when I am sitting on my machine.
Slowly, this will all come back together, but its going to take a while. I know I am still slowly realizing some of the stuff I lost.
