sdb bombed

I am writing to say that the secondary hard drive of my Ubuntu system, the one in which I stored my /home partition, has given up the ghost. Last night, upon doing a routine fsck check, it brought up the error "Attempt to read from block from filesystem resulted in short read reading block 1547"

This is one of the more "chilling message" you can read on a Unix-like system. From what I've seen online, this is simply the state of a dead hard drive. I have already backed up from several weeks ago, so not all are lost, but of course, it does not have account of the things I had done since then.

Ah, well. That's a problem with being on a cutting-edge. You bleed, then you terrify the mortals with your scars and stories of pestilence, as if you were some silent shaman in contact with the blackest magic.

This, though, was not the fault of Ubuntu. As ever, the fault lies on me, for making such a journey.