Thanks to the internet. If nobody else bothers or understands what loss of data means, you can shout it aloud here. I lost 500GB of data - every moment of my personal and professional life captured in bits and bytes. It is a Western Digital Premium Edition external hard disk (USB/Firewire). I bought it despite my friend warning of bad sectors and hardware issues that WD is known to have. As with any story, one fine morning, I was copying some songs, pictures from my pen drive to the hard disk. All of a sudden, the hard disk and my laptop hung up. I restarted the system thinking I would make fresh start. But to my dismay, all my drives on the hard disk had vanished like dust. I tried connecting and reconnecting a few times, the drives showed up once or twice like a sick man's last few breadths. The other similar incident was the hard disk crash at my office last month. It was also a WD 160GB hard disk (IDE). And it took with it more than 5 years of email storage, project documents,
Another effective [debugging] technique is to explain your code to someone else. This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind. I see what's wrong. Sorry to bother you." This works remarkbly well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. - From "The Practice of Programming" by Brian W Kernighan & Rob Pike.