It seems the worst has happened. Last night, while working on the upcoming episode of One Week Job, my laptop crashed. No word of warning. For a fraction of a second I saw the "blue screen of death" and then all went black. The computer restarted but didn't get very far. The harddrive suddenly started emitting a terrible scratching noise, like a skipping record player.

It could only mean one thing...complete hard drive failure.

The laptop, a brand new ASUS G1S, had been great up until that point. No idea why the hard drive decided to pack it in. All three of us have spent last night and the entire morning trying to salvage the data - which includes 1/3 of the completed episode from the animal hospital.

No word on whether we'll recover the data. Thankfully, all the previous episodes I backed up on an external hard drive. The current setback is more one of time, rather than catastrophic consequence.

Today is also a holiday so we can't call ASUS tech support, or ship the laptop off for repair.

Anyone out there in internet land have a spare laptop kicking around they don't need? Just thought I'd ask...