My laptop is broken again. It has actually been broken for about three weeks. This time, it wasn't just the hard drive that died. I took it to a local Apple repair store, and they told me that I would have to replace the logic board for $1000. So instead, I bought one on EBay for $500. The annoying part is that it might have been the hard drive connector, a $5 part, and not the logic board. However, I am waiting on a new hard drive to arrive before I can confirm that.
It hasn't all been bad: because of my previous near hard drive death experience, I have a backup of nearly everything that was on that drive. This crash has made me move all my email to IMAP, and I'm never going back to POP. It is just far too convenient to have all my email on some server, accessible from any computer. The second advantage is that I'm back using Linux as my primary desktop for the first time in two years. It is nice being back in the open source land, but I still can't wait to get my PowerBook fixed. I'll post more about revisiting Linux as soon as I get some school work done.