How annoying! I woke up early this morning, and decided it would be a good time to try and do my quarterly review on our investments while DH and DS are still asleep. Wouldn't you know it, my brokerage's system is down for maintanence and I can't get into my account. Grrrr. Plus on etrade, my husband signed us up for these special password keys to make the account more secure. You enter your regular password and then the number that appears on this little gadget -- it changes every minute or so. I had it out the other day as I was updating our budget, and now I can't find it. So I can't get into etrade, either.

With the death of our laptop, I lost my budget and all of the spreadsheets I had created to track our investments. Fortunately all our pictures had been backet up to CD so we didn't lose those. I considered taking the hard drive to a recovery place, but it was going to be $99 for the first hour just to look at it. I quizzed the person there to find out what they did, and it sounded like that it was rare for a disk to be a simple $99 job, more common was several hundred dollars. My spreadsheets aren't worth that much to me, I'll just have to recreate them. I did put the hard drive into an enclosure and can hear it spinning, but Vista is not recognizing it so it's likely got some dammage. For a software engineer, I really hate this kind of computer maintenance and repair stuff.