Despite the continual rain while walking around Downtown Disney and waiting in line for entry to the House of Blues, the Train concert was, for lack of better verbiage, fucking awesome. The opening act, Blue Merle, who I had never heard of before was actually good. Their music was an interesting, but well-defined combination of various music styles including rock, bluegrass and jazz using mandolin, acoustic guitar, fiddle, stand-up bass and drums. I would have let the mandolin player strum my strings, but anyway, I digress.

Train puts on a very high energy, potent performance that not only commands the attention of the audience, but also demands it. Front man Pat Monahan belts out his thought provoking lyrics with an amazing voice, coupled with his reserved, yet subtly flamboyant stage presence and hint of sexuality. The play list included a great variety of songs from their first self-titled album, award winning and map-placing sophomore Drops of Jupiter and their latest offering, My Private Nation. Just as the energetic performance reached a peak following powerful renderings from Nation and singles such as "Respect," "Calling All Angels," "Meet Virginia," "Drops of Jupiter" plus a crowd-pleasing cover of "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin, the band left the stage begging the question of what the encore had in store for us. After returning to the stage with the crowd wildly applauding, stomping and screaming, Train erupted back into playing with another classic rock idol, Aerosmith's sixties anthem and personal favourite of mine, "Dream On." As they wrapped up the encore, I wondered what could possible follow such an energetic feat, one that nearly brought the house down. It turned out to be my favourite Train song, "Hopeless" from the Jupiter album and originally featured on their non-label independent release, One and a Half. I had not planned on hearing this ballad during the show due to its never having been a single and its placement on older albums, but it turned out to be their second encore only to be followed by the concluding and self-described "favourite" of the band themselves, "Your Every Color," from Nation.

I bought a new hard drive today, which should arrive in three or four business days. I ended up spending less and getting more than what I had originally thought I would, based upon my previously having looked into upgrading a while back. I got a 20GB drive for $147.95 which is a good price for the notebook world and considering the age of my system. So, yay. Only $162.90 all together with tax and shipping still comes well below my anticipated price of $200.00 not inclusive of tax and shipping.

And now if you will excuse me, I have a Train to catch.

Wrapping up that which has been a rather disagreeable week, I came home today (after having left work at around seven in the evening) to find my laptop hard drive has failed. At boot and throughout post, pressing my ear up against the bottom plate which holds the hard drive mounting bracket inside the chassis reveals the classic "whir, click, whir, click" of a drive gone bad.

Needless to say, I was furiously mad on my drive to dinner. The only thing that helped calm me down, besides my rather well-prepared Darden Cajun blackened mahi-mahi fish dinner with rice pilaf, was the knowledge that I had a backup copy of the files I would miss the most. Having just recently formatted my laptop, I conducted the customary LAN dump to a desktop system, but for some reason, did not delete it once I was back up and running on my laptop. And boy, am I glad for that.

I have decided I will attempt one temporary recovery solution I have learned about from several hardware focused sites and forums. The suggestion was to place the hard drive in a freezer for an hour or so, shrinking the metallic components of the drive unit and hopefully loosening-up and stickiness that may be causing the failure. I really have nothing to lose by trying. I do have some data that I would like to recover that was not in existence when my backup to the desktop was made, but nothing so significant to cause me suicide on failed revival.

So now I am left in a difficult situation that I must think about and act upon shortly. The big deal for me is replacement. Hard drives for my older system are expensive, so do I spend the $200 and get one for my computer, built in 1999, or do without a machine for a while and save up to buy a new notebook.

These questions and others will be pondered this weekend, during which I will be seeing the band Train at the House of Blues. With any luck, the place will not burn to the ground whilst I am inside.