A demon ate my hard drive. At least that's what seems to have happened. I have XP (with SP2) and the latest Norton Antivirus, but some demonic program still found its way to my hard drive. It even killed the Lavasoft malware remover that I tried to use to get it off. The only thing I could do was wipe the hard drive and go back to my initial factory settings. (This is relatively easy but time-consuming on my IBM Thinkpad X31.) I'm travelling today (in San Franciso, not Cape Town), so I'll have to wait to reinstall all of my software.

I had planned to do a podcast last night from my hotel room in San Francisco, but I instead spent the evening reclaiming my laptop. No podcasting for at least a few more days until I can get everything reinstalled. This is painful.