Dead. Kaput. Null and void. I backup at least once a month, so it won't be too bad getting back up and running and data recovery (if I need it) isn't all that expensive. It's not a tragedy. Still, I won't be posting here as often and I might not have ANY photos from the Chicago show to share until I get my hard drive back from the data recovery folks.
(posting off of the Ubuntu install disk, by the way. Ubuntu is cool.)