Aaaarrrrggghh. Dead hard drive.
The hard drive died on the weekend I was going to put up a nice self-congratulatory 5th anniversary post. When I could get on line, it was with old backups on external Firewire drives. Just now, though, the PowerBook booted from a backup that I thought was corrupted. I had attached it to try and pull some files to update a previous backup I used all weekend, but the system booted from it, and so far it’s behaving.
Thanks to Mike for writing in, too.