My server suffered a major hard drive failure a few years ago, and I didn't have any backups.

I've just now used the Internet Archive to partially recover a whole bunch of blog posts from 1999–2001. There's lots of embarassing or otherwise amusing stuff in there.

• Here's very first post, in April 1999.
• In college we used to go to First Wok for horrible cheap Chinese food just about every week
• Pulling all-nighters in the imaging lab
• Colin's operating system, the COS
• catching a lunar eclipse from the roof of our dorm
• worrying about motivation
• my first summer in San Diego
• ridiculously fun school breaks
• buying this keyboard
• graduating
• moving to San Diego, visiting Colin on the way

I have a collection of old IDE drives which probably have much more on them; hopefully I'll get around to going through them this summer. Matt Cutts's hard drive recovery effort is inspiring.