Back into the groove, now that my laptop has been resurrected from the dead. Or maybe reincarnated is a better word for it. Resurrection implies a complete return to what was once there, whereas reincarnation means you're back, only different, and often with little memory of your former existence. My laptop's return from Hades involved an electronic dip in the river Lethe - where souls bound back to the land of the living washed away their old selves before inhabiting new mortal shells - as I had to reformat the machine's hard drive just to get it to boot again. Which means everything that my laptop had experienced since I brought it home with me a year ago was lost irrevocably in the swirls and eddies of induced virtual forgetfulness. Or was it? Plato suggests that since we've all been here before, the act of learning is actually something more like remembering, as a fresh mind makes connections that the underlying soul seems to recall. I wonder if that holds true for machines as well. When I bookmark a favorite old website, re-install a piece of software, or make the trip to the online mail server, does my born-again laptop have a vague sense that this has all happened before, a nagging suspicion that its life is but a groove on an ever-revolving CD-ROM, a deep premonition in its hard drive that there are potentially limitless beginnings and ends lurking beyond its presently established configuration?

This is why I'm not supposed to be drinking coffee anymore!