Personal Update: I'm baaack.

As someone might tell from my recent upsurge in Facebook traffic, I am back online via my homemade workstation. 3Ware owns LSI (the manufacturer of my controller card), but they were very good about replacing my dead controller card. I was able to plug the card in (this time installing an extra slot fan for additional cooling) and the machine booted right up and is running great. Immediately I performed a data backup and bookmarked the 32 tabs on my browser and then exported the book marks to an html file. Everything seems to be running well. Now to get back to reading books instead of the information ocean...