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This is good news that probably adds 30 or 40 years to my life expectancy … and maybe yours, too.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the folks at The Death Clock to add a coffee-drinking data point to the calculation.

Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone in the path of Katrina, which will make landfall by about noon today and is expected to deliver a worst-case scenario wallop to New Orleans. WeatherBlog is a fascinating place to follow news of the storm, and to click over to other weather-related blogs and sites.

Google’s desktop search upgrade 2.0 is now available. It’s well worth the download, if only for the fact that PDFs are now indexed. But beyond PDFs, there’s a lot going on here.

I’m only a few days in, but I’m really liking the Sidebar on my desktop. The search panel delivers instantaneous results as you type your query, and gives you easy access to switch between desktop search, web search, images search, and so on.

“Web Clips” is an RSS reader, though I don’t think you’d want to use it to deliver more than about a half-dozen feeds to your desktop; I’ll still keep my BlogExpress. However, I’ve customized “Web Clips” to deliver a group of New York Times feeds to my desktop. That’s a nice feature to have in conjunction with the News panel, which delivers headlines on a realtime basis. You can de-select the types of stories you want to see in News as they appear, which is interesting. Over time, I expect that staying diligent with de-selecting will make the overall value of what’s shown rise dramatically.

The Photos panel is a nice touch, delivering a slideshow of images from any folders on your hard drive you choose. I’ve customized my sidebar slideshow to include stills and posters from favorite movies, covers of favorite CDs, and images from TV shows along with the family photos. It’s an interesting mix, and there’s something kinda fun about having Sinatra smile at me while I’m working, or seeing the evil monkey from Family Guy pointing at whatever email I’m writing at the moment.

What’s Hot purports to allow you to “learn about the current trends and what’s hot on the web,” says Google. “What’s Hot is automatically generated based on what’s currently popular on the web. It automatically combines different sources of information to determine what people are talking about online.” Sorta like the “top searches this hour” feature on Technorati, I guess. I’m not quite sure why I need that on my desktop, so it’ll probably be gone once I fine a better plugin.

About those plugins: There are 50 or 60 available right now, and my favorite is gdTunes, which lets you operate your iPod from the desktop without having to switch back and forth into your iTunes program. For Google Adsense users, there’s an app that lets you monitor the status of your account. You can create a ToDo list that stays on your desktop, and you can add a system performance monitor to your Sidebar. Once developers really dig into creating all kinds of useful and fun tools and toys for the Google Sidebar, this will become that much more of a useful and entertaining tool.

So maybe that’s what Yahoo and Konfabulator had in mind?

Few things put a sobering sense of impending doom in one’s gut like seeing the kind of message reproduced above blinking on your screen first thing in the morning.

That’s what I woke up to yesterday. Caught in a loop, unable to boot. For too long a while, it looked like my hard drive would be better used as a coaster. Fortunately, the folks at the Hewlett-Packard help desk, both on the phone and via email, talked me off the ledge (though at one point, the guy on the phone was recommending I find a good local data recovery service). I was so deep into the weeds, I was even considering calling the Geek Squad, and I despise anything having to do with Best Buy (but that’s a story for another time).

Fortunately, with assistance from the folks at HP, I navigated out of the weeds after six or seven hours, and everything seems back to abnormal.

Jeff Jarvis has been having a grand old time in his blog roasting Dell over an open flame, and I’ve had my own visit to Dell Hell, which is why I’m writing this on an HP machine. But we should point the finger when the service is good, too. So I gotta hand it to the folks at HP customer service, with whom I’m now 2-for2 (they did right with a printer issue I had last year).

Thanks for getting it right. I’ll remember when it comes time to buy again.

Takeaway for marketers (and everyone else): Back up your data! Your products, too!