/path/to/some/weird/directory$ rm -rf ~

Yep, I've done that today. It sucks. 1.5 seconds after I did that I hit the power button in the hope the kernel wouldn't have flushed it's buffers yet (hm, that old trick might not work with journaling filesystems). Boot up in single user mode and see half of it is gone. Try using recover but for some bizare reason it can't find any inode within the specified time. I think it sucks and I think I should learn to use debugfs directly.

So syncing back from my other machine, .ssh was gone but I luckily still had .gnupg and a few of the other important ones) I try and recover as much as I can. 3 hours later My machine looks nearly the same again. Only major thing I I'm still suffering from for now is having lost is my .gnome directory, and that contains damn well a lot, but I'm sure more will surface. Most prominent currently are my bookmarks --for once that they where organised a little bit-- and my photo collection.

Originally I was going to write a bit more about the site module and about eggs & setuptools etc. However I've now spent all evening recovering and have also lost the notes about the post. Altho I admit it was 100% user error, I'm still going to blame easy_install for distracting me and giving me this unwanted directory named ~.

grrrr