Somewhere in or around this time I upgraded to Natty Nartwhal and was met with epic failures on the NVIDIA front. Won't go into details just yet. Just putting this here for a timestamp. Long story short I nuked the system and downgraded back to Maverick. There is gracious beauty in having your /home on a hard-drive which the system is not installed.  Perhaps the only thing I remember from the Ubuntu book I bought a long time ago.