My backup drive now works. I had to buy a new Acomdata case since the problem was caused by my old case. I'm not sure what happened - either the case blew out and took my USB hub with it or vice versa. I now have an external FireWire case with my 250GB drive. Works like a champ.
I also came across a post explaining the Summarize service in Mac OSX. If you haven't seen it, check it out here - it's really cool. From the blog, "What it does is it takes an selection of text and generates a very precise summary of the text." Where was the Summarize service when I was in school? Very cool.
