I realized after getting my computer up and running again that it never actually worked right.
It does things now that it didn't used to. It's stronger, faster, better. Most impressive of all, it doesn't intermittently boot in open firmware for no good reason.
I hadn't ever worked in OS X when I bought the eMac. Turns out if I'd of realized that it wasn't supposed to do all weird things it did I could have just traded it in for a working one. Ultimately I suppose I could have actually spent a little time learning about how it was supposed to work, but that would have required effort on my part. I do think it's interesting that that the hard drive took over a year to actually fail.