At first I questioned the need to do anything at all — my computer apparently mounts my NTFS drive on its own but I couldn’t remember how.

Before I found the ultimate solution, one approach my coworker attemped was to have gnome execute a script at login which used the mount command. This didn’t work; he forgot to use gksudo and anyway the script never seemed to run.

Then I remembered fstab and the rest is history. If you need to accomplish the same thing, be sure to read his fstab blog post.