Grrr. So, no luck on the ‘finish doing stuff with MP3s and hence stop talking about it’ front then.

The new hard disk on which I stored all the MP3s I've just spent a week collecting has failed. Catastrophically. I'm going to take it back to World of Computers at lunchtime and they'll try to copy off as much of the data as they can save for me, but frankly I don't hold out much hope of avoiding another week of shuffling CDs in and out of the machine all over again.

Words cannot describe how appalled and angry and frustrated I'm feeling right now. It doesn't help that I found out there was a problem at about midnight last night when I got home from playing board games at the Gallery, so I slept rather badly due to worrying about it, which probably isn't improving my mood; but mostly I'm just speechless at the sheer bad timing of the wretched piece of hardware, holding on for just long enough that I thought I'd finished the hard work and then blowing it all up in one go. If it were going to fail immediately, I'd have preferred if it had failed immediately.

There aren't many things that make me as upset as a large amount of effort getting wasted, whether it's my effort or someone else's. It's odd, that; I'm sure there are lots of things that are worse in absolute terms. But completely wasting a load of effort is one of the few kinds of disaster that can reliably bring me close to tears.