At 8:45 this morning, I finished a project that has been ongoing since 18th October last year.

On that day I got my Dension car stereo installed, and since then my entire music collection has been available in my car, instead of the small fraction of it that I picked out as being particularly good driving music and copied on to Minidiscs. Therefore, I've been playing through my whole music collection other than the stuff I already had on Minidisc in the car. This has taken four and a half months. On the way to work this morning, the last album on my list came to an end, and now I have no choice but to listen to music I've already listened to.

It's been a fascinating experience. All sorts of things that I'd never have thought would make good driving music have turned out to; all sorts of albums I'd completely forgotten I owned have come to light, and I've rediscovered a great many tracks I love.

dreamingchristi was right: once you've got used to MP3 solutions that make your entire music collection available to you at all times, you never want to go back. The Dension may be temperamental (geddit?) in cold weather; it may occasionally get confused, stop after every track and need to be rebooted; it may have annoying glitches when changing tracks (which most MP3 solutions seem to, admittedly); but in spite of all that it's now become indispensable.

All of that said … I've also been slightly looking forward to getting to the end of the list, because now I'm going to go back to playing some of the stuff I originally had in the car. Which, after all, I did put there because it was a lot of my favourite music, so that'll be good too.