As anyone who's talked to me in the last week will know, I've finally got round to joining the MP3 generation, and since last Thursday I've been determinedly feeding my entire CD collection through my computer and uploading the contents to my hard disk. This has involved quite a lot of effort, some hardware upgrades, three or four separate computer problems, and other fun stuff, which is why it's been the only thing I've been able to talk about for a week.

(I started doing it on Thursday because I reckoned changing a CD every twenty minutes was easy and undemanding enough to be a productive use of two sick days. Of course then the hardware troubles started to bite and I found it had become rather more stressful than I'd bargained for…)

One of my CDs, an electronic instrumental rock album by Bjorn Lynne, started giving read errors on the last track a few days ago, which was extremely annoying. I tried various moderately silly approaches to get round this problem and obtain an MP3 of the track, and had several other even sillier ones lined up to try next; but Jon S suggested that since the artist is a nice guy and a real approachable human being, I could simply mail him and ask if he could send me an MP3 of it as a favour! So I tried this today, and it did indeed work. Let it be known far and wide that Bjorn Lynne [www.lynnemusic.com] is a thoroughly wonderful chap. (I promised him I'd say that. :-)