Episode 1425: Bad News, Good News

So my laptop hard drive has been on the verge of failure for some time now, but it's continued to function reasonably. Lately though, it's begun to be an issue when syncing music to my iPod. I recently realised that songs have been going missing on my iPod, which I thought was due to issues with the iPod hard drive getting messed up by repeated interrupted syncs in iTunes. In a moment of frustration, I decided to wipe and restore my iPod to factory settings. That was when my problems really started. While trying to add my music library back onto my iPod, I found a number of corrupted music files, likely stored on the damaged part of the laptop's hard drive. There's no way of telling which files are going to cause problems though, so it's a case of adding songs and keeping track of which files trigger the laptop's freezing. The tedious part is replacing those songs, usually just one single track out of all the songs from a particular artiste. I have managed to put about a third of my music back on the iPod so far. I know it's such a waste of time, but I'm slightly obsessive-compulsive about this. Something did go right today though, as my supervisor got back to me with comments on what I sent him a couple of weeks ago. He likes it, had only suggestions for some tweaks here and there, most of which shouldn't take more than an hour or two of work to incorporate, so it looks like I will be on track to finishing my dissertation by the end of next week.