A couple of days where one thing after another goes wrong. What more could anyone want? That is basically what has happened with me over the past few days.

Let’s start off with my iPhone. I installed Vista on my desktop over the weekend, which meant I had to reactivate iTunes before I could sync my phone with it. Would have been nice for someone to tell me that before trying to sync it, because somehow in the process half the applications I have were deleted from my phone with no warning, resulting in the loss of some data. Luckily for me the applications I have installed are all free, so they could be replaced with no problem, but the loss of data (not that it was important data) and the fact it happened at all surprised and irritated me.

As I had just installed Vista, I was having a look around it and getting used to it all when I noticed that iTunes likes to store all the configuration data for playlists in C:\Users\username\Music, or the default music folder as it is more commonly known. I want to be able to synchronize my music collection over several computers (most of which don’t have iTunes or the capability to run it), and having that folder on them all just seems like a massive kludge.

One of the other things I ordered recently was a cover for my iPhone, so that it does not get scratched. The one I ordered was the Marware Sport Grip from play.com, a shop I have used many times before and who I have always been happy with. This would be fine, but so far they haven’t managed to send it, and it is really starting to get annoying given how risky it is to have a smartphone without some kind of protection for it. To their credit, they did send the other thing I ordered very fast, but I would rather have had the iPhone cover.

All of this was topped off with what happened on Tuesday. After doing lots of work on one specific file during the day (an update script) the text editor or link between the computers I was working on resulted in the file I had been working on somehow being empty. As it was a brand new file, I didn’t have a backup of it, meaning I had lost half a day’s work. Luckily after quite a while trying to recover the file, I eventually managed to get most of it back by grepping the hard drive for a string I knew was in the file, storing the output of grep on another computer, then using ed and grep to get all that was left of the file, including the bits that took the most time to develop.

When I lost the data I was exceptionally annoyed, and one thing I tend to do when annoyed is put on some stupidly heavy music (in this case, System Of A Down). For some reason that tends to make me much more relaxed and generally happier, although I really don’t know why.

Three days of woe – hopefully that won’t happen again for a while.