Michael Douglas thinks he can win me over with charity work. Pfft. Like that will happen. I'm wise to him.

I did something really stupid yesterday. My quest for Still Life led me to Usenet, where alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd had what I wanted and a whole lot more. I downloaded something like eleven albums, including a few double albums. I snagged all the studio albums except for Brave New World and A Matter of Life and Death. Sweet. [Full disclosure: I also don't have The X Factor or Virtual XI. But those don't count. If it's not Bruce Dickinson, it's not really Iron Maiden. Except for the early albums with Paul Di'Anno. Ok, what I really mean is the albums with that Blaze guy don't count.]

My music library is set up exactly the way I want it. All these new files needed to be renamed and retagged. I keep a separate library of audio files downsampled to save space on my PDA, so I had to set that up too. All this takes time. I wasn't finished when I shot myself in the foot yesterday.

I keep a separate folder for Usenet downloads. New files stay there until I can sort them or whatever else I need to do. Yesterday I saw something in a multimedia group that caught my eye: screen captures from a zombie movie. Sweet! I loves me some zombie movies. So I downloaded about 40 of them.

Yeah, it turns out they all sucked. Not a one of them was worth even a glance. Delete, delete. While working in my Usenet downloads folder, I hit Ctrl+A to select the whole bunch [Tip for Windows users: Ctrl+A is a nearly universal shortcut for "select all"], then hit Shift+Del to bypass the Recycle Bin and get those turds off my disk that much sooner.

Hey, I thought. What did I do with those other Iron Maiden albums?

NOOOO!

Dammit. I deleted the six CDs I hadn't yet sorted out. I'm retarded.

But everything came together in the end. I fired up my newsreader to see if I could download fresh copies of those CDs. Not only were all the deleted ones still available, but now Brave New World was also available. Do you think maybe if I delete my shit again, the other album I'm missing will appear?

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