"Work smarter, not harder" goes the saying; which is advice I'd wish I'd heeded on Wednesday. My project had slipped so far behind schedule that, after Buzzcocks, I booted my computer and tried to bludgeon my code into extracting the serial number from a hard disk.

But again and again it refused to work; each impasse forcing me to dive deeper and deeper into the guts of windows. (And trust me: Windows gets very gory very quickly.) I was well into the witching hour before I gave up rifling through the kernel's small intestines and went to bed.

But bright and fresh Thursday morning, the problem blinked at me: I had written StorageAdaptorProperty when I should have written StorageDeviceProperty. That may seem like a "Duh! Of course”-moment, but to a computer it's the difference between a circle and a square. And it was blindingly obvious to me with a clear head. (The "Duh! Of course”-moment came later in the day when I discovered I needed to WRITE permission to read from a disk. Duh! Of course!)

Anyway, working a couple of the wee hours gained me nothing but a hangover. :(

On a related note I needed a 3½" floppy disk to confirm my code would reject floppies*, just in case. I hadn't got one to hand, so I spent an hour rooting through boxes and upending shelves on a quest to unearth one. It was only when I returned to my desk with my dusty prize that I realised my machine lacks a floppy disk drive. Still, at least I have the disk once I find a drive.

* (Insert your own priapic euphemism.)