Short update on my status. As I noted before, my laptop failed to boot Sunday night, taking with it nearly a week's worth of work, including Monday's planned Jazz Prospecting and a rather substantial update to my year-end list metafile. Since then I've been working to recover the data and get the computer working again. The first part of that has been successful. After a lot of cautious poking around I ran fsck on the laptop's root filesystem and it did its magic -- after one read failure, and a few dozen inode/bitmap/freelist fixes. Three files were orphaned and reconnected to /lost+found -- I haven't figured them out yet, but they don't seem to be part of my data. I was then able to mount the disk read-only and copy off my data. Then I reconciled its data with other changes I had made to the website's copy (including finding a bunch of inconsistencies where the two had drifted apart). Finally, I uploaded the reconciled data to the website. My master copy has been moved to a different base machine -- one that should be more reliable and which is also a fair bit faster.

Still need to work on the laptop. The file system is no longer corrupt, which should fix the boot problem -- mount was failing so no startup files could be found -- but the broken files could affect something further down the boot process, so I need to verify the software install. I'm also worried about the reliability of the hard drive, so I should run some diagnostics before I put much trust in the system. But for now I've cut it out of the work loop, which make it something I don't have to deal with right away.

I'm thinking now I'll hold Jazz Prospecting back until Monday -- I have enough material now but still have a bunch of filing and fiddling to deal with the incoming material. (Which, by the way, has started to come in again after a dry spell over the holidays.) I'll probably do a second Rhapsody Streamnotes later this week -- I had been planning on that after I split January's stash, then I wanted to hold it back until after Downloader's Diary appeared, then, well, this.

The much updated 2010 Metacritic File is sorted and up now -- although a tiny amount of source information is still lost (an accident prior to the crash). Since December 22, the leader's count rose from 438 to 742 (69%), while the challenger's rose from 391 to 699 (79%). Still unlikely, given my unweighted methodology, that Kanye West will ever catch up with Arcade Fire. Also worth noting that Beach House overtook LCD Soundsystem and looks to be pulling away -- the opposite seemed to be the case earlier. Also Janelle Monáe has edged ahead of Vampire Weekend, and Black Keys have opened up a fairly large lead over Big Boi. I thought the lists were settling down into a fairly stable pattern, so this much churn has been a bit of a surprise.

Not sure if I'm done with the lists or not -- at least I've broken the habit of working on them. And they've mostly served their purpose (although I would like to work Bruce Gallanter's list in -- bottom of post here, also Robert Christgau's Dean's List; I generally don't bother with Pazz & Jop, figuring it's too much and too late and spoils the predictive value).