On Thursday and Friday, I had to wake up early to get to work by 8 am for conference calls. On these two days, I got less than five hours of sleep on any one night, and discovered that waking up early does not do me good. In fact, up until lunch time, I was completely out of it, unable to concentrate because of the overwhelming fatigue I was feeling. This was exacerbated by the my constantly being interrupted for a departmental project I'm co-ordinating, which, naturally, ensured my concentration was shot to bits.

Still, I soldiered on... that is, until the hard disk of my laptop committed suicide, rendering all of the data stored inside irrecoverable. Ouch.