An Unplanned Day Should Not Count As Wasted

This is my new desktop look. I am proud of it, this cost me 6 hours of my day. An experiment in copying drives destroyed my Ubuntu root installation this morning, before I had eaten or gotten any caffeine. This is my first lesson for the day, it is a very bad time to be using sudo privileges.  I had wanted to migrate off the old, loud, power-hungry SCSI drive onto a sleek, fast and relatively quiet SATA drive, but instead I failed to consider the symbolic links involved. I wasted several hours reading community docs on how to maybe patch the install after critical files were deleted before finally initiating a re-install.
What I did learn: Ubuntu installs pretty easily, but GRUB (a booting program) is very finicky and will try to install on the first IDE device it detects, instead of the root drive selected in the OS install. GRUB will not recognize Ubuntu as a bootable OS on a SATA drive when sitting comfortably on and IDE drive.
Also, I learned to just partition a drive instead of trying to rm the files from it.
With a brand-new install I have found much greater functionality. My previous install had been from a 32-bit disk and involved upgrading to a 64-bit kernel, and in that process I must have missed a lot because gnome themes and desktop effects work much better. I also found a program called Exaile that proposes to work as well as Amarok but in the GTK frontend--the standard for gnome GUI--allowing it to take this beautiful dark skin. Later, I may indulge my vanity and spend an hour looking for a proper wallpaper.

I may not have gotten the chores, shopping and cooking done today that I had planned, but I learned quite a bit about my operating system, and especially learned the dangers of administrating while half-asleep.