Well, it wouldn't be my life without some sort of devastating technological disaster occurring every couple of weeks, would it? And the latest is unfortunately a doozy; not my main Mac Mini, but my older G3, has had a complete and utter meltdown, and is now not even recognizing that there's a hard drive even physically inside the machine. And this is kind of a trainwreck of a problem, frankly, for both personal and professional reasons: personally because I had been using my G3 as an external hard drive, basically wiping out in an instant about two years' worth of photographs, music, movies, plus every single bit of writing I've done*; and professionally because this was the only Mac I owned with Adobe's publishing software (including InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Professional), the software I had been using for CCLaP's upcoming new programs, an electronic-publishing one and a Flash-based virtual photography gallery. And so that means that I can't actually finish either of these projects, even though both of them were supposed to go live here at the website over the next week or two.

So needless to say, it's not a happy day here at CCLaP headquarters, and this also means I'm going to have to once again officially put the electronic publishing program and virtual gallery on hiatus, for something like the sixth time in the last year. Sigh. And speaking of which, if any of you just happen to be fans of the center and would like to donate a copy of Adobe InDesign or Flash Professional, I would be eternally grateful, and of course so would CCLaP's upcoming featured artists, all of whom have been patiently waiting and waiting and waiting for their moment in the spotlight. If you're serious about getting a copy of either of these programs to me, just drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com; and meanwhile, my brother and I will keep working on this busted hard drive (he's an IT professional for a living), and keep praying that we'll have good news soon.

*And why haven't I been making regular backups of my system to a dedicated external hard drive, I hear the snottiest of you now asking? Because I'm poor, and can't even afford the magazine that compares external hard drives and tells you which one to buy. And why haven't I been burning backup CDs of my most important material on a regular basis? Because the CD burner on my Mini broke about a year and a half ago, and I'm too poor to get it fixed. Yeah, I know, middle-class people rarely ever think of the unique issues faced by the tech-savvy poor, part of what makes the entire issue of technology so frustrating sometimes to us perpetually broke people in the first place.