Well it has certainly been an eventful summer. Some of it has been good, some of it has been bad. On a personal front, I relocated from the Atlanta, Georgia suburbs to the Cleveland, Ohio suburbs with my son and the cats and all of our stuff. I’m trying to sell the house in Georgia now. We’re now renting a house together with Dan, and so far it’s going really well.
On the travel front, I spent a week in New Hampshire as usual; Dan came with for part of that. Dominic wasn’t there, because he was with his dad in Virginia. He went to New Hampshire later with my mom. Dan and I also went to the 2007 IJA Juggling Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. It was a lot of fun, but I’d injured my thumb the week before which did put a little bit of a damper on things. We also went back down to Georgia for a long weekend, to go to Dan’s brother’s wedding in Athens. All of those trips were after I moved to Ohio, and it meant that for the first month I “lived” here, I was almost never here.
The most relevant news to readers of this newsletter, however, is certainly the fact that my server was hacked in early July, and the hacker deleted the contents of the directory that contains all of my sites. All of my websites went down. I was in New Hampshire at the time and also having laptop problems, so I didn’t have my local files available to restore things. I did have a full backup of opalcat.com, however the most recent backup of the gallery was from mid-2005. I have all of the images on my local computer, but it’s going to take me a while to re-create the albums and so on in the gallery that were created after that. This will take me a while, to say the least. Additionally, the gallery for the forums was wiped out, and will need to be recreated from scratch—the upside is that it was brand new and didn’t have that much in it yet.
You might be saying “hey, Opal, you’ve been using computers since the mid-1980s, don’t you know better than to not have backups?” And yeah, that’s true. I keep my pictures in general in a folder called “camera” which is broken down into folders by year, and then folders by the date I offloaded the images from the camera. Then I have a “Gallery” folder that has the same folder structure as the gallery on the website, and as I chose pictures to upload I would put a copy of it in the corresponding Gallery folder, and reduce the file to 800×600 for web viewing. The problem for the gallery is that I was running out of disk space on my local drive, so I stopped making the duplicate images and moving them into the Gallery folders, knowing that eventually I was going to fix that. The irony is that just a few weeks before the hack, I had bought a 500GB external drive, and was planning on going and backing up all of that stuff as soon as we finished the move. I still haven’t found which box it is in, as we’re still unpacking the boxes for the office (all of my computer/desk/filing/art/school/etc stuff plus all of Dan’s computer/desk/filing/school/etc stuff) but I’m going to be the backup queen henceforth.
I have moved the site to a different host and I’m still getting some of my other sites back online. If you see stuff missing that you thought you remembered being there, it’s probably just not back up yet.
This fall I am taking 4 general ed. classes through a program called eCore, which is a sort of online university run out of the Georgia university system. Officially my classes are through Southern Polytech, at which I am a “transient student” from KSU which is where I’ve been going the last three semesters. It means that I can still take another semester of classes as a Georgia resident with the Hope scholarship and so on, rather than going to school here in Ohio and paying out of state tuition. It is actually quite a lot of work and will take a lot of time, however not having any art classes this term will balance that out, and also give me some time to work on some art for myself. I am hoping that all this time at home will allow me to get the stuff on the site finished.
Well that’s about it for this newsletter—thanks for visiting opalcat.com and be sure to check back and see what’s getting added!
— 01:10:36 PM
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