From the NYTimes, an interesting video interview with John Irving about his upcoming novel Last Night in Twisted River and his writing process.  Not what I would have imagined!  At the very end of the interview, the author is asked to read his first and last lines of the novel since he had been talking about them.  He then proceeds to set them up and gives them from memory (or so it seemed to me and believably so).

If you have a computer and therefore data stored on your hard drive…. back up or be prepared to cry. No back up?  No tears will help you when your drive stops working.  Yes, there are places that can try to get your data from your non-working drive but they charge per CD of data recovered and they don’t pick and choose.  It’s all or nothing.  So the $2700 quoted in this article is more than possible.

Ask yourself if it’s worth it.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just do the right thing and back up?  And what’s more – the writer of this article in today’s NYTimes has a Mac.  The Mac OS now offers you a way to do automatic backups to an external drive.  Get a drive, set up TimeMachine, get it going.

Have a back up plan:  external hard drive.  Most important things backed up to something else – CDs, flash drive, other hard drive and stored – SOME WHERE ELSE!  So, when the flood, fire or other disaster takes out your computer (and the external back up  plugged into it) your baby photos are somewhere ready and waiting for you.  Otherwise do not whine. Computer hard drives don’t care that you’re special, that you’re an artist, that you don’t want to think about doing back ups of your most-important files. 

Computer stores are not Disneyland… there is not a guaranteed happy ending to your sad tale involving a dead hard drive.

If you’re not looking for a zen-based outcome, don’t follow the writer’s example.

Well I got to Wednesday and home again without causing too much trouble so it’s all down hill from here, right?

Yesterday’s delivery brought two books for me.  One I’m saving because it’s the Quilt National 2009 book and I’m going to curl up with it some night and really enjoy all the pictures etc.

The other one is very interesting though:  The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.  Short pieces, what I would call essays on various aspects of how to be an artist and get the work done.  Each piece is thought provoking and revolves around a couple related themes.  Not done reading this – I alternate between wanting to read the next bit and nodding over the one I’m at.

The other delivery was even more exciting – new business cards!  I used my new Photoshop to create two versions of a business card when I got a nice offer of a discount from Overnightprints.com – easy to upload and promptly delivered.  Everyone who’s seen them so far were like – oooooOOOooooo (can I keep this?).  I’m counting that as a thumbs up!

One especially nice thing about Overnightprints is that you can print in very low quantities – rates vary depending on a few things including the amount.  I got mine glossy, one-sided (don’t print on both sides if you don’t have to – having a place to write something is handier than whatever you feel compelled to include on the backside) and 250 of each design.  All good.  I have them stashed all over the place now.

My quilt left for the Vermont Quilt Festival yesterday.  Love Fedex! Last night I spent some time stroking some fabric that has followed me home lately and, as Twyla Tharp would call it, “scratching” for some ideas on the web. In other news, I found my box of good color pencils.  Not sure what I’ll do with them, but it was bugging me where they’d gone to.  Now I know.