Long Time...

It's been a long time since I posted...

For the past 7 months or so, I've been recovering my files, photos, graphics and websites from old hard drives, an ailing WDMyCloud, microSD cards, SD cards, and Memory Sticks.

I am fortunate that I have recovered nearly all of my photos and video except for my cousin's wedding videos, my photos and video from our Disney World trip when Max was in the national MathCounts competition (and photos from around that time), a favorite AVI from when Max was young, the audio to all my older AVIs from when Max was young (who the heck thought it was a good idea to put the audio in a separate .THM file, anyway?), and all of the current font projects I had been working on.  On top of that, reorganizing all the file backups into an organized system has been a challenge (as I copied multiple copies of files over and had to sort through everything).

I did lose any graphics, logos, fonts, and website changes that I had made in the 6 months or so prior to the hard drive crash a month (or two) ago.  I will never buy another Seagate hybrid (SSD + HDD) drive ever again.

I still have the distribution archive of the 20 or so fonts that I have been distributing (some exclusively) through my freeware/shareware TrueType Font-Journal font repository website, but I also have to update the font management software script that Font-Journal runs on, as soon as I can.

I have also quit my stupid menial labor, minimum wage job at Kohl's.  Kohl's neither treated me fairly, nor offered any challenges, nor paid well (at all), nor had decent benefits, nor was encouraging (actually management was extremely discouraging) about career opportunities, nor complied with my personal interpretation of OSHA labor force guidelines (nor tried).  That said, it was only intended to be a step up to a permanent design/art position at the corporate headquarters in Wisconsin.  But after how I was treated after getting injured and permanently partially disabled because of Kohl's unsafe safety equipment, I don't want to work for a company that treats its employees so poorly.

I am still busy trying to sort a few things on my hard drive, plus I am still looking for a few missing files (especially the photos and video) that I am missing.  I have gone through almost all of my older boot hard drives and portable backup hard drives, as well as all the (micro)SD cards and Memory Sticks, but I still have to check if I can recover anything from online services such as Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa.

I am still worried about my backups.  The WD My Cloud I was using as my NAS backup drive device was sick when I was recovering the files I had previously copied there (which was probably why I couldn't get an actual backup program to work).  We did a a factory reset and it seemed fine for a while, but now that I have backed up my system and it is at least half full, it is having difficulty scanning the content and telling me how much free storage is left.  WD Quick View has stopped reporting its used size, status, temperature and the attached backup drive (again).

Without a job I went through my savings pretty quickly buying a new Samsung SSD 850 Pro boot drive and an external portable drive I use for the graphic/photo/video/files archive since the SSD is half the size of the old hybrid drive.  Seagate is sending a replacement drive (as it was under warranty), and I sorely need it.  But with my WD My Cloud starting to act up again, I still need a new 2 or 3 TB backup hard drive to cover it if it fails.

Therefore, I won't be able to focus on free software such as my freeware fonts, graphics, cartoons, animation, video or photos for a while.  The website client I was counting on isn't providing the content/materials/links I need in order to start a new project for her, and so that means I need to start looking for work as I don't actually have an income source without her projects.

If you have ever looked for work before, you know that it is an 80 to 120 hour a week job (that I hate) and I am paid absolutely nothing for it.

I don't want to work for a soulless corporation with no moral compass like Google, Verizon, or GE that don't pay billions in their fair share taxes owed to the US Federal Governement, though.  In fact, I have to figure out how to distance myself from these companies, which means that I need to stop using them altogether.  Which also means I have to find a new alternative to gmail and blogger, check whether Apple or Microsoft pay taxes fairly before moving off my Android smart phones and tablets, finding a different and more responsible 4G LTE  carrier, stop buying GE light bulbs, etc...

But what I intend to do as soon as possible is to blog about the fonts that I have already done and are currently available for distribution.  There are at least 20 of them that are publicly available.  Then, eventually I can get caught-up and sorted-out and start creating new fonts and updating some older ones.