Technical issues prevent update...

I have a shitload of things to blog about, but for several reasons they're going to have to wait for a while...

Firstly, i came back from spending the weekend helping to run a temporary social centre (on which i will, hopefully, eventually report) to find that my hard drive had, apparently, died (first telling me, when trying to boot up, that there was some sort of error on drive C, and then not even getting to that stage, but stopping in the middle of a line of the stuff that briefly flashes up before the Windows loading screen appears). That hard drive contained all the photos I have ever taken with my digital camera (of which i have no backups), a fair amount of downloaded music that i don't have on CD, and several unfinished or nearly-finished blog posts. :(

I'm currently using a temporary computer for internet access, but am also incredibly busy at the moment as i'm in the process of moving house, and will need to get internet set up in the new place, which might be somewhat complicated, as i might not be able to get it in my own name due to financial history. As i have to be out of this house by the end of April (tho i'd prefer sooner), i probably won't have it properly set up until some time in May.

(I am getting a new computer, which my brother has given me, for the new house, but won't actually have it until i've moved in. Still, it's a strange coincidence that my old computer chose to die almost as soon as i was given a new one... i just hope that, when i go to see my brother next weekend (his birthday is the day after mine, the 27th and 26th respectfully), he being the computer expert that he is will be able to recover the data from my old hard drive and transfer it onto the new one... ie, i'm hoping that it's just some Windows files that have been damaged by whatever disk corruption happened, and My Documents is still salvageable...)

Lastcrazyhorn gave me a blog award, which requires me to pass it on to 10 other blogs, which i will do as soon as i manage to get enough time to think of who to pick and why... but a big thankyou for picking me, and i will pass it on when i get the chance to... :)

I'm also thinking about possibly changing the look of my blog - among other things, i'm not happy with how narrow the column of text appears when viewed on larger monitors (which i didn't realise while using my old computer, which has a small, old, crappy one), and a visually impaired friend who uses screen-enlarging software told me she found it hard to read because white text on black "dazzles" her. (I chose the white-on-black template because i had heard that light-on-dark is easier for VI accessibility, but some people on Ouch have complained about the light-on-dark colour scheme there recently, so i presume that that info, wherever it came from, is false...) I'm not sure, however, what i want to change it *to*, so suggestions welcome...

Anyway, i'm off to London tomorrow for what might be the first major disability-themed direct action in the UK for several years... and which, hopefully, i'll be able to report on... and i will be posting "proper" blog posts (a substantial backlog, if i get my data back) as soon as i can...