Dealing with Data Death Depression -- my solutions so far.

The saga of my hard drive crash continues. I sent it away to one of those hardware forensics firms to see if they could help me recoup some of the information. OK, when they use the word "catastrophic" it isn't good. The darn thing is dead -- although Easter is in the air, there is no resurrection in sight for my hard drive.
But my experiment of keeping my new terrabyte hard drive free of commercial software is going pretty well. Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) is taking care of my word processing and spreadsheet needs. And last week, I used Google's presentation to create a simple presentation -- it worked fine. The biggest drawback with Google Docs is the limited formatting capability -- I have become addicted to complex indentation and bulleting schemes. And I don't know how easy it is going to be to drop audio and video into a Google presentation. We will see.
To replace Dreamweaver, I have downloaded Smultron (http://tuppis.com/smultron/) and it is working great. I have never really been a Dreamweaver power-user so the simpler interface is reassuring. I am using Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch/) for FTP. Sure, it hurts my street cred a little to be using a program that has a rubber duck as its icon, but the thing works. And it interfaces with Smultron to make it easy to manage and edit files online.
But the challenge I dreaded most was finding something that would allow me to do image editing. So far I have been pleased with a program called Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/). It lets me crop, resize, and encode images -- and truly that is about 90% of everything I do with graphics. I am concerned about what happens when I need to do more, but I will burn that bridge when I come to it.
So thus far, my goal of reducing the cost of participating in digital media is progressing well. Who knows, maybe it is possible to build an entire curriculum without spending a dime on software!