First up:
I had a great response to my last journal about looking for commissions.. thanks guys! But they're closed again now.. and I shall try my hardest to keep up without overly frustrating anyone :}

Second: Was looking for advice with some computer things..
a very long, LONG story short - i somehow managed to get the conficker worm loose in my system and ended up having to reformat and reinstall windows and the whole nine yards. Now, I had the majority of my art backed up to an external hard drive before any of this happened, and what wasn't on that (because it soon became unreadable due to the worm) I burned to cd before I bombed my hard drive.

Now that everything's back, neither the x-drive or the cd's seem to be readable.
I am SO bummed.
There was a small amount of artwork and photos that were saved by temporarily storing them on jared's computer (we're connected by a home network..) but everything else, including a lot of old art, a lot of music that I paid for, photos of my kids.... just seem to be gone.

Any ideas about that? Anyone know any tricks?

I'm also looking for a good keystroke encryption software. BlueGem seems to be the most popular, but when I tried their free trial, it kept freezing my keyboard and could only be fixed by a reboot (which was encredibly annoying when i was right in the middle of an email or message). I dunno, after this whole worm thing, that one made me kinda nervous so i pulled it back off.

any help is MUCH appreciated!