I know I said no more Friday Faves until after NaNoWriMo – but I exceeded my first day’s word quota (you can follow my word count via the widget in the right column on my blog’s front page), so I’m taking a moment to share both a new Kickstarter project for Boston friends AND their warning about flying with data!

Steven and Katrina are long-time Boston artists who want to create a venue/community for supporting local and visiting artists of all kinds, in the spirit of the late lamented Pan9. To this end they have purchased a 19th century firehouse – it’s awesome but in need of serious work after years of neglect. Even if this Kickstarter is successful they still may be eating ramen for the next 30 years… while supporting the arts community! Please consider donating:

When you visit their KS page you may notice that unlike most projects they currently do not have a video to promote it. They HAD a lovely video created in plenty of time to post, but it no longer exists! Yesterday the posted:

EMERGENCY: the friend of ours who shot our Torrent Engine 18 Kickstarter video had the footage destroyed by customs.

The videographer was traveling with an external hard drive containing the only copy of the video. For some reason (perhaps owing to this person being a male of middle-eastern appearance) the TSA decided they needed to destroy the drive in case it was an explosive device!

Your lessons from this unfortunate incident:

– Never travel with anything that is irreplaceable.

– Always copy any important files to multiple devices in multiple locations.

This could have as easily been a story of someone in NY/NJ who lost all their files earlier this week due to storm flooding. So even if you back up to a Time Machine drive or other local device, invest in a remote backup product like Carbonite, and/or copy files to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or another remote storage site.