When I left last Monday, I had no idea that it would be so long before I was again posting here. Upon my return Tuesday, the computer refused to boot.

If you follow the forums, you already know this; John Walker, who has been invaluable in restoring things to operational status, posted almost that much there. As to the battles and the solutions of the past week, little need be said but that I am now working with a slightly faster processor and a new operating system, and I am getting through the frustrations of programs that won’t run from the old drives because they were not “properly installed” under the new system. (If anyone knows a cute shortcut for getting Windows XP to recognize software present on another drive which (the drive) was added after the operating system was installed, please pass it my direction.)

I still do not have all of my e-mail accounts working, but the one which is not is not one commonly used (except by a few important services–PayPal, McAfee). As of late last night I got all the M. J. Young Net boxes working. I’ve not yet attempted the FTP program. The music program has been reinstalled as a trial demo, and I seem to be missing a number from the release key, so I’m going to have to contact the publisher to see if they can give me my missing digit.

The most serious problem is that the CD-RW is not working. I am guessing that the problem with the computer (all the components seem functional, including the mother board and processor, now that things have been rebuilt with parts of another computer into two complete systems) was that the boot files on the primary drive got scrambled somehow and the CD drive took that moment to fail, so nothing would boot the system. There seems no way to prove that guess, so there’s no point pursuing it.

I’d like to say how much work I accomplished in the down time, but most of it was spent on the very stressful process of trying to get everything fixed. I did a bit of editing here and there, mostly in Romans, and that’s really the bulk of it all. Most of my work is highly dependent on my computer.

For anyone who was wondering about the documentary that did not happen, the young filmmaker has reported that he ran out of money and could not afford to finish the project. He will keep us in mind if he tries again.

I am hoping we have resolved enough of the problems now that I am back in action for the foreseeable future; there are still problems to fix, but we’re fixing them.

–M. J. Young

Yesterday was Sunday. You knew that. At the time, I knew it. I was behind on everything, but pressing toward completion, and then I was, I thought, finished. The problem is, my Sunday workload includes file backup and system maintenance, and I’d retired to my room without doing either.

I remembered the file backup when I returned to my office to prepare for bed. Yes, home offices are strange. I get dressed in mine every day, so that’s where I leave my slippers and pajamas (actually a really cool Multiverser long sleeved T-shirt from our Cafe Press store, and a pair of sweat pants). So I started the file backup while I was getting changed, and then this afternoon when I got to the office I did a bit of drive cleanup in anticipation of the system maintenance, which I will have to do tonight. What irks me most isn’t that I forgot, but that I forgot last week, too.

I slept in today, and then rushed around a bit because I needed to do laundry before I could make the trip to take my mother-in-law shopping. I made dinner and carved through a substantial amount of e-mail at the same time, but then left orders for people to finish certain tasks and go to bed while I did the big errand. I was going to stop at the bank on the way home, but forgot that, too, so I’ll have to run out tomorrow.

There was one interesting piece in the e-mail: Someone in New York, I think a film school student, wants to do a documentary on Dungeons & Dragons. He wanted to find out whether I lived close enough for him to come film one of my game sessions. I apologized that I rarely have game sessions at home anymore, and even more rarely run Dungeons & Dragons (because of the demand for Multiverser, and my interest in a stack of other games I never get to run). However, I indicated that I was eager to help him, and suggested that he might be able to get a lot of what he needed at Ubercon–which apparently is going to be held in April or May this time around, but no date has been announced. We’ll see how that goes.

On that note, I think I’d better tend to the forums, or I’ll never bet to ged.

–M. J. Young