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by M. J. Young

Unreal Audio

November 15, 2010 in Blogs

The sound of Thunderbird right now is frustration, as my efforts to reinstall the e-mail client and return to the tasks of receiving, reading, and replying (the three R’s?) have been fruitless.  This is admittedly complicated by the facts that I am still recovering from the illness that took me in the wake of the recent convention, and so keep finding that when I ought to be getting work done I am either sleeping or involved in other tasks because people think that I should have gotten my work done instead of sleeping.  Today I should have been trying the next step in resolving that problem, but I was otherwise occupied–sleeping yesterday evening when I could have been working, running late night errands when I should have been sleeping or in lieu of that working, and then sleeping most of the day (apart from one morning errand which interrupted the sleep) and trying to make the late afternoon and early evening fit.  So the computer problems continue–and if you have any suggestions on how to get the program to stop freezing, don’t e-mail them to me.

All of this is an echo of last week, including that I have again posted an article on temporal anomalies at The Examiner.  This one moves from Adam to Nick, looking at the launch of the music career which originally failed, Hot Tub Time Machine part 7:  Chocolate Lipstick, or sing it, Nick.  Given the now well-established fact that popularity is based on popularity, I have had some fun announcing the article by saying that this is how it came about that the name of the band was on everyone’s lips, but if anyone has reacted to that I don’t yet know it.

If I’m going to avoid standing up the forum gamers yet again, I’m going to have to get to them now.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Reconfiguration

November 8, 2010 in Blogs

It is a strange night, because on the one hand I have so much I should write and on the other I ought not be writing at all.  My health is challenged at the moment, and although I have slept in several chunks (an hour in the car this afternoon while awaiting someone, a couple hours this evening instead of being here) I am ready for more of the same–with an early bell tomorrow, two people needing transportation to different work locations two hours apart.  Yet I do not want to fail to post a few items.

First is, of course, that it being Monday I posted a temporal anomalies article to the Examiner, continuing the series with Adam and Jenny, or fork you, dealing with the way history changed when Adam did not break up with Jenny but got stabbed anyway when she broke up with him.

Also on the board here is the trip to Ubercon XIII, which was greatly enjoyed by all who were there but in some ways less profitable than usual.  I suppose it’s obvious that during an economic downturn few people will attend conventions they have not attended before, and not only did we see mostly familiar faces, our players had all been at the table last year.  On the other hand, they seemed to enjoy the game immensely, and two of them who were starting over might make it to the forum this time.  Oh, and Mike has his Multiverser rule book and First Worlds, so he’s good to go for running more games.

I spent much of the weekend sitting beside the cute and personable younger sister of one of our (also cute and personable, lest I get myself in trouble) regular players, and she made the game very interesting (when she realized she was in a haunted house she got very excited that she was going to meet a ghost, and I don’t think the excitement faded despite the repeated comments of her companion that dying hurts, maybe even after she was killed by kitchen utensils and he by furniture).  I wanted to note, though, that I recognized that there is a problem with eighteen year olds:  by the time they’re half my age they’ll be twice theirs.

Oh, at the convention I met Danielle Ackley-McPhail, and purchased a copy of the revised and expanded edition of her first novel, Yesterday’s Dreams.  As she autographed it, I mentioned that I do book reviews here, but I also do the Adapting series.  The latter idea genuinely excited her, so I have made a promise to do an adaptation of the aforementioned novel and let her know when it posts.  It’s an American urban fantasy with Celtic elements, very interesting in the first two chapters, so I’m looking forward to it.

Complicating life, the computer I sent out for repairs had developed a flaw in the core files and had to be reformatted and have Windows reinstalled.  This means I lost a substantial amount of my e-mail because I was too lazy to go through the trouble of moving it to the other drive so it would be backed up regularly.  It also means–well, as I recall, Windows 98 was smart enough that if you installed it on a computer on which there were already other programs it would find them and figure out how to incorporate them into its structure.  Windows XP is not that smart, and instead will not recognize or run any program that is not installed after it is.  That means all the programs I use have to be reinstalled and reconfigured.  To make it worse, they’re saying that there’s an untraceable flaw somewhere in the motherboard or processor, and that at this point my best bet is to replace the computer with an upgraded used one (because I can’t get a new one that isn’t Vista or higher, and many of my important programs won’t run on Vista and can’t be replaced for less than hundreds of dollars), so there’s not a lot of point in pushing forward on the installations of everything.  So I guess I’m muddling through for a while until I make that move.

Speaking of move, I’ve done almost enough that I can almost go to bed now.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

After One Step Back

August 9, 2010 in Blogs

Before we get any further, let me observe publicly that today has been eight-nine-ten, and no one mentioned that in my hearing.  Usually people get all excited about odd dates of that sort, but they happen often enough I suppose.

It has been a rough weekend.  As mentioned, I sent my computer out for diagnostics and repairs.  They increased the on-board memory four-fold and upgraded a driver that manages the drives, and it’s still freezing and crashing and restarting, although I’m not certain whether it is doing so less frequently.

Not having a computer, I took the time to put The Time Traveler’s Wife into the player and look for anything I missed–specifically, anything at all that would help me tie Henry’s life to a calendar, or his age to Clare’s, or anything that would cement the timelines in a way that solidified them.  Good in the sense that I’m glad I didn’t miss it, I found it–which is bad in the sense that I had to hand-edit the printout of all twenty-two articles in the series, and then last night when the still-defective computer returned to its proper place on my desk, to make all those changes in the articles themselves so that today I could upload the first, The Time Traveler’s Wife part 1:  a fixed time gem, to the temporal anomalies section of The Examiner.

I got swamped with a heavy load of Monday e-mail, but that would have happened anyway, I think.  It was bad enough that something I really wanted to read (from a friend in the Christian music world) I sent to the printer and will take with me later when I expect to be cooling my heels somewhere.

I have several other projects looming over my head, but at least this one is good to go.  I dropped a dime–actually, closer to two hundred dimes–to buy a copy of Hot Tub Time Machine, the promised promotional copy never having materialized, and wondered whether I’m in the black for my writing at the moment or not.  All the good things I’ve heard about this movie make me hesitant to watch it, and the fact that the big deal with the copy I bought is that it also includes the unrated version does not encourage my expectations, but at least I already have stated that I don’t watch director’s cuts because it is theatrical versions that tell the story that was ultimately told, so I have my defense ready.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all that comes to mind at the moment.  Oh, I did read Eric Ashley’s latest installment, Cereal Novel:  Eleventh Bowl, which still determinedly refuses to allow its main character, or the reader, to get oriented to this strange world.  Fascinating, in that way.  I can’t remember a fantasy that didn’t make a valiant effort to connect the reader to the world somehow.  I’ve often thought about running game worlds that were that disorienting, but I seldom actually do, and even then I think I impose a bit more order on them than is really good for a disorienting world.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Equivalences

October 5, 2009 in Blogs

I thought I had mentioned but cannot now find a note with reference to my recent notion of a scale for explaining life, which I call the Nine Five Equivalent, abbreviated 95e.  In essence, it is determined by taking the time an individual ordinarily reports to work, calling it effectively nine in the morning, and then referencing all other times by their relationship to this.

I mention it now because I had car trouble–last night the alternator died on the car on which we rely for our own transportation.  I spotted the problem in time to cancel any evening travels and managed to drive to the garage early this morning so they could repair it.  That means that I was out of bed around eight thirty.  For someone on a nine-to-five schedule, that’s probably sleeping in a bit.  I, though, am on a three-to-eleven schedule, dictated by my wife’s employer.  Eight is seven hours before three, and thus I was up at 95e two-thirty in the morning.  I spent the worst part of the day falling asleep over a book and several cups of coffee in a diner that has a no sleepers policy, and settled the bills in the early afternoon.

Under the heading of what else could go wrong, I decided that since I was passing the inspection station on my way home, I would stop and ask how I get the car reinspected if I lost the paper that said for what it failed originally.  They were very helpful, having no one waiting, and said that they could print a copy from the central computer and bring me through right away.  Although it had failed for bad tires, apparently they had to drive it through the inspection line, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, turning it off, starting it, as it moved to the end, where they turned it off.  When I went to drive away, there was nothing left of the battery to start it yet once more.

Thanks to the generosity of my parents, I have Triple A, so I called them.  I know that in our part of the world it can take as much as ninety minutes to get emergency road service, because the approved service stations are some distance away and are often busy.  However, it was barely ten minutes before a vehicle, a large flatbed, arrived, and I thought I would be headed home.  Wrong again.  It seems that this particular truck was passing through the area and got a call from his dispatcher to check on me, but he had no jumper cables and no jumper pack–the tow truck could not give me a jump.  I could wait for him to drive back to his base, probably half an hour away, and return with cables, or for someone else to get to me, or I could let him tow me wherever I wanted to go.

On reflection, I had him tow me the mile or two back to the garage that had done the repair.  They found my story of the inspection station running down the battery entertaining, and set about charging the battery for most of an hour while I sat this time on a bench in the sun.

It drove home fine, and the gauges and lights all looked good, but as for me I wandered about a bit trying to get oriented and finally collapsed for a nap in the nine-five equivalent of about noon to three.  I am now attempting to get up to speed on some of what I missed in this disrupted day.

I hope you found it entertaining.

I did have the foresight to upload the latest Examiner temporal anomalies article before I left for the garage, although I am only this evening announcing it (you should subscribe if you want to be notified, but I have no idea how that works).  This was an answer to Primer Question 1:  the disappearing Abe, treatment of one particular doppelganger in the cult-popular film.  It remains to be seen how the readers will respond to these question-and-answer articles, but I had been planning to do a third viewing of the Futurama movie Bender’s Big Score so I could continue the analysis, and the car trouble disrupted those plans as well.

So at this point I think I’m pushing most of Monday into Tuesday and trying to get back to some semblance of sanity around here.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Not Sure What I’m Doing

May 12, 2008 in Blogs

The Saturn, the car with good gas mileage, has started losing coolant.  I’ve had to top it off a few times in recent weeks.  The problem is, I don’t know how fast it’s losing coolant–and this is complicated by the fact that the design of this vehicle does not include direct access to the radiator, but only to the overflow tank, which is under pressure when the vehicle is hot.  Thus I cannot easily determine whether there is air in the radiator trying to get out.

The problem was severe last night, as the car started overheating en route to the fulfillment of an interstate errand, and the one running the errand (not I) had to return to swap for the less-efficient truck.  This creates uncertainty, since on the one hand I had topped off the tank Saturday afternoon, but on the other hand I do not know that there was no air in the radiator and I do know that there was extensive driving done Saturday night and Sunday morning, which could have depleted the reserve.

Right now someone is driving the vehicle around locally to see whether the added coolant is sufficient; when the car returns, I will have to let it cool and then open up the overflow tank to check the level.

All of this is because it is Monday, and part of the Monday workload includes taking my mother-in-law shopping.

It has also been a strange Monday, as I was informed sometime late yesterday that one of my sons would need to be seen by a doctor today, so (after going back to bed after bus riders were organized) I forced myself out of bed once the office was open and made a call to get an appointment.  The first available appointment was at crack of dawn tomorrow–actually, eight in the morning, but that’s outrageously early by my standards–and so he did not go today.  However, I had by then forced myself into wakefulness, and so attempted to get started on my day–an effort which took longer than I would have preferred, and then was interrupted several times once the hurdles were crossed.

At the moment, then, I am trying to get as much of this work done as I am able while awaiting the return of the car so I can figure out what I’m doing for dinner and what I’m doing about the car.  Once those matters are settled, I will be dealing with my mother-in-law with whichever vehicle is guessed to be the better choice, and returning to finish whatever was left undone.

So maybe I do know what I’m doing; I just don’t know that I know.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Not Yet Absent

April 24, 2008 in Blogs

Why don’t you just tell everyone that you don’t have time to post because you have to get ready for Ubercon?

The question would have been less ironic, I suppose, were it not that the one asking it had called me around one in the morning, when I was trying to make good use of the time my laundry was running by washing some of the dishes which must be under control by the time I leave tomorrow–a phone call that lasted over an hour and took me away from the things I needed to do to look at one of the very forum posts he was suggesting I not answer until Monday.  Yet irony or no, it was a good question.  I could decline to attend today’s game, and let it all slide into Monday.  I would be a lot less pressured in terms of convention preparations were I to do so.

It is not so simple as that, however.  To my mind, the question is not whether I will post today, but whether I will attempt to post tomorrow before I leave.  My inclination at the moment is that I will not, but it is a hesitant inclination.  I believe that I have always posted on Friday before departing for any convention, probably all the way back to Apartment Con years ago.  However, I have also gotten caught in traffic, or fallen behind schedule, or otherwise wound up reaching the first event late, or breathless, or both.  I would like this time to get to my hotel first, leave my suitcase there (since I will be traveling in the pickup this time around, and I do not wish to leave my suitcase in the bed of a pickup in a hotel parking lot in the middle of a New Jersey Turnpike interchange while I spend four to six hours in the convention).  That means I’m looking to leave earlier than I usually get out of bed, and hoping to have accomplished at least a few things before that (although I will probably pack most of the stuff into the truck tonight).  So I already feel a bit guilty about the fact that I am nixing tomorrow’s visit, and to add today to it would be too much.

On top of that, as I pointed out to my caller, the work does not stop stacking up simply because I stop doing it.  Come Monday I will have all that I usually do on Monday, plus whatever I did not do in the interim.  Frequently I have managed to pop in and post upon my return Sunday night–but last Ubercon the last session was packed, and this Ubercon promises to be even more insane, so there’s no hope of an early departure (and really, I do not hope that there will be no interest in the last session).  I will be late getting home, and probably will not be able to do the bare minimum of Sunday’s work.  Thus Monday promises to be nightmarishly overloaded, and adding Thursday to it would be completely foolish.

So here I am; but I make no promises that I will return again before Monday.

–M. J. Young

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by M. J. Young

Concerted Effort

April 20, 2008 in Blogs

The Collision concert went reasonably well last night.  Baxter brought his new amp, which looks really good, but because we’d not worked with it I suggested we use the old one for this concert.  Adam got crossed communication wires and went to the wrong coffeehouse location, and since Brittany had to be out early we got a short delay and then did the first song without him, tuned up the bass while Brittany introduced the second, and finished our two songs to audience approval.  I got some compliments on Adam’s playing, but he ducked out early.  Baxter and I did an encore near the end of the night, which also went well, although not as well as the opening songs.

Meanwhile, I’m starting to get nervous about the week ahead.  I’ve got Ubercon on Friday, and Kyler has indicated that he will not be going this time, and I’m not certain what John’s situation is.  I can probably handle it alone–but there are still many preparations to make, including getting my hotel reservation (I don’t know anyone close enough to Edison to stay with them, despite having attended elementary school within half an hour of there).  I have to do inventory of everything that has to go with me, probably printing copies of forms used, and make sure that I have everything packed.  Complicating this, my Monday Workload has been increased because when I take my mother-in-law shopping I will also have to go about ninety minutes further to return a certain young lady to her home.  Then my overbooked Tuesday has been further overbooked by the need to help an old friend move.  I’ve also realized that our youngest guest’s medicine will run out next weekend, and that his doctor cannot refill it without seeing him, so I’m going to have to twist arms to get him an appointment midweek on top of everything else.

It’s not looking good; and I have been alerted that there is a substantial amount of work awaiting me in the form of an analysis of The Last Mimzy that will add a significant chunk of time to Monday’s work.

Conventions always mean crazy weeks; unfortunately, crazy weeks don’t always wait until they are convenient.

–M. J. Young

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As Far as Six Thirty-One

April 8, 2008 in Blogs

I suppose it was a sort of accomplishment.

I finished my scheduled Monday work last night, signing out from posting to the Corinthians list just as my wife finished hers and arrived home.  We were both dealing with those last-thing-before-bed things when the phone rang, and our son wanted to come home from his work address.  Normally my wife would go, as she enjoys late night drives; or else, if she was not feeling well, I would go.  However, she decided we would both go.  That, though, meant that our departure was delayed a bit longer, and we stayed a bit longer at the other end than we otherwise might have done.  I got home in time to shut off the five o’clock alarm and give the first boy his medicine as he prepared for school.

We had a bit of a scare, because his bus was late.  I do not recall it ever having been late, and thus our fear was that it had come early and he had missed it.  This would have meant an extra forty minutes or more of driving for me, to deliver him to the school.  However, it arrived, and he caught it.  I, then, proceeded to prod the other boy, the one who has to catch the next bus but who lately has been freed from riding buses because his girlfriend drives and has her own car.  He is not an easy starter, but I managed to get him to acknowledge verbally that it was six thirty-one.

I’m afraid that the next thing I remember was said girlfriend standing over him telling him that he had to hurry, because she had misplaced her car keys and her father was driving them.  He flew out of the house remarkably quickly as I apologized for failing to roust him quicker, and I finally had the opportunity to get ready for bed.

All of which means that I am finally hitting the ground for today’s work.  I have managed in the midst of everything else to arrange for our mechanic to take a look at the car one of my sons is hoping will be available for him to take to school soon.  I’ve unblocked it in the drive, but one of our houseguests has apparently decided it is a good place to store stuff, so I’m going to have to get him to clean it out later before it vanishes.  However, there is much still to do, so I’d better get to the doing.

–M. J. Young

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Eat, Sleep, Drive

March 18, 2008 in Blogs

…Not necessarily in that order.

As I mentioned on Sunday, yesterday’s plan involved driving north so that a son could spend his girlfriend’s birthday with her. This also would give me opportunity to visit my sick father, who although home from the hospital seems to have lost his voice (vocal chords not responding for some reason), and to connect with our drummer to give lend him the electronic drum gadget he’s been eager to use. It has also meant that the Monday workload got pushed into today atop the Tuesday workload, which is a lot of work.

The plan did not go entirely smoothly. I believe I got almost three hours of sleep by five in the morning, when the first to need to catch a bus was looking for his morning medicine, and then in somewhat disrupted and disjointed fashion pieced together my morning study and was on the road around quarter after seven. We grabbed breakfast at the gas station (which is not as bad as it sounds, since although Wawa has recently established a strong place in the retail gasoline market they are traditionally a deliconvenience store) and so reached the northern destination very shortly after ten.

Having fought for consciousness over the last leg of that journey, I locked the car and slept, fitfully with the CD player running, for about two hours. I then was unable to reach the drummer, who I think had not anticipated his wife and her Irish family monopolizing his time on St. Patrick’s Day–but my mother called, wondering why I was not already there, so I went there, ate lunch, and by around two was reading clippings cut for me.

Then, perhaps near three, I fell asleep again, and slept until my cell phone awoke me, my wife calling to see what arrangements I had made for several things she had expected me to address. Since it was by then almost six, my mother turned her attention to feeding me dinner and packing my car full of groceries. I still could not raise my drummer on the phone, I settled in to wait for someone to call.

The son called first–not the son for whose call I was waiting, but the son who hoped I would pick him up from his brother and bring him home for a few days. That was agreed, although the timeline was still uncertain. Then the anticipated son called, but to tell me that he was going to have dinner nearby before he was ready to go home. Then the drummer called, and the end of the stay up there was a somewhat awkward juggling of conflicting connections–but we made it.

The return trip put us in the driveway around two in the morning, if memory serves, and then there were some things that could not stay in the car overnight which had to be unpacked. My online work was limited to posting to the Corinthians list, and then I got to bed about an hour before I would be getting up again–but at least this time I correctly anticipated being able to return to bed after people were rousted and driven from the house. I think I’m reasonably rested at this point, but do not know whether I will be caught up by the end of the night or not.

To add to the confusion, my mother-in-law called. We just solved her banking problem so she can pay her bills, but now she has no stamps. Thus I have promised to bring her some tomorrow. Here’s hoping that’s not too disruptive.

–M. J. Young

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That Worked Like Not At All

March 16, 2008 in Blogs

Tomorrow is an anticipated disaster.  I’ve been tasked with dropping someone off three hours away by ten in the morning, which means I’ll be leaving here as soon after the boys are on their buses as I can manage, and then with bringing him home sometime after eight at night, which means I’ll be getting in around midnight.  This is not unreasonably because of a certain girlfriend’s birthday, and while I am in the neighborhood I am planning to visit my ailing faither (who is home now) and hoping to catch some time with my old and returning drummer.  I am not anticipating being able to do even the bare minimum of work here.

To compensate, I had planned to tear through a lot of tomorrow’s work today, tackling e-mail and getting everything in order so that I was on top of things, and then getting to bed early.  I did manage to take my mother-in-law shopping; but my wife had a meeting up that way, and so we went together, and one thing was added to another to another until it was very late, and I am very tired, and I will be lucky to manage today’s work today, unlikely to get to bed early, and probably not going to manage to get the things from the attic that I had promised to take with me when I went.  Well, maybe I can manage that part–but I’m pressing my luck as it is.

I’m constantly asked why I never plan to do the things that need to be done.  The reason is that my plans are irrelevant; whatever I plan, I can be pretty certain that that is not going to be done.

–M. J. Young

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