That seemed an appropriate way to open this post.  Even though I am terribly behind schedule, there were good things in the delays; but let’s tackle things decently and in order.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel part 14:  denoument appeared to wrap up the Examiner temporal anomalies analysis of that clever bit of entertainment.  The last minutes of the film gave us several temporal gags that deserved a quick glance, including a tango with parallel dimensions and dance with doppelgangers.  Monday will see the start of Source Code, and I’m making progress prepping Warlock to follow that.  After that the only film sitting in my inbox is Blackadder Back and Forth, so I may have to do a bit of time travel movie shopping, unless I can find Turtles in Time before then.

Part of today’s delay was a trip to the Sam Goody in Cherry Hill, the biggest music store we actually visit.  We were there to get a few things for the new used viola that was added to our instrument collection over the past week (really, what she paid for it on E-bay probably wasn’t as much as the case was worth, and it seems to be a decent instrument), but I casually mentioned that I was looking for a decent pair of PA speakers, preferably used, that could handle two to three hundred watts apiece–and they had just got such a pair and let me have both for less than I’d expected to have to pay for each.  They’re nice, Electrovoice, three hundred watt eight ohm jobs, I heard them in operation and have already delivered them to the practice hall; maybe I’ll hook them up tomorrow night.

I was at the practice hall because of course there was a rehearsal tonight, for the church music, and another tomorrow for Collision.  I was particularly needed tonight, despite being late, because the piano player who is taking over running the music (I am really only there to help them get organized) is out of town this weekend, so I’ve got to run things on Sunday.  But I think things are under control.

I am thinking about making some changes to my Thursday schedule, though.  I don’t want to say too much here, because even though the people it impacts are unlikely to read this blog I want to discuss it with them directly first.  In any case, it will free up some of my time, and I think it might be time to do that.

That brings me to a quick review of Eric Ashley’s contributions since my last entry.  It was several days ago that I read Practise Bits:  You, which is a rare second person story (in which you are the protagonist) with what seems to be a touch of amnesia to help connect you to the events.  Practise Bits:  Amoral 1 appears to be a prequel to one of last week’s pieces with similar name, dealing with the origin of the nanites that destroy the world.  Practise Bits:  Watching brings a defender of good into a deteriorating and debauched world.  Earlier today he added Practise Bits:  Job (apparently the third time the database has encountered an article of that title, because it autonumbers the links when there’s a second one).  The new character introduced here, along with his crewmates, is an AI genius, and indeed I find the notion of such an individual floating around the verse interesting and probably would consult him (after all, the Architect is a generalist, and never as good at any one thing as a similarly-experienced specialist).

Time’s a wasting, and if I’m going to get the rest of tonight’s work done tonight, I’d better be moving.

–M. J. Young

Meanwhile, over the weekend I managed to complete a draft of what appears to be an eleven-part series on Source Code.  I wish it might have been longer, partly because it means that’s only five and a half weeks before I will have to have the next one ready, and partly because it was a good movie well promoted so I expect to get strong readership for the articles.  However, trying to stretch the series without more to say would be bad for readership overall, so unless my editing process causes me to recognize gaps in what I’ve written, it is what it is.

I also completed since Thursday sheet music for the next Collision rehearsal, which our piano player Jonathan is already practicing.  I’m trying to add five more songs in about a month, which is going to be a challenge, but if I get three of them working that will be good.  I have not yet seen the video culled from the concert (posted at the Silver Lake Community Church website, I’m told, but I’ve got the audio recordings which I review in the car while driving or waiting, and I’m not entirely unhappy with them.

Eric Ashley has contributed only one new piece, but it’s good, interesting in several ways, and worth reading:  Practise Bits:  Flashes is a space travel story, in which a verser uses her equipment scriff sense to follow a trail through space, and her other abilities to deal with problems on the ship.

–M. J. Young

Meanwhile, my coming and going today has left me exhausted, and I am going to attempt to push through a bit more before I collapse, but I barely made it to tonight’s rehearsal for Sunday’s church service after the day was filled with–well, other activities which included an early rising.

Let me remind anyone in the area that Collision will be playing Saturday, 6:00 PM Saturday at the Silver Lake Community Church, and that ice cream is free.

I have again been keeping pace with Eric Ashley’s prolific efforts.  Practise Bits:  Tied Up has an off-stage hero doing a bit of matchmaking in the midst of crisis.  Practise Bits:  Intruder 3 continues the Intruder series, introducing new characters.  Practise Bits:  Jewels dabbles in a little magic and a battle of impatiences.

I’m fighting my own battle, but I’ll at least glance at the forums before I surrender.

–M. J. Young

This one finishes a movie that was a disaster from the beginning, which heaped disaster upon disaster, and ends with a final disaster, in which by attempting to repair all the previous disasters they tie them all together in a web of disaster.  Gee, maybe I should have written that in the article.  In any case, the final article addressing this movie has appeared:  A Sound of Thunder part 16:  unendings.  Another movie begins on Monday.

I’m ready for that one, but worried about the one to follow.  I have only four weeks of articles in the pipeline, and the movie to follow is half done and already I’ve lost the thread and started to get confused about it.  In my defense, the film is laced with multiple temporal hops, very few of them fully detailed, many of them interacting with each other in unexpected ways.  Hopefully, though, I’ll work it out.

On another front, Eric Ashley has given two more episodes in his fictional fragments.  Practise Bits:  Swim starts as a verser at Spring Break and turns into a modern vampire hunter; I would probably like it more if it didn’t remind me of Dusk ‘Til Dawn, which always struck me as two entirely different really bad movies awkwardly stuck together in the middle, but I’m sure that’s not a generally shared opinion.  Not Eric’s fault, and he poses some interesting ideas in his world, although they might be difficult to execute in play.

The other, Practise Bit:  Pretender, pretends to be named for the supposed king of the planet but is really about the visitor who has come to undermine the present social and technological order in order to advance the local population to a level sufficient to join the intergalactic war.  There’s no Prime Directive in this story, or if there is, it’s absolutely opposite of the one we identify with those words.

–M. J. Young

I am similarly vexed in my efforts to wrap my head around the work I’m doing on Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, which has been a lot of fun to watch and to consider, but is starting to bog down in my brain.  I should probably watch it again, but one of my sons borrowed it promising to make a copy that will run on the DVD player (and I suspect my trial copy of the program that will play it on my computer is going to run out before I get it back) and has not yet done so.  He is elsewhere celebrating Independence Day.

Which reminds me:  to all who celebrate such holidays within these United States, happy Independence Day.  I might get in the pool, but not because it’s a holiday.  Most of the holiday celebrations I have seen boil down to “it’s good to have an excuse to mix fire, gunpowder, and alcohol”, which doesn’t seem a good plan to me.  I’m not a holiday person generally, though, so maybe I just don’t get it.

The car is probably the biggest complication–Thursday night when left practice it blew a hole in the radiator, and it was a two-hour effort to limp it home five miles a hundred yards at a time with such bottled water as I had in the car (not bottled water, but water in old coolant bottles).  Complicating it further, the bank account is about depleted and we have not yet heard whether disability is going to consider sending us money on the new claim, so we’ll be scrounging loans from family (not all of which we have repaid from the last disability delay) to pay for the repair.

That rehearsal introduced its own complications:  the new drummer, Nick, has trouble with weeknight rehearsals, but Baxter doesn’t want to sacrifice his weekends; but then, he has had a lot of trouble with rehearsals for Collision and for the church band, to the point that I’m concerned whether he’s still interested in doing music at all.  More complicating, I’ve noticed in recent recordings that I get too tired trying to play and sing, and mess up rhythms and tempos terribly, so I am definitely going to need people who can help hold the beat together.  The old drummer, John Mastick, seems to be ignoring me, although I have not given up hope that it’s just some kind of technical snafu that prevents him from getting anything from me.  There are a lot of other complications, but this is getting long, and I’m hoping to do a bit of swimming before I finish the rest of the work today.

Eric Ashley has offered three articles over the weekend, worth a quick view; he courteously posted them on different days, with the result that I could read them one at a time and still have them clearly separate in my mind.  Practise Bits:  Apartment was a bit of fun with a super-human character trying to modify available real estate to suit his training needs without causing undue problems with his neighbors.  Practise Bits:  Ghost was a bit of high-tech commando work, perhaps inspired on some level by his early Multiverser character, who took the name “The Ghost” when he single-handedly defeated the Army of Eight using a few tricks and guerrilla tactics–although I’m still not sure why the charging dogs did not break the laser beams he was so carefully detecting.  Finally, Practise Bits:  Unease is another untrained kid verser trying to struggle through being a hero and not doing well at it.

So on that note, I’ll let you read those articles (don’t miss mine, of course), while I get wet and then return to tackle the forum posts.

–M. J. Young

Today’s temporal anomalies article at The Examiner is also about being late, specifically about the oddity in the film A Sound of Thunder which suggests that having changed the past the time travel team cannot return to the moment at which the change occurred.  We’ll talk more about how ridiculous and inconsistent this is, but for now A Sound of Thunder part 10:  late arrivals introduces the problem and the immediate impact of the trips made while attempting to define it.

Turning the attention to the latest work from Eric Ashley, I read Practise Bits:  Farmboy yesterday.  It’s an interesting view of a Multiverser character recently versed out as a young man who does not know what has happened to him but is struggling to make a life where he is.  Today I find Practise Bits:  Faith tells a story of a confrontation between a weak but believing verser and a horde of vampires in the playground of a preschool, which was an encouraging read.

Before I am late for anything else, let me wrap up and move forward.

–M. J. Young

After that, I’ll probably be breaking one of my rules:  it appears that the copy of FAQ About Time Travel that came to me will only play on the DVD player on my computer (and that only with the help of a thirty-day free trial of a Nero decoding program, so I’ve got to hurry and watch it before I hit something like the problem I had with Turtle Beach).  So I will be watching video on my computer, which I never do because it’s too hard on the computer.  But I’ve had a couple of requests for this obscure film, and I should get to it.

We had a strange music rehearsal tonight for Collision and for the church; but I’m too tired to go into the details at this point and they’re not really that important.  My day was shredded by the expectations of others, which grew more demanding and complicated as the day progressed, and so I’m cutting out stuff I never skip simply so I can get to bed and try again tomorrow.  We’ll see.

I do make it a point to read Eric Ashley’s work as soon as I can, so I don’t miss it (just as with e-mail, I know that if I don’t answer it when I get it, I never will).  He has two new ones.  Practise Bits:  Dozen Steps has me a bit confused on several levels, but the most mundane of them is the mention of the slightly acidic taste of limestone.  I’ve never tasted limestone, but I understand it to be comprised entirely of calcium carbonate, which is used to eliminate acidity in swimming pools, so I would expect it to be a mildly bitter alkaline taste, not a sour acidic one.  That’s picking nits, but then, when a comment in an article sends me on a search to figure out whether I’m misinformed, it’s probably a problem.

Practise Bits:  Shiptree is the other, reminding me of an old Peter Davison Dr. Who with wooden ships racing through space.  I’m not sure why a hemp rope is “natural” but a steel cable isn’t, or indeed how the universe can distinguish “artificial” materials from “natural”–it is, after all, just a matter of degree, whether you turn a hemp plant into artificial fibers from which you make a hemp rope or turn a tree into petroleum which you then convert to artificial fibers from which you make a nylon rope.  But it was a good read nonetheless.

Today is not quite over, but I might just pretend it is.

–M. J. Young

Today I posted the penultimate piece in the Timeline temporal anomalies series at The Examiner.  Thursday the series will end, and next week I will begin a couple months looking at A Sound of Thunder, which I believe is already complete.  After that, I have a mere seven articles sketched to cover Next, and I keep thinking that I should write at least one more but can’t come up with what it should cover, so I might just have to edit the seventh to round out the series and be done with it.  I have not yet chosen the next one, although someone asked if I planned to do FAQ About Time Travel (I think that’s the name), and I believe I have a copy, so if it runs on my machine I’ll probably move it to the top of the pile.

Back to the point, Timeline part 17:  recalling deals in more detail with the problems created by the way the recall devices work–or perhaps do not work–and the impact that potentially has on history.  The next one will finish the story.

Meanwhile, the problem with my Turtle Beach software is complicating other aspects of my life, as I now cannot print many of the music sheets I’m using both with the church and with Collision.  I’ve got someone looking for a way to crack it, which I will publish here if it is found, but it’s not looking promising from last report.  I’ve got to work up music for another hymn before Thursday’s practice, and things are terribly busy here anyway–I am told to expect delivery on the new washing machine tomorrow sometime in the middle of the day, a time frame that begins early enough to roust me from bed ahead of my usual schedule and runs late enough that it might interfere with getting someone to work.

Despite this, I did manage to put the last lick and polish on the twenty-fourth lesson of Mr. Young’s Music Theory Class, the Facebook group started to help a few friends get some music theory and composition under their belts.  I don’t usually mention those here, partly because they are so far off topic and partly because for a while I was tearing through them at almost one a day, but since I took a break while working on this weekend’s wedding (my little brother got married, it must have been the end of the world) it had been stagnant for a while.

I’ve also got some legal papers to answer, and really should have tackled them before tonight but I misplaced them; so I’m going to have to cut and run.

–M. J. Young

First, though, permit me to announce the publication of the latest temporal anomalies Examiner article.  I have been examining the movie Timeline, and have just released Timeline 16:  a blast, which fills in some of the details involved in the anomalies which involve sending seven time travelers to the past, and then snatching one back to the future.  If you are new to this blog and interested in time travel movies, you’ll find an index of most of my work in that area here.  Now, let’s get back to the problem.

Turtle Beach once published software under the trade name Voyetra.  What some would say was a long time ago but I think of as fairly recently I purchased one of their products, something called Digital Orchestra, from a software rack in a Best Buy.  It did a number of things that were very good, but there were some things it didn’t seem to do, and the suggestion was that there was an available upgrade for it.  I contacted the company, and was told no, but there was a program called Record Producer that I could buy and download directly from their server which would take the proprietary .orc files and convert them to another proprietary .rpp format, from which I could produce midis, wavs, and mp3s.  I purchased it.

They tell me that I purchased it in 2003; I have no reason to doubt that.  They say that the price was forty dollars, but my recollection is that it was the most I had to that point ever spent on an online purchase or paid for software, and that this was on top of the previous software I had purchased from them which was supposed to do what this one did.  I installed it on my computer, which I think was by then running Windows 98, after I had been coerced to abandon Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 for that inferior operating system.  The program worked well, and I used it frequently, creating several collections of music and also using it to print scores and parts for songs I had written for others.

The time came when due to hardware problems I was forced to replace several computer components simultaneously, including the boot drive, and in the process was forced to upgrade to Windows XP.  This created a minor problem, because the registration code did not work; but customer service at Voyetra provided a new code that would work on XP, and although the program lost some functionality (it no longer saved in mp3 format), it still worked quite well and I was again using it frequently.

At this point it would be important to explain the security on this program.  Voyetra was serious about preventing piracy.  You could install the program, and you had to type in a code that was, I am told, unique to your copy.  It probably is not, but at least it was not universal.  This would make the program functional for thirty days.  In that time, you had to register the program to make it fully functional for more than thirty days.  If you did not, the program ceased to run–it would come to the registration screen and tell you that you’d finished your thirty days, and you could then register it or close it.  Registration was simple, though, because the program would itself contact the Voyetra server and obtain a code which you would never see, and that would resolve everything.  They were aware, however, that not everyone had Internet access on every computer, so they provided two alternative methods.  One was to log into that server directly from any computer, type in a string of numbers and letters that the program generated, receive a new string of numbers and letters which the site generated, and then put this information into the program to unlock it.  The other was to send that same string of numbers and letters to Voyetra by Fax, and receive a response by Fax with the needed code.

Earlier this year another hardware failure required replacing a boot drive.  This did not mean that I lost the Record Producer program, which was still installed on the data drive.  However, beginning with Windows XP Microsoft decided that its operating system would not recognize programs whose installations pre-dated its own.  That means if you have to re-install XP you also have to reinstall every other program on your computer so that XP will recognize it.  I did so, because I needed the music program.  It gave me the thirty day warning and attempted to contact the Voyetra servers.  But sometime in the past year or so, the Voyetra servers have ceased to exist.  Turtle Beach still exists, but they don’t maintain that site.  So I e-mailed them and asked for a solution.  I sent them the code that the program generated.

It took several e-mails before they even understood the problem.  Then they decided to tell me that there was no solution:  neither they nor anyone else could give me the code that would be needed to restore the program to functionality, because having taken down the servers they were apparently too incompetent to preserve whatever software was required to generate such a code, and having found a lucrative business in audio hardware they have in essence closed down their audio software division.

Our company president, who knows more about such things than I, says that if they will not or cannot provide the registration code to a licensed user, that makes it abandonware which anyone can use, crack, and install; but his preliminary search for a code or cracker to get the needed number has only revealed that there are many others out there in the same position, unable to register their software because the servers are gone and thus unable to use it after a computer crash.

To be clear and fair again, I understand that the program might not have worked on XP; that would then be one more complaint I would have about Microsoft, who repeatedly redesigns its operating system software so that my preferred programs no longer run.  That is not the case here, as the program ran fine on XP for quite a while and then when XP was reinstalled it ran fine for thirty days until the “trial period” expired and it locked me out.  I also understand that they might be unwilling to support software that ran only on operating systems that were no longer supported, such as Windows 98; however, it does run on Windows XP, and although Microsoft is threatening to discontinue support for XP next year it has not done so yet.  I’m old school; I would like to get my Commodore 64 running, get new controllers so I can play my Intellivision, and find a version of QBasic that runs on XP so I can run my own programs that are now nonfunctional thanks to Microsoft’s less-functional operating system changes.  I don’t think software should ever expire, and I don’t see any reasonable argument for it to do so.  It’s not as if I’m asking them for an upgrade.  I’m asking them to honor the license they sold me to use this software as long as I am using a computer on which it can run, by giving me the password to get around the security they installed on it.  They are refusing.  If, as they claim, they cannot, they are incompetent; if they simply will not, they are intransigent.  Either way, despite how polite they have been, I find their refusal to provide the necessary code to activate the software I bought from them unconscionable.

I am open to hear other opinions.

Before I close, let me note that Eric Ashley has again written another, Practise Bits:  The Meaning of Words.  Having just now read it, I find it a fascinating fragment of a world about which I would like to create more.  Perhaps I will find a way to do so.

–M. J. Young

Today has been about the unanticipated.  Even today’s Examiner temporal anomalies article, Timeline part 14:  the recall problem, is a bit of an interruption.  After a baker’s dozen of previous installments suddenly I bring forward a major problem with the whole time travel idea, based on the fact that the recall devices have to fail, first time every time.  It was also a bit unanticipated in another way:  I changed the title of it on Monday when was checking it for publication.

In other unexpectedness, I was not planning to do the shopping for the washing machine until tomorrow and Saturday, but plans changed so I lost the afternoon and part of the evening to that task; it is mercifully completed except for the delivery part, which is going to take a dozen days because the excellent underpriced washing machine we found is backordered, but worth the wait.  I will, however, be making a few more trips to the laundromat in the intervening time, including one tomorrow.

I got back part of the night, though, when the piano player at the church, who is also the new piano player in Collision, called with some unexpectedness of his own.  One of his teenaged kids announced late this afternoon that he had a high school concert tonight, needing transportation and probably also the obligatory parental attendance, and since we rely on the piano player to unlock the practice space for us that was the end of that.  It’s disappointing, but it’s also more convenient, and hopefully both the church practice and the band practice will fall into place next week.

I heard from Turtle Beach, but the answer they sent was inadequate so I’ve written back to get a more adequate answer.  I mention it because I am likely to post on Monday either glowing praise or severe condemnation of their to date polite but not always helpful customer support, and by including mention of it now I’ll probably increase the search engine friendliness of whatever I post, which increases its impact significantly.

Finally, I do want to mention Eric Ashley’s two new pieces that are being bumped down the page by my blog posting.  Both focus on battles, but different types of battles.  The older one is one of strategy at high magic power levels:  Practise Bits:  I’m Not a God talks of a battle between versers given god-like world-building power.  Since then he added Practise Bits:  They, which is a single commando against viscious humanoids.  Both are well told.

Let me see what I can do about the rest of my unexpected day.

–M. J. Young