My wife is sick. I have been fortunate that my immune system usually wins against the diseases she gets from contact related to her medical profession, and so I am not also dreadfully ill. I am, however, dreadfully busy.

I lost yesterday to a long roadtrip, returning a young lady visitor to her home in the northern end of the state. While I was up that way anyway, I met over coffee with an old friend, who will be playing drums with Collision, and delivered to him a copy of that compact disk he has been eager to receive, along with many pages of song sheets and drum parts for his consideration. The time we spent together was both too long and too short–too long in that it was very late by the time I got home, and too short in that there was so much more to say.

Then this afternoon my mother called to let me know that my father was back in the hospital. No one is quite sure what is wrong with him, but they have half a dozen excellent doctors working on it.

Shortly after that I received the news that Ernest Gary Gygax, to whom everyone in the role playing world owes a debt of gratitude for his courage in publishing the original Dungeons & Dragons game and with whom I’ve had enough correspondence to feel that we knew each other, passed away early this morning. On the heels of the death of Larry Norman last week, perhaps the key figure in making Christian Rock acceptable and who impressed me in our one meeting thirty years back with his keen insight and discernment, this comes as something of a blow.

I am too far behind to try to do everything, and must make a trip to return another son to his work address tonight. More and more is being pushed into another day; may there be enough days to bring all up to date before I, too, am too sick to do anything.

–M. J. Young

It’s been a crazy week, to the point that I cannot even remember all the things that have conspired to delay my work here, let alone sort them into days.

I lost a good part of Friday to driving, picking up a son’s girlfriend who is staying the weekend and going back on Monday. I had managed to catch up the e-mail before I left, but by the time I returned it was too late to consider seriously doing doing much more.

Thursday night I was hoping to play catch-up after the Collision rehearsal, but our chief computer technician decided that this was his best opportunity to try to figure out what was wrong with the CD-RW on the computer, which effort left me without access to the computer until late Friday afternoon, in an already tightly-sandwiched situation.

I cannot even recall which day was largely lost to the medical attention of the child in our care. He needs a particular medication once a day in order to function appropriately in school, and to get it he must be seen by a doctor (actually, it was a nurse practitioner) every other month or they can’t write the prescription. Between waiting at the doctor’s office to be seen briefly and waiting for the pharmacy to fill the prescription, I lost a good part of whatever day that was. I did manage to get some Romans editing done in the cracks.

I also managed to do some serious backing up of files. This involved acquiring a small flashdrive–the new computer does support such technology, where the old one always had problems–and using it to carry files physically to another computer with a CD burner. This effort included burning copies of what is now the complete set of Collision practice recordings, so that each member of the band can hear what each song is intended to sound like, once these are fully distributed. Audio files being relatively large, this required several transfers; I believe those are now fully preserved, and I can set aside that particular project for the present.

The CD burner was restored to operation by late Friday. It seems that the IDE support on the new motherboard has a flaw, and it is thus good that we got the IDE card–each IDE cable from the motherboard supports a primary but not a secondary drive, so despite having purchased an IDE card we can only run four drives on it. At the moment, that means the new hard drive with the new operating system, the two old hard drives with all the data, and the CD-RW; the DVD drive was chosen as the superfluous one. However, the old primary drive is small, and I am seriously considering transfering everything from it to one of the other two drives and removing it for use elsewhere. There is not much advantage to having a DVD reader on my computer, but there is the fact that my wife’s computer has a DVD burner, and she could save files to DVD in such a fashion that I would need a DVD reader to access them. It is also the case that it’s much quicker to copy a CD if you have two drives than if you have to move all the data to the computer and back again–although for that, I can remember running copy programs on my Commodore 64 where one had to swap the original and copy disks back and forth several times to move all that information from one to the other. I got a bit more backup work done yesterday, although I’m not entirely certain what still needs to be saved.

By last night, I was exhausted; I think I have caught up on the lost sleep, but still have much to do. Here’s to the doing of it all.

–M. J. Young

Yesterday was one of those days when I just could not get started. I thought about staying up after I got a boy on a bus, and I thought about getting up more than once after that, but even after I got to my room I found myself dabbing at this and playing with that, just not turning my attention to anything that really mattered.

Part of it was that I knew I had overbooked the day–in addition to taking my mother-in-law grocery shopping, I was planning to do some grocery shopping myself (she shops at a relatively expensive store, I at a surprisingly cheap one), and stop at the bank, and stop at another store to look for a specialty lightbulb, on top of doing the work here. Yet I was not turning my attention to any of these tasks.

Finally I left, later than I’d intended, to deal with my mother-in-law’s shopping trip. It was already nearly evening, and I had already left instructions for supper and then delayed my departure yet again. However, I went there and did that, and returned home.

It was by this point ten thirty at night, and now that I was moving I was wondering how I was going to finish what I had not yet started. I was stopped at a traffic light perhaps two miles from home, listening to the local radio station whose transmitter I had just passed, trying to sort the work in my mind.

Quite abruptly, the traffic light and the radio station both shut down–along with every light within view but for those connected to vehicles.

By the time I called the electric company, they knew that all of several towns were blacked out, and were predicting half past midnight as the restoration time. Several of our emergency lights were missing, but we have blackouts frequently enough that several were still available, and there was enough light for our purposes. I realized I was not going to be able to do much even if the estimate was accurate. I pulled out the Romans editing and worked at that by electric lantern light, then got dressed for bed.

The lights were restored mere minutes before one in the morning; I took the opportunity to send my daily post to the Corinthians list, and went to bed.

This morning I got my laundry going that absolutely had to be done last night, so I’m a step behind even now. Also, while I was getting students started for school, I finished the last of the Collision repertoire recordings. At that point I figured I might as well just stay up and see what I could accomplish, which has not been as much as I might have liked, but I’ve finished the e-mail (including a letter from someone asking my input on General Relativity, which is not really my area). I still have to do that grocery shopping trip, and stop at the bank, and there’s another appointment this evening, but at least I’m moving.

–M. J. Young

We still don’t have everything functional with the new computer, but we’re getting closer. I’ve determined, in connection with the CD-RW, that it sees no disks at all; I’ve also realized that in that technical information that flies across the screen during boot-up, which is gone before the monitor has warmed sufficiently to display it if it’s a cold boot, there’s a message to the effect that there is no channel 80 connection on the primary IDE, or something like that. I copied the message and delivered it to my primary computer guru, who is working on what it means in terms of what is actually wrong. I do not know whether the two items are connected, but since the CD drive is hooked on an IDE line, it seems reasonably likely that they might be. Some trouble-shooting guide somewhere suggested that the problem was probably that I have five IDE drives and most PCs only support four, but since I also have a second IDE driver card installed and three unused ports there, I’m thinking that’s probably incorrect–there wouldn’t be much market for IDE cards if they didn’t work, and I’m pretty sure that the non-functioning drive is not the one on the card.

I’ve also been dabbling at the Romans editing while running errands, including taking my sick son for medical testing Saturday morning instead of being in church. Also, since I’m dabbing at musical recordings and arrangements in my odd moments instead of playing computer games, I’ve finished more recordings from the Collision repertoire–recordings which remain on my hard drive, since I have not yet gotten the information to reconfigure my FTP program and my CD burner is still not working. I’m also locked out of the Valdron development forum because I don’t have my ID and password, and apparently I don’t know which mailbox was used to register me there. I’ve got to get someone to help me with that, I think.

There’s a rumor about that one of my sons is coming home tonight, and that I am driving him. I do not know whether either of those statements are facts, but probably will learn the truth shortly.

In the meantime, let me accomplish something.

–M. J. Young

I continue tweaking the computer, trying to get things back in operation. I now have the POP3 and SMTP settings for my remaining e-mail account, but have not yet set up the program; my ISP will be getting back to me with the FTP contact information for the old site, which I was still gradually converting and still has the old indices. I can think of a thousand other bits that need fixing, but I can’t do a thousand–and today is Tuesday, generally the heaviest day in my week on the computer, and undoubtedly the heavier since I did not get to any of it last week.

I still am poking at the Collision repertoire songs. Part of that is because if I have another one finished I can justify attempting to use the burner side of the music program to make a CD, and so determine whether it is the CD burner or the new burner software that is not working right. I suspect, though, that it is the burner itself, and that this is a lost cause. This would not be a good time to have to replace the burner, but it’s also not a particularly good time to lose the ability to backup files and burn CDs, so I’m still hoping to get the thing working.

Let’s keep moving, then, shall we?

–M. J. Young

I am still fighting with the new computer, but making progress. Here are some of the things I need to do, in no particular order:

• On the old computer, someone had told me how to set up my MicroSoft Excel in my Office 2000 so that all those Multiverser scores with “@” in the middle would not be converted to e-mail addresses. I had to reinstall the Office programs entirely, and am still reconfiguring everything, but that little annoyance needs my attention once again.
• The music program is ticking off the number of days for my free trial. It seems that when I copied the registration code onto the disk, I dropped a character, and so I’m going to have to figure out how to get the right code for it. The company has been helpful in the past when I had problems with the program, and they still send me their advertising, so if I don’t actually have the number somewhere else they’ll probably give me the missing digit. I just have to find time to ask.
• The biggest problem, really, is that the CDRW is not recognizing blank CDs. Of course, I don’t know for certain whether it is recognizing any CDs, because I ran the installs off the new functional DVD drive (which does not write). Thus I’m going to have to find a CD to use to test the other functions of the drive, and I just have not had time to do that. It is entirely possible that the problem is in the software–the computer won’t recognize my old CD burner program, so I’m working a problem in two variables, whether the CDRW works and whether the CD software works with it.
• I started setting up the FTP client and realized that I did not know any of the FTP information. I expect that the user name and password are the same ones I’ve got for the hosting service e-mail program, which does work, and that I can get the rest from the hosting company’s web site, but that’s going to take some digging.
• I also need to get my POP and SMTP information from my ISP; that is the only mailbox not yet working, thanks to some debugging of the others.
• There are probably still scores of programs on my computer I can’t access but simply have not yet tried; either I haven’t had occasion to attempt to use them, or I forgot I couldn’t. However, I’m getting there slowly.

Of course, today involved taking my mother-in-law shopping; I also took her out to dinner. It was her birthday last week, but on her birthday she refused to get dressed to go out to dinner, and over the weekend things were just too hectic for anyone down here to go up there, so it got pushed into today and fell back to me. I enjoyed it, at least for the food. She’s not a big eater, and will be feasting on her leftovers from the diner for a few days, I expect.

I’ve also made some progress on recording another song for the Collision practice CD. Of course, at the moment I can neither burn them to the CD nor upload them to the website, so my progress is sort of contained to my own benefit–but hopefully those problems will be solved, and we’ll be back in business.

–M. J. Young