Yesterday I mentioned having made a few minor changes to the Temporal Anomalies section of M. J. Young Net.  I did not mention, because I forgot completely until I was answering an e-mail today, that I also updated the Other Films page, where I list movies I have not yet analyzed, and give some idea of whether I am going to and what I think in brief.  It came to me because there was an e-mail awaiting me today asking if I planned to analyze a movie I just added to that page, Premonition, which is sitting on my television awaiting my attention.

I also dropped a note to Grey Vanaman of Audio-Clear, the man and the company who have (has?) helped Collision, and before that 7dB, so much with equipment, about getting an amp for our P.A.  I got his response today, and he’s got just the ticket, so I’ll probably try to pick it up when I go out a bit later.  This will make everyone happy, but particularly our distant drummer John, who has been told repeatedly that I can’t really bring the drums to rehearsal until I can hear the vocals over them.  We just moved a lot closer.

I’ve much to do, so I’d better turn my attention toward doing some of it.

–M. J. Young

I fixed a few things since Friday, mostly yesterday evening.

The big one is probably the Collision MySpace.  After a fair amount of hair-pulling, I managed to pull the black background out from behind the black print, so the site can now be read.  I also sent some friend invitations (to people who already know the band, so that means locals), added a brief history (which needs some editing), and uploaded the lyrics of our first song to the blog (since I didn’t see a place for lyrics).  I sent Baxter and Brittany notes alerting them to this.  I also took note that our MySpace site name is CollisionAtHopewell.  Checking in briefly now, I note that we’ve had positive answers to two of our invites.  If I tell you that they are from my son and Baxter’s sister, I hope that doesn’t make you think less of us.

The second repair job, which I actually did before that, was on the Temporal Anomalies site.  I proofread my response to Vazor’s blog, made a few minor corrections, and then redid a piece of the directory structure for the site, changing the section name that was “Correspondence” to “Conversation“, adding to the subindex of that section the new page plus the four pages which were responses to questions on another site years ago, and redoing the links on all the pages in that site to include those five along with the two dozen letters.  Hopefully it will make site navigation a bit easier.  Meanwhile, I note that Vazor has thanked me for my response, on his blog, and promised a followup post; I will have to keep alf an eye there, although I have asked that he notify me when he posts it.

The third thing that got repaired is really the first.  I started once more reading through the book Do You Trust Me?, and fixed two or three spots that could have been said better.  There is a rule in this business that if you wait until something is perfect it will never go to print, and I can feel the pain of that rule with this book; however, the reason for my delay is entirely that the cover art is not ready (which seems to be a reason that delays most of my books at some point), so the fact that I am still tweaking the text is not an issue.  I do have to format it to page size and add the page numbers to the table of contents, but that will come soon enough.

I have been giving serious thought to combining the three books, Do You Trust Me?, What Does God Expect?, and About the Fruit, into one volume, tentatively entitled A Christian Primer.  I could sell the one book for less than the three individually, and I think that they fit together in a coherent package.  I am minded in this that C. S. Lewis originally published the three books we know as Mere Christianity separately–somewhere I have a copy of the second, Beyond Personality–but that combined they make a coherent whole.  From a marketing perspective, the single volume would probably cost the reader less than the three books separately without impacting my profit.  I would keep the individual books available, though, because someone interested in only one would still be able to buy it (and then come back for the other two eventually).  Anyway, it’s on the table for consideration.  The Trust book has to go to print before anything will be done on combining them.

I accomplished something.

–M. J. Young

Someone discovered the Temporal Anomalies site this week.

Actually, it might have been last week.  He read so much of it that he must have spent several days working with pages from the site.  Then he posted comments, and questions, to his own blog, and dropped me an e-mail inviting me to respond.  I did.

That has in fact been a substantial part of what I have been doing today.  It didn’t help that I had written several hundred words when a storm came through abruptly and knocked out the power; I used the blackout time to do some grocery shopping, and returned to start afresh.  I also decided that since I was uncertain exactly what LiveJournal’s response posting system would permit, I would do the answer as a web page on my own site.  Thus I tossed the pieces I’d already composed into the framework of pages for that site, finished the rest of the response, and tossed it on the site under the title Response to Vazor’s Time Travel Questions, and posted the link to his blog.

There is more work to do with this–the page is on the site, but it’s not really incorporated into the site; I have to decide in which section to include it, and then add links on other pages to connect it appropriately.  For the moment, though, I’ve done too much, and have too much more to do to mess with it, so I’m just going to leave it as it is.

–M. J. Young

Sometimes it feels to me as if I have not accomplished much–particularly when I wind up collapsing early, then going on late-night errands, then sleeping well into the next afternoon only to commit to long errands on behalf of others.  However, review of the facts suggests otherwise.

At some time within the last twenty-four hours I finished reading a book I have promised to review.  It was an allegorical science fantasy illustrated novel by a writer I know somewhat personally (never met but have corresponded), whose work I have reviewed before.  I’m not certain when I’ll get to the review, as I’ve a lot on my plate at the moment, but I will get to it.

I also returned my attention to the Multiverser Triple Play:  Horror supplement.  What I did was copy all the notes from the development forum to a document on my hard drive.  I was fighting a headache yesterday which is attributable to the fact that the disruptions of the day prevented me ever from getting a cup of coffee, and so I did not feel up to making all the checks as to what still had to be done with those notes.  However, it’s a step in the right direction, and as things appear now sometime after Ubercon I may be able to make progress on it.

I also provided an extensive response to questions about a developing temporal anomalies analysis of The Last Mimzy, which took probably an hour or so from today’s precious time but will mean a new page on the Temporal Anomalies site which might garner some traffic and interest in turn in the Multiverser books.

I’ve agreed to pick up the girlfriend of one of my sons tonight; he has agreed to help keep the dishes under control all weekend.  If he hasn’t got them under control before nine I guess I’m not going, and I’ll have more time to work, but I am hoping that he is sufficiently motivated by the desire to have her visit that he will get to them in time.

I’m also committed to a Collision concert tomorrow night, sans drums or major amplifiers, at the church coffeehouse.  They do this once or twice a year.  Brittany has a school assignment that requires her to be at another location fairly early, so we’re going to have to ask to be at the beginning of the night, but I think they’ll accommodate us.  Last night’s rehearsal went quite well, thank you, and I’m comfortable with our ability to do these two songs at a performance quality level.

I’m not as confident in my ability to finish everything else that must be done, however, so I’d better get to it.

–M. J. Young

I finally watched The Last Mimsy last night, a family film of sorts with a fantasy time travel element.  John Cross, who wrote the Temporal Anomalies page on The Final Countdown, had approached me about doing another page addressing the anomalies in this one, and has since been waiting somewhat anxiously for an opportunity to discuss the film with me.  I expect that I’ll find his notes in my mailbox on Friday.

I also put a bit more time into sorting through the Gaming Outpost archives, completing all articles through the end of 1999 (although that means that yesterday I did December).

I’ve an extra errand on tomorrow’s plate, so I’m hoping to get to bed on the early side tonight–although I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not.  We’ll see what transpires.

–M. J. Young

None of us were fully functional today. Sometime late this afternoon, while I was still trying to get myself moving, I mentioned to my wife that I was a bit fuzzy today, and she said she had the same problem–and my son missed the bus going in and coming home, so apparently he wasn’t doing entirely so well either.

It doesn’t help that the e-mail volume is up slightly and the density up significantly. Much of this is temporal anomalies stuff, the new Sarah Conner Chronicles show has sent people to the web in search of time travel stuff, and they’re finding my pages and asking questions. There’s also been an upsurge of discussion on a minister’s list in which I participate, two subjects becoming hot at the same time. It took several hours to get through the e-mail, and I abandoned the effort to rush off to take my mother-in-law shopping very late in the evening.

But then, I never am entirely on top of everything on Monday, so that’s not surprising. Let me see what else I can accomplish.

–M. J. Young

It happens sometimes–something hits me early in the day that throws me off balance and derails everything I’m trying to do, so I can’t get started. It just happens that today was a rather bad day for it to happen. I had a half rehearsal for Collision this evening–Brittany can’t make it tomorrow, so rather than miss her rehearsing completely, I met with her tonight. However, I was so late finishing my morning study in Corinthans that I had to interrupt making supper and push that later to work with her, and then finish that after rehearsal (at least I had the sense to keep it shorter than the usual two hours-I have another rehearsal with Baxter and Adam tomorrow night). Then I had a flurry of MySpace friend requests because I happened to mention my MySpace account on a list as part of a question about something only loosely related–and you all know how much I hate the way MySpace sucks bandwidth and computer resources, and would rather avoid it because it takes forever to do so little as load a page. Plus the time travel e-mail is still running a bit heavy. Today someone wrote about Kate and Leopold, and said that they found the site because it was linked from something connected to Terminator 3 page of IMDB.

So I’m busy, and it’s late, and it’s my own fault, really, for allowing myself to be so completely derailed by something stupid.

No, I’m not going to go into more detail than that. Let me get to the forum.

–M. J. Young

Today’s mail included the notification that someone had posted to my blog–the other blog, the Harry Potter blog connected to my MySpace (which is here, if–in fact, whether or not–anyone cares). She read my predictions, and posted to the final entry, Spoiler Scorecard, to congratulate me on my predictions.

I attempted to post a reply comment, but the system wouldn’t take my comment in reply, so I messaged her instead to thank her. Apparently she found me through the Temporal Anomalies site, I presume because of the Prisoner of Azkaban analysis and not as part of the recent inrush of Terminator fans inspired by The Sarah Conner Chronicles.

Did I mention that last night’s Collision rehearsal went really well? We got through the first three songs decently (not fabulously), and then took the fourth from “nobody knows nothing” to playing it beginning to end with minimal problems, in less than an hour. I was pleased.

I’ll be even more pleased if I can get some sleep tonight and make it to church this weekend, so let me stop dawdling here and move ahead.

–M. J. Young

I did have some time to spare last night, but apart from taking a turn at the dishes and making sure everyone got supper, I put most of it into business matters: I attended to polishing the meeting minutes for the two recent directors meetings which the secretary missed. I also had to run an errand which had me sitting somewhere long enough to do a bit of editing on the Romans exegesis.

This morning I managed to complete the overly complicated registration process for IMDB board to post concerning The Sarah Conner Chronicles–a show I did not watch and have not decided to watch, but for which I’ve already been contacted and questioned. I posted there in response to a thread in which my Terminator temporal anomalies page was mentioned.

I’m hoping to get a bit of extra time today also, but we’ll see how that goes.

–M. J. Young

This was a busier Monday than usual, as my afternoon was tapped for dealing with some important matters related to the son of a houseguest. I still had to take my mother-in-law to the store, but with the afternoon shot and supper to do it was nine at night before I reached her. Then on the way home I picked up my son from his brother–which is not really on the way, but completely the opposite direction, but still a lot less driving to pick him up while I’m there already than to make a separate trip for him.

I squeezed in the e-mail while making supper, which thanks to the premier of The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which I did not watch) had several letters concerning the Temporal Anomalies site, one of which was calling my attention to a special forum for it at the IMDB web site. I have begun the process of registering for that site so I can see that forum.

I ate supper while my computer was rebooting, which is a commentary both on how fast I wolf down my meals and on how slowly my computer functions, and now I’m trying to finish here and get some sleep before tomorrow arrives officially.

Oh, I’ve also sent a couple of music files to the drummer, so he can begin to get some idea of what I am hoping Collision will sound like. He did hear the one that is on the web, Holocaust, but I don’t know whether he got either of the ones I e-mailed him. Even so, I am going to attempt to e-mail another tomorrow, and am working on getting more of the music files converted to mp3 format (something I have not been able to accomplish on my computer, for reasons I have not been able to determine) so I can send him more.

–M. J. Young