JohnCalvinYoung.com

Murphy’s Law: If any­thing can go wrong, it will.

Young’s Corollary for Publicly Promoted Announcements: If a def­i­nite time for an announce­ment or a release is made, events will con­spire to make it ludi­crous or plainly impos­si­ble to try to meet the deadline.

Yes, I am here. I am not dead. I am not even dead tired. But there will be no announce­ment tonight. I reg­is­tered the domain, I picked the images for the splash screen. I even opened Photoshop and began the lay­out. That’s when my iffy-but-working AC power sup­ply for my lap­top decided to fail, appar­ently irreparably.

30 min­utes of fid­dling later–still not work­ing. No prob­lem! Web work is by def­i­n­i­tion portable–I’ll just move over to one of the other com­put­ers. (BTW, you don’t begin to appre­ci­ate some­thing like Adobe Photoshop until you have had it and sud­denly don’t.) So I fired up the trusty-and-free GIMP to fin­ish the job and sud­denly it crashes. With an unex­plain­able error. I down­load and rein­stall GTK+ and GIMP 2.4.6. Twice. With no bet­ter results.

Rather than attempt­ing to do it with Microsoft Paint, I decided to have another go at fix­ing the lap­top. 45 min­utes, three rub­ber bands, a piece of alu­minum foil and a Norton Anthology of American Literature later, the power blinks on!

Joyfully I power up the lap­top, open PS, and am import­ing my images when it decides to quit. Going back once more to GIMP, I rein­stall it again, wit­ness it crash AGAIN, and seized by some kind of des­per­a­tion, begin dis­abling any .dll in my system32 folder that comes up with an error mes­sage. Finally, at 11:58, I belat­edly con­clude that appar­ently I am not to get this announce­ment out before midnight.

That is the com­fort of being a Calvinist–the Lord must have a pur­pose of some sort behind this–who knows, pos­si­bly forc­ing me to get some sleep so I can get up and get to work in the morn­ing. So I shall. The announce­ment will come tomor­row or the next day when the Lord enables me to get my elec­tronic world put back together. Apparently it is also time to buy a new AC adapter…

Until then, a teaser…
What occurred on July 6^th, 1938 that would have reper­cus­sions for the next 70 years? Hint: it’s been in the inter­na­tional news a lot lately.

In His Service,
John Calvin Young