Over the last few weeks, I've been trying to knock things off my to do list so I could focus on Author Intrusion. I thought I was ready to switch over, but then I realized I needed to focus on something big this week at work and I'm stick. So, it would be better to work with smaller items for the time begin. So, this week is another to do week.

Sick Again

I was perfectly fine when I headed out Thursday night. By the time I got home, I wasn't. In a few short hours, I got nailed by a nasty head cold which has made everything difficult in general. Thankfully, I have a wonderful spouse who lets me sleep, but I still had to get other things done.

SSL

I managed to switch the Journals of Fedran website over to SSL thanks to StartSSL.com. I know that there isn't nearly enough there for privacy concerns, but I believe that most sites should be SSL these days and thankfully, I don't have to pay a couple hundred a year to get it.

Editing

Probably the best thing that came out of last week was going over edits for Under the Streets and Raging Alone (Part 1). Both of these ended up being rather drastic reworking, mainly because of a beta reader pointing out a few flaws.

I've uploaded new versions to the website, but I don't really expect anyone to read them. Hope, yes, but until I get these edited, I'm not really pushing them.

A question came up during the edit, but I'm going to make that a different post.

MfGames Culture

Since I can't focus for Author Intrusion (including the Markdown parser), I decided to work on little things. One of them is to hopefully figure out a system for managing dates in my little fantasy world.

Dates and calendars are a nasty little thing, mainly because so much code is written to handle the Gregorian calendar but not other calendars (Islamic for example) or a fictional one. I, on the other hand, use different cultures when I write and I'd like the ability to tag various elements with the “in world” date but still have the information to put them on a time line or figure out when one chapter is before another.

I started MfGames Culture quite a few years ago with the idea of writing a library for that, but it was never a high priority and it never went anywhere. Eventually, I planned on using it in Author Intrusion so I should the difference of times between chapters without faking it via the Gregorian calendar.

Most of the system is based on Julian Days (JD) as a generic baseline (it is just a decimal, so its easy to work with). The plan is just to get the two calendars written up and capable of parsing the formats into JD and back again.