Well... Today was the big day at church with the blessing of the newest addition to the Jones family, Samuel Jones. The blessing went well, even if I did botch the proclamation of the power by which the blessing was given.  I'm glad God is a forgiving God. The spirit of the meeting was wonderful, and it testified quite powerfully of one sp...

Interesting that in verse 7, the example he uses of an unrighteous king pretty much parallels what happened to the Nephites in the Land of Nephi under king Noah.  Couldn't have been many years since the people of Limhi had come to join Zarahemla, anyway.  I've never thought of that before. Verse 13 is always a fun one.  It's great ...

The first thing I thought of when reading this chapter was, "Man, if my teenagers (or young adults) came to me and asked if they could go to a nation bent on destoying ours, and teach them the Gospel.  Man... My initial reaction would definitely be one of incredulity.  No wonder they had to pester Mosiah for so long before he'd even ...

Reading the beginning of this chapter, it's interesting that Mosiah put laws into place which made voicing anything which could be interpreted as "persecutions" against the church, illegal - and it seemed to work.  There was "peace" for a number of years due to that law.  The church even began to grow and prosper more ...

Upon beginning this study session, I found myself quite uninterested in doing pretty much anything.  Maybe it's just because I'm tired....  or maybe it's because I just finished one of my projects at work, thus putting me between projects again.  Who knows... When I got to verse 3, though, I found a gem of a scripture that I had fo...

I've been pondering, and struggling somewhat, on how exactly to write what I'm going to write today - for quite some time. Growing up, I was encompassed by stability.  I had a stable religion which required us to attend meetings once per week, which we did religiously (pun intended).  I had two parents who loved one another.  My m...

I've been writing a snippet of code to take a list of rows from a table in an Oracle database, and have been having problems with a pesky error having to do with PostgreSQL's character encoding and PHP's handling of it. The error I've been receiving is thus: Query failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xae HINT: Th...

*sigh* As programming techniques become more and more complex, and the programmers continue to be just as, or more, diversified, companies who insist on being the industry standard while tossing away organizations such as the W3C, make life as a web developer increasingly difficult. If that didn't make much sense, let me rephrase:  Micro...

Three days ago my inlaws arrived here, and the living arrangements were such that Annie, Craig, and their two wonderful children got to bunk up with us here in Springville. I don't want to go into detail as to the exact happenings of this weekend, but I'd find it hard to maintain peace within unless I wrote a bit about something which I could im...

One thing I noticed while reading verses 7 through 11, apart from the torn emotions of all the people, was what caused their emotion. Why did they feel so "amazed" and fille with "pain and anguish", and with "exceedingly great joy"?  Well... When was the last time you felt filled with pain and anguish for some...

 What a horrible end to this story.  Poor Coriantumr.  Saw his situation with vivid clarity after it was too late, and rather than give up his life, he watched (which what must have been a horror show) everything Ether had told him come to life:  The complete destruction of his people, leaving him alone.  I can't imagine th...

I just got done making the video for this entry, so take a look if you've got a high speed Internet connection. Today was the 2nd day of the Ed Roth Memorial Reunion held in Manti, UT. There were finksters-a-plenty there on Friday, but even more on Saturday.  I lost count of how many Rat Finks I saw. So, because the days were packed, ...

something I've never really learned? Yup. Today was the day I found out that one major part of my new job is to handle a data feed made purely of XML. Do I know anything about XML? Yes.. But have I ever done anything with it? Yes. How much? One simple little flash dealio, and I did that over 3 years ago. So... My point? I've gotta learn ...

Yet another great strategy-based chapter.   I'm kind of tired right now, and this chapter wasn't really loaded with doctrinal insights, but I will say that if there's any question about whether or not obedience has its rewards, you'll have to read verses 21-27.  Definitely makes me want to both learn about and obey my Heavenly Father...

Wow....   This will probably be a short entry, but I thought I'd write down what is the first hardware failure of my server! I built this server 3 years ago, and it has been serving up everything that is served in my house (mythtv, web (this site), ftp, ssh, music, photos).  Well... Yesterday evening, we tried to fire up mythtv...

Oh wow.  Man, life just keeps getting more and more interesting...  along with frustrating, slightly scary, and faith-promoting.  I won't get into the details here, though, because I want to talk about something else. One thing which came at me as quite intriguing today during church was the concept of "Doctrine of Gratitude&...

Ya know, I sure am glad that Nephi wrote verse 22 of this chapter.  In all of scripture, this is the only chapter which uses the word "flaxen" to describe the way Satan tempts us. Flax is a fiber from a plant which is used to make linen.  Linen isn't known for its strength. Satan indeed does "lead us" with very ent...

Chapter 22 was another toughy, but I figure I'm gonna better my life if I read and am only able to type a tiny bit, rather than not read at all. I guess my brain is still getting over this sickness, because I find it difficult to do any critical thinking.  Anyway... I found it interesting the bit about "more are the children of the de...

Okay...  So three days ago (that would be Saturday morning), I found that my server was having weird problems.  I was getting an I/O error when I tried to start a movie for my daughter.  Yeah, that can't be good.  I'd seen that problem before when LVM got out of sync somehow (after about 6 months of uptime), and decided to reboo...

Hmmm....  It's hard to write about something so wonderful when I'm not in the mood...  But I've found that when I feel like "blah", and I write about something wonderful, I usually am feeling closer to wonderful when I'm done... So, here goes. First off, I'm at work, so I don't have any pictures, but I'll update it when I get...

The thing which resonates so much with me about this chapter, is how true Moroni is to himself and his God.  Truly, the last thing he wanted to do is to kill thousands of his brothers, yet he had to.  He knew his lifestyle, freedom, religion, and family were more important than letting themselves be put into bondage, and the Lamanites wou...

My mom called me up a couple of days ago to give me some not-so-great news. My dad got fired from his job.  Now, those of you who know my dad know that he isn't "fire-able" material.  While he was employed at his full-time job at the prime of his life, he happened to "keep a job" for more than 15 years, so...  ...

I've been watching "So You Think You Can Dance" now for about 3 years.  For me, I think it's better than American Idol.  These young people are .... amazing. Well, a couple of weeks ago, there was a dance done which had the theme of "addiction".  It was done by Mia Michaels and the two dancers who danced were fa...

Alright... So one of my hard drives failed in my backup server LVM array, and I received the new replacement disk today. So, I turn on my computer and even though the volume group isn't initialized (due to the missing disk), it still exists, and has all the other drives in the array still held captive. So, this is how to completely destroy your...

The first thing that stood out to me this time around was the anger of Lamoni's father.  Try to place yourself in the situation Lamoni found himself in.  There are so many variables in the situation, it's hard to imagine exactly what was going on with the family undercurrents, but holy cow.  Lamoni's father drew his freaking sword an...

Today was spent with my good friend, and brother, Ryan (and his family, who happens to love my family!) We spent the day moving all sorts of large items from our home into the storage space we're renting.  From the kitchen table and chairs, to the couch downstairs, to the hutches - we made two trips full of items, with our mini-van and Dad'...

 If the fortifications that Moroni built in the beginning were enough to astonish the Lamanites to the point that they were afraid to fight, and then failed to kill even one Nephite, while they themselves were slain to the tune of over 1,000 - I can only imagine what the additional fortifications did...  Goes to show that a good Christian...

Beyond yesterday's post, I haven't posted anything in awhile.  I guess it's because nothing really interesting has happened lately. My kids are growing like weeds, and I try to enjoy them when want to, and I'm trying to want to more often.  That's kind of a sad statement, but I don't believe I am a "born-to-parent" type of guy...

During last month's testimony meeting, our wonderful Luci whispered into Sarah's ear, as the church members were expressing their feelings about Christ, that she really didn't want to go up there.  It was totally unprovoked, but as she is somewhat frightened of unfamiliar situations, was totally understandable. We told her that it was okay ...

Something in verse 13 struck me as interesting, even though it probably could be considered common knowledge among the LDS population. I never remember seeing anything quite as obvious relating to happiness as Alma 41:10, which states "Wickedness never was happiness".  Well...  It's easy to inverse-ify it and say "If wic...