I just returned from a family vacation at "Down-At-A" water-park with all my immediate family (minus Andrea) and had a blast. During the evening of the first night, the discussion was lulling a bit, so Curtis and I decided to begin discussing some doctrinal points of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. During this discussion, both Curtis and I ...

First off...  I'm beginning to understand just how much of  a camper / outdoorsman I really am not.  We brought the family up to a water park for a vacation yesterday and Monday, and I tell ya... on Monday, I had an absolute blast.  On Tuesday, it was all I could do to keep from just hopping into the car, and driving home the mo...

I just arrived home from a most splendid 3-hour church meeting. Yesterday morning I got a call from the elders' quorum president, in which he asked me to teach the priesthood lesson today.  I said yes, and got the information I needed to teach. The lesson was on "Obedience Born of Faith in God".  Well...  I spent about 5 ...

I must proclaim it from the rooftops!!!! Yes!  I finally figured out how to rip DVDs with that nasty Sony ARccOS protection!! (up yours, Sony) You see, I'm one of the good guys. I don't condone pirating stuff, and rarely pirate anything myself. The collection of the 5500 songs I own, are 99% mine (I'm not perfect), as well as my hundre...

Well, people....  Most of yesterday (until this morning around 12:30am) I spent trying to figure out what to do about my email situation. Here's my situation:  I get so much friggin' spam, I can't stand it.  This shouldn't be news to anyone.  The person who receives no spam is a person who doesn't have an inbox. So, I decided ...

I'm not exactly sure what I want to write about today.  No...  I know what I need to write about, but I think it's too private, and I want to write something I can publish publicly. Ya know...  I really hate sin.  I really do. I am amazed at how much the world accepts what is wrong.  Pondering how much the world accepts s...

As I was sputtering around the net today, I found a pretty cool feature within google, of which I did not know.  Did you know that google can search blogs for stuff you're interested in? Well.. Today I typed in "LDS Doctrine" and I found this site which had all sorts of good stuff in it.   I read one of his posts concernin...

I just got home from Jovi's baby blessing (Brandon and Chloe's first baby) and it was a pretty cool experience. Today was a good day because I thought that it was gonna be .... not good. Yesterday night, I stayed out a bit too late, and thus didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night.  In fact, on my way home, my good friend Steve bought me ...

One other thing. ILoveMyJournal now has an RSS feed for the main page content.  Soon, we'll be adding categories to the blogs as well as categorized RSS feeds. Also, eventually, we'll be getting the ability to post comments on blog entries. I love this site. :)...

Today I had an interesting thought.  It's a question that possibly has thousands of answers, but, since I'm on a pensive streak, I thought I'd write down some of what I came up with. The thought was "How do you tell if someone cares for you?", which also spawned the thought, "How do I tell if I care for someone else?", whi...

Of course, verse 1 immediately reminds me of verse chapter 36 and what I wrote about that.  But then, verse 2 held just as much interest for me.  First off, it seems that Alma talking to his three sons in these chapters has something to do with his being old enough to die at any time.  Yet, Alma's words talk about him having great jo...

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...

Religious Links: LDS-Quotes.com - The best LDS Quotes site on the web. LDSCompanion.org - A Great site filled with uplifting Quotes, Stories, Poetry, and Music LDS.org - Official site for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Linux Links: Gentoo.org - The greatest Linux distro in the universe. suseblog.com - My friend's ...

It's good to be back.  I feel like I really got a lot out of this chapter.  It could be simply because this chapter has a couple of verses which always seem to prick my heart.  Maybe, maybe not.  Anyway... It seems this chapter is all about love.  One of the verses found here is so poignant, it pricks my heart every time...

I wish I could describe to you how much gratefulness is in my heart for whoever is in the skies who loves me. The prophets say He is Jesus Christ - and I believe them. This being up there loves me more than I can possibly comprehend. There is no way that words can describe to you, whoever you are, how much I want to learn to love Him. One thi...

I just got done reading, listening to, and watching the general conference talk "Ask In Faith", by Elder David A. Bednar. I must say, having missed the original broadcasting of this conference, I heard all the hype about this talk in the ensuing weeks and months.  It seemed that this talk was all the rage about learning how to &quo...

Lately, I've been getting a lot of feedback concerning lost entries from I Love My Journal.  Occasionally, I would even lose one myself. The session timer for ILoveMyJournal.com is set to 2 hours, which means that you can stay logged in to the stie for 2 hours without being logged out due to inactivity. I initially thought was long enough,...

I just finished reading through this talk, and it brought some thoughts to mind... With Elder Walker's example of his grandparents displaying a photo of the First Presidency, I totally agree with the analogy, "Years later I concluded that displaying the picture of the First Presidency was equivalent to Joshua’s beautiful expression: '...

 When I first installed the 64-bit version of gentoo on linode, everything looked good - except I couldn't get apache to send email.   When I emerged PHP, it pulled in ssmtp by default, but that didn't seem to be sending mail at all.  So, I emerged sendmail.  That got me a little bit further, but the logs were giving me an error...

Yesterday at church, I had a couple of thoughts which I neglected to write down.  I think I'll write them down now. Something I might have written down in my previous scripture studies is my question as to why Lehi's family didn't think about getting the plates of brass / Ishmael's family before they left for the wilderness?  I would th...

I've often wondered why Nephi included the portions of scripture containing the writings of Isaiah. I remember one time during my mission when I was reading the stuff in 2nd Nephi and it actually made sense, but I didn't write any of it down, so.... it still makes no sense to me. Only one verse out of this chapter gave me any inspiration at all...

For some reason, I love the commandment of paying tithing.  It's probably one of the top 10 commandments of which I have a burning testimony. I love this quote (as well as Jacob 2:19) "President Heber J. Grant stated, “I want to say to you, if you will be honest with the Lord, paying your tithing and keeping His commandments, He...

It's 2:00am and I'm sitting down here writing and recording music.  I'm trying to do some really relaxed "Trance" music, and .... I'm not entirely sure how it's gonna turn out, but it feels good being able to record music again. I don't even have a name for the song I've been working on for the last month, but... it'll come when it'...

As soon as the angel of God knew Nephi's purpose and desire, the first question he asked him was "Do you believe?". I think that's a fairly important question, which we should ask ourselves each day.  If we are being tempted and we ask ourselves that question, to which we already know the answer, I can promise you the tempter's pow...

Heh....  If you know me at all, you probably know a couple of things about me (in no particular order): I love Linux and gentoo I own a 2007 Mustang GT I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I really loathe the idea of DRM. Now, before I get into the details,  DRM just makes me sick.  I ha...

I've been debating writing this down for quite some time now, but I think it's time now to write it. What I am penning is a more detailed account of what happened this day during my mission. It was April of 1996, two months before I would return home from my 2-year service as a missionary for our Lord Jesus Christ. I was serving in a leade...

I upgraded all of my boxen yesterday, including my main server (which now has successfully become my slowest machine).  As you probably know, I run gentoo on everything. When I built my mythtv-based home-theater in my basement about 2 years ago, I spent about 2 months configuring my server to handle everything I needed it to.  I didn't d...

Ya know...  I didn't quite know what to write about today, but I knew I had to write about something.  Some days, I've just got to write. Fasting.  Fasting, to me, is simply going without food or water for a duration of time with the purpose of showing God I am willing to sacrifice something which is very important to me, having h...

Today I had an interesting thought.  It's a question that possibly has thousands of answers, but, since I'm on a pensive streak, I thought I'd write down some of what I came up with. The thought was "How do you tell if someone cares for you?", which also spawned the thought, "How do I tell if I care for someone else?", whi...

Concerning world events, I'll be the first to say that I'm a pretty naive guy.  I keep up on stuff that's important to me, but not too much more.  I realize that this is somewhat of a flaw, so I am trying to involve myself much more with the world. That said, on the morning of Sept 10, 2001 - if you asked me what the "world trade ...