It's raining outside. ...and I love it. Today was pretty much wonderful from the beginning to the end.  I don't have as much time as I would like to express myself here and now, so I pray my fingers will be fast! Amidst all the stress going on in my life right now, today was definitely a day given to me as a gift.  Possibly to do no...

Okay.  I've used various verses from this chapter to prove that we had agency in the pre-earth life, but now I'm questioning myself.  Here's the basis: Verse 3 says this: And this is the manner after which they were ordained—being acalled and bprepared from the cfoundation of the world according to the dforeknowledge of God, on ...

Well i just barely made my very first blog, and this is my very first entry.  So my day was school pretty much (sigh). And then i went onto my facebook account and invited myself over to my friend Jakes house. And what we did there was play a wicked game of Star Wars Battlefront Greatest Hits. I didnt do so well because i had a lot of stuff on...

I've recently become part of a cover band and we're getting to the point now where we need to choose a name.  None of us can agree, so we need your help.  We currently have a pool of about 100 possible names, and you can vote on any or all of them by clicking here. So far, our set list is the following: With or without you ...

Okay...  Since I had recently returned from my mission in 1996, I knew I wanted to learn how to record music.  Recording music swiftly turned into wanting to be able to record my drums.  A couple of years ago, I was able to put enough money away to buy a load of recording equipment for my drums. I've recorded quite a few diddies in...

I have written quite a bit about this chapter during previous years' studies.  To begin, I noticed this time that it is by the "spirit of prophecy" that Zeezrom's thoughts are made known to Alma and Amulek. I also noticed that during the buffeting these prophets delivered to Zeezrom, not one attack was personal.  They were sim...

Last night, the temperature dropped down to right around 0 degrees fahrenheit.  When I woke up and was almost to work, I almost hit the car in front of me.  No, I'm not a poor driver... It's just that with it being so cold, there was literally about a half an inch of frost which had gathered on.... pretty much anything left outside. ...

I've gotta ask.  Well, before I do, let me preface the question with the scripture found in 1st Nephi 19.  Nephi says he won't write anything unless he thinks it's sacred.  Assuming that the prophets after Mosiah thought the same thing, I've gotta ask.  Why are verses 1 through 19 even here?  I know the Book of Mormon is tr...

Interesting that in verses 22 and 23, Amulek states that if they got rid of the righteous, they would ultimately be destroyed.  That's a sad prophecy, which unfortunately comes true.  They not only got rid of the righteous, they killed them - and swift was the judgement of God upon this whole city. That's it for this chapter....

Okay...  I remember having read this awhile ago and cross-referencing Alma 16:10 about the destruction of the city of Ammonihah in one day, but I didn't remember that it wasn't a prophet who said that.  It was one of the non-believers.  One of the people who was trying to refute what Alma was talking about up and said, "yo,...

So, in the business of audio recording, it doesn't get much more fundamental than 1. Room Acoustics, 2. Sound Source, and 3. Microphones. One of those three basics is about to get a serious upgrade here at Advanced Budget Studios. Today, Michael Joly of OktavaMod is modifying two Apex 205 ribbon microphones, and will be shipping them back ear...

I just got done playing some sweet jazz for a client, and with the usual rock 'n' roll requests coming in, this was a great change of pace. I'm always intrigued at the different nuances that exist between styles of music as it pertains to rhythm and percussion.  Rock and roll pounds out some great 4/4 along the occasional 3/4 timing, with so...

I decided to get back into reading the scriptures now that I've finished the last conference talks. This has nothing to do with Mosiah 3, but one thing I neglected to write about was the last gospel doctrine class I attended.  Our wonderful teacher, Ryan Anderson taught again, and made a wonderful parallel out of Amalickiah and Satan. We...

Okay...  We just got back from a little trip up to Ryan's house so he could sign us up for a loan that'll make it so we can make quite a bit of money saving up for life insurance (too much info for one paragraph to sustain, so.. we'll leave it at that) Anyway, on our way home, it began to snow, and snow quite a bit harder than I've ever see...

Today, an audio file was sent to me in an email.  This audio was compressed and encoded using the aac codec for compression and wrapped in m4a.  In order to use it, I had to convert this file to a wav format.  Usually, I receive files in mp3, ogg, or flac file types, and use lame, oggdec, or flac to decode them back to wav.  Wit...

Man...  11 straight hours of tracking can sure be....... FUN!  Yup...  Herod the Fink is still on schedule, and after yesterday's session, I can say the end product is gonna be something you've never heard in a Christmas album before, guaranteed. To give you an idea of what was recorded yesterday, the title of one of the songs we ...

We've been recording a bunch of drum-takes to be added to otherwise "ready-to-go" songs lately here.  The latest of which happened to be a genre I particularly don't like much - country. But, the music sounded so good for this particular song, I decided to have at it anyway - and 4 hours later, we came up with the final result. I...

Today I needed to encode a movie I bought on Friday (Fearless), and I wanted to encode it in its native language, but have english subtitles.  The command I ended up using was this: transcode -a 0 -i Fearless.dump -M 2 -w 2200,250,100 -A -N 0x2000 -y xvid -o Fearless.avi -Z 854x480 -J extsub=2:0:0:0:0:100:255:2:3 The "a" takes care...

Interesting that one of the first-mentioned doctrines that Nehor was said to have taught was the very doctrine that led to the beginning of wickedness for the Nephites time and time again.  Pride.  "Being popular"...  Seems to resound with the core of what the adversary teaches.  Verse 4 pretty much testifies to his pr...

IT IS SO CRAZY I LEFT HOME TODAY WITH NO REGRET AND NO BAD THOUGHTS EXCEPT THAT I LEFT MY BOYFRIEND AT HOME WITH MY GOOD FRIEND. I TRUST BOTH OF THEM SO I THINK EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE. I AM REALLY LOVING THIS MONI VIE DRINK IT MAKES ME FEEL AWAKE EVERYMORNING. DEAR LORD BE WITH MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY, PRAY FOR THEIR WEALTH AND STRENGTH THROUGH ANY ...

Well...  I haven't written in awhile, and quite a bit is coming to a head soon, so I thought I'd just site down and write whatever comes out.  It may be a novel, it may end right now. Lately I've been focusing a lot of my time on music.  Our band Mimic, is in the process of getting gigs around Utah, so I've built a website for us,...

You know those types of musicians...  The ones that just "get it".  They don't worry much about writing the music, but rather, it seems to write itself.  Now, I'm not going to put words in his mouth, but it sure seems like this is the case with Alex Bateman. He came in, knew what he wanted, and the way he wanted his reco...

I had to post this.  We went to a ward halloween party and I went as a punk rocker (of sorts), and Sarah went as Cinderella.  Gotta love the result. Awwww yeah!...

This was the last talk given in the April General Conference of 2008, and President Monson did a wonderful job. I love how he wants to be personal with us, to tell us of his family and his experiences.  I feel the love coming from him and know he loves the Savior. Not having watched many talks given by President Monson as president of th...

Holy cow.  My journal is done.  I still can’t believe it.  Wowza. I started writing in my journal every day on January 1st, 1990.  About ten years later, I found that I had journals scattered all over the place, and with my technical background - I hated the disorganization of something that might be precious someday.&nb...

Some of you may know that I've been working on a Christmas music project called "Herod the Fink" with someone who has been steadily becoming a great friend of mine - Jesse Crowley. This started September of 2009, when he called me up and asked me if I wanted to work on a few Christmas songs he had been cooking up, and I accepted.  We...

Hmm....  I'm kind of tired right now, but I figured I needed to read some scriptures... This time around, I realize how being under the rule of a tyrant would be absolutely horrible.  In this case, Alma was under the rule of one (or more) of the Amulonites - which were his wicked peers when they were the king's priests.  Talk about...

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...

I thought that today I'd be enjoying conference, but instead I'm playing Mr. Mom, as Sarah is trying to control her contractions. I woke up around 7:30 this morning to the tune of my wife exclaiming that she was sure today was the day.  Due to her body's signals, I believed it. So, we've been patiently waiting for her body to get a bit mor...

I almost didn't post anything tonight..... But... I've gotta. One thing which seems to irritate me quite a bit is this phenomenon among people of my faith which drives them to make some pseudo-philosophical yet some how not quite doctrinally correct quote and then follow it by "I'm sure it's in the scriptures. I just read it. I swear. " or, "I'...