So, this chapter was a bit like the last, only worse.  Blood, carnage, war, and death throughout pretty much every verse. One of the beginning verses, though, caught my attention.  The one that says that people couldn't go to sleep at night, without losing their treasures, even to the point where they had to sleep with weapons to ...

 So, this chapter, I hate to say it, wasn't very inspiring to me. I'm not sure if it's the state I'm in, or the chapter itself, or both, but there wasn't too much inspiration going on. I did, however, 3 years ago, begin the journey of reading and writing about each and every chapter in the Book of Mormon, so I've gotta write something, if I ...

 Ya know..  I think the whole "sight" thing is over-rated.  "Dispute not because ye see not" just shouldn't be an issue.  Prime example is Laman and Lemuel.  They saw angels, and it didn't do jack-squat.  Personally, I believe the sense of the Spirit (as opposed to the sense of sight, or hearing, or...

 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...

So, the very first thing which came to mind this time around was from the first verse.  Ether seemed to be a fairly amazing person and a great prophet.  So... How did he get to be that way?  I'd love to hear the story of Ether's conversion - especially considering the environment he grew up in - being born in captivity.  Interes...

 So, this chapter seems to be about the rise and fall of the people, and the rulers who ruled both in righteousness and wickedness. It seems to mow through a genration with each verse that goes by - very quickly.  I guess this chapter would be a good one to illustrate the Lord's prophets making promises, and then keeping them through la...

So...  Interesting that one of the reasons cited for Heth's righteousness is his remembering what the Lord had done for his people, specirfically, bringing Jared and his kin over the ocean.  There has got to be something behind the whole "remember what the Lord has done for you" thing, and living a righteous life.  Heck.. E...

 Not much to write about on this chapter...  Lots of backbiting, hatred, slaying of kin, destruction of entire civilizations due to war, living in righteousness and prospering because of it.  Poisonous serpents, famine, more death, repentance, and just the general way the people live within the pride cycle. Not a bad chapter, but n...

Setting your heart upon the glory of the world has always seemed like a bad idea to me, but then again, for most of my life I've been kind of the odd-man-out.  heh..  My own siblings have mentioned to me that they "don't get me".  Most people would consider this a bad thing, but for me, it's been life.  The desire to &...

 So...  Sometimes I feel like I write things here that could get me into trouble, but I figure, if this is what I really think, and I'm sincere about it, then right or wrong, the truth will eventually come out.  Many times, I've thought one thing, and then upon further studying and prayer, have found out I was wrong ... and I'm okay ...

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 ...

I just got back from one of the best races I've been on.  It was awesome. I've only got a bit to write about it, so I'll write as much as I can. I took off around 10:20 tonight to see what kind of damage I could do out on the streets. I was cruising on state street in Orem when I found a Dodge Charger R/T who wanted to play.  The...

Okay...  So about a month ago, I sat down at my keyboard and plunked out a few notes.  About 2 weeks later, I gave a rough copy of a mash of music to my friend, Ryan Phillips, and had plunked out some sweet riffs to it. Two weeks later, I add some vocals and effects, and this is what you've got. I hope you like it.  (press the ...

After receiving a warning in my PHP implementation of AES encryption (which is called Rijndael), I did a quick google, and found one match - and it happened to be in planet larry, so...  I clicked on the link to go to the blog which contained the fix, and found it wasn't there anymore...  So..  I thought I'd just copy the answer and ...

  I was floating around the webosphere, when I came upon this key, which, evidently is released by Microsoft themselves.  It is claimed to work on all Windows 98 CDs VP9VV-VJW7Q-MHY6W-JK47R-M2KGJ  I've personally verified that it works with Windows 98 1st Edition (helping my neighbor with computers too old to run XP efficiently...

Man, I've got a lot to write.  Quite a bit happened this weekend, and last weekend.  I'll start with this weekend. We had another LAN party this weekend, and it was up at Shane's house in Perry, UT.  We played the usual, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and Unreal Tournament 2004. Traffic was pretty horrible going up through Davis ...

I just spent the last 5 hours trying to get Evolution to connect to our corporate Exchange server.  I finally figured it out, and I can now interoperate 100% with calendars, contacts, meetings, and email from our Exchange server. Due to the wide array of configuration options in Exchange, doing a step-by-step how-to would be, for the most p...

We had been anticipating the visit from Craig and Annie Young (my brother-in-law's family) for awhile, and I must say, their visit was simply delightful. I had to go and attend the LDSFest 2008 on Saturday, from noon until midnight, so I wasn't able to be home then, but I took Friday off and Friday was great! On Friday, we went and visited Temple...

I spent pretty much all of yesterday trying in vain to write a soap client to connect to a web service provided by our new partner in Green Bay, WI. After about 6 solid hours of getting the same error, a great programmer and acquaintence of mine, Jared Smith gave me a quick tip on how to fix it. Before I get to the fix, let me say that first, I...

I'm not entirely sure how to begin this post, but I'm just sitting here kind of wagging my head back and forth in disbelief.  I hope this is at least exaggerating. With everyone blathering on about how wonderful Windows 7 is, Microsoft hasn't changed a bit. Before I begin, let me just say how wonderfully reassuring it is to be using Linux ...

Oh, man...  I haven't had a day like yesterday in quite some time.  Possibly years. My day started at 6:00AM with about 4 hours of sleep in me.  Ah well...  Caffeine has its purpose, right? We started out thinking there would be 4-6 cars out there on the salt with us, but it ended up being just Steve and me.  As it tu...

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...

Ya know...  Sometimes I hate open source.  Most times I love it, but sometimes I hate it. I recently updated my gentoo gnome installation to 2.24.2, and didn't think much of it.  I then tried to connect my Nikon S210 digital camera to my usb port and perform the simple task of importing photos.  I have done this probably 100 t...

*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...

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...

Sitting here before I begin this entry, I have to sit and sigh...  A sigh of gratitude. Today has been a Sabbath of great spiritual confirmations of simple truths. While reading this entry, I suggest you click the "play" icon button  in the upper right-hand corner of this entry window.  Instead of playing the usual En...

Man...  Starting my new job, I had the opportunity to build a new computer.  They ordered me the parts, and I was good to go. For this computer, I opted to buy two acer 22-inch widescreen monitors.  In doing so, I knew I would have to be up and functioning quickly with a dual-head setup running gentoo Linux.  I knew this was ...

Hehe....  I love it when I learn new stuff about Springville. I had no idea that there existed a place in Springville that was absolutely perfect for racing.  Now we're talking 0-80 MPH racing in a straight line.  Nothing curvy or anything like that.  So... Anyway... My co-worker, Steve comes into my office (or rather, the...

Oh, man...  Where do I even begin this post?  And from which angle?  How about I just start typing and figure it out when I'm done....  Yeah, that's what I'll do. I just finished reading this Microsoft article which explains, using no uncertain terms, how to get "IT Management" to see the "value" in upgrad...

As many of you know, I recently upgraded the exhaust on my 2007 Mustang GT. Well... Tonight, I had to take it out to see what I could do.  So, I went the usual route and didn't find much more than a crappy 90's Eclipse that wanted to play.  After almost an hour of dragging back and forth, lady luck just didn't have it in for me tonight...