This is my very first journal entry. And I love this journal website idea! I am really excited about it. Maybe now I will actually write out many of my thoughts and spiritual experiences I have that I tend to never write out. I am going to just vent, because I need to; but first I will introduce myself.        ...

Why does Microsoft insist on making life so hard for developers? There are web standards, Microsoft, in case you missed the memo.  Please adhere to them.  It would do EVERYONE good. Here's yet another hack to get IE to work in cases where min-height is used (according to my browsers, this still doesn't work in even IE8) I found t...

Okay...  So lately the studio has been getting some serious upgrades, thanks to all of you who have been supporting me, and creating awesome music. About a month ago, I was chatting it up with a good friend, Jesse Crowley, about how in the world we were going to sell our fabulous new Herod the Fink album this season.  You see, there ar...

From the beginning of this chapter, it's obvious that Christ means business when he makes covenants.  Causing entire books to be written, and then keeping 100% of everything that is written means something. I wonder why the people thought that Christ's coming "destroyed" the prophets?  Interesting. I love verse 9.  &q...

Last week was a week of upgrades! The studio was able to finally get serious (well, at least semi-serious) about the way we look. Previously, the studio "rack" was nothing more than a cut-out backwards bookshelf bought at Walmart, and with all the stuff we were able to upgrade last week, it was finally time to buy a real rack. We...

Take a moment, now, and think about what you'd do if you had access to unlimited funds, and didn't have to "work" another day of your life. I once heard a multi-millionaire state that, "money brings out with clarity, that which is inside you."  If you love to watch football with a passion, then having loads of money would...

Okay...  So I own and operate a recording studio, and I've been using an M-Audio delta 1010 as my primary audio interface.  This provides me 8 channels of simultaneous audio streams coming into my workstation.  Up until about a month ago, this has been very sufficient. About a month ago, I ordered another Delta 1010, and planned o...

Linux + gentoo + jack-audio-connection-kit + dbus use flag enabled = doesn't work any more. Okay... Just a personal note to remember. DO NOT COMPILE jack-audio-connection-kit WITH THE dbus FLAG ENABLED!  IT REMOVES jackd WHICH IS WHAT  qjackctl USES TO START THE JACK SERVER. So... Unless I'm missing something, this is pretty much th...

Aside from being booked solid last week, Advanced Budget Studios has made some progress on the techinical side as well.  Up until now, we have only been able to handle 8 simultaneous streams of audio into the workstation, however, due to the success we've been having, we saw a need to upgrade.  We now have two M-audio delta 1010's synced ...

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...

 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...

  Poetry by Kelly Miller   THis is dedicated to my son Shawn VanWagen who left on his mission in 2005 and that next week I started writing poetry. It has been a big part of my life since and has kept me very busy.  Also, to President Hinckley and his challenge for the members to read the book of mormon. and to Bernice Hutchenson w...

Today has been ok I guess.. My Maw and I stayed in the house all day and cleaned, while the boys worked in the yard. I hate "womens work"!!!! I rather be out side, but of corse I can't. I'm tired!!! Tomorrow I'm suppost to skip out stake sports day and  go with my Maw to this womens class thingy, I'm hoping that some one I know fr...

One other thing I've been thinking about lately is a lesson I learned a long time ago.  This lesson is summarized into one sentence: Being true to God in no way diminishes your being true to yourself, simply because God knows how the *best* "you" is. I was talking with one of my brothers when he said "But if I become 'churchy'...

I find it interesting how Satan is described throughout scripture. In this chapter, through verses 13 - 20, Satan is seemingly exposed as the weak fraudster he really is.  Verse 16 is quite potent, written from the standpoint of people who were tempted by him, when shown his actual person, are amazed at the frailness of Satan.  They say...

The beginning verses of this scripture were the ones of focus today. For the past 2 chapters (or more), the Lord has been chastising the Gentiles, should they fall into the pride cycle and not repent. The beginning 2 verses of this chapter basically says, "even though the Gentiles were bad, don't get on your high-horse, thinking you're any...

**UPDATED ARTICLE HERE** (for using the new firewire stack) Okay.  I got my new Echo Audiofire12 3 days ago, and I now have it fully functioning on all 12 ports.  I don't have MIDI working yet, but I haven't really tried on that one. Here's what I did to get it working. First, I'm using the 2.6.33-rt kernel. I enabled the OLD FIRE...

One thing that comes to mind while reading the first verses of this chapter is, "If I were a queen, and my servants brought me my unconscious husband, I'd immediately want to know who did it." - and Ammon did it.  That doesn't make much sense to me.  Obviously the times of the Book of Mormon were , uh, different, so that could e...

A few months ago, I thought I'd get a bit more serious about setting up a semi-professional studio in my home.  It's worked out great, so far! As I've worked with clients, they've been more than happy with the results, and I'm learning new techniques and tricks of the trade at the same time.  So far, so good. So, along this trail, I b...

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...

I got down here to my studio tonight, after playing with the kids, putting Sam to bed, and taking care of a few other odds 'n' ends, and I got to feeling like I should write in my journal.  Not entirely sure about what, but it's been months, if not a few years since I have just sat down to write, with nothing in mind beforehand.  Some of ...

So a little more than a year ago, I took my mustang out for the first time on the Salt Flats.  I had a blast out there with my good friend Steve. On the way home, Steve had some problems with salt lining his rims, causing some tire imbalance, so we  got off the freeway, I showed him what the problem was, and as I was getting back on th...

 So, I used to use the -dumpaudio switch in mplayer to get audio extracted from random videos, but now that seems to do not much of anything.  I found this site which had a great explanation of how to get it done a different way, but was a bit out of date.  The newer version is found below: mplayer -vo null -ao pcm:file=audio_file_...

Okay...  This sucks.  I just spent the last 10 minutes typing up a nice novel on how today was spent, and I then proceeded to accidentally delete it.  How unfortunate.  Let's see if I can do it again. ....nope.  Sorry...  I'm tired, and it's late (it's now 12:30am), and I've got to get up tomorrow morning. Suffic...

Since I've been job-hopping for the last bit, I've had the chance to install fresh gentoo builds on quite a few 64-bit computers in the last couple of months. I've also been looking at different IDEs for PHP development.  After using jEdit now for close to 5 years, I've gotta say the one which impresses me the most is Zend Studio for Eclips...

Since the studio's new shining star arrived, we've been having a lot of fun around here.  To be honest, the guy who was good enough to sell us our new MXL V77, couldn't say enough about this microphone, which unfortunately is no longer in production, so when it arrived, I had my hopes up quite high - possibly too high. So, after two successf...

Within the first 5 verses of this chapter, I'm reminded again of how a person works who is truly interested in God's commandments. Lehi was commanded of the Lord to have his sons return to Jerusalem to get the plates of brass from Laban. Telling Laman and Lemuel would most certainly have some consequences in that they would automatically assu...

Tired of the same old colors?  Try customizing the color scheme of your ILMJ blog!  Here's how to do it: First, make sure you go to your blog home page.  If you're not sure how to get there, simply click on "Blog", and choose your blog.  You will then be at the home page of your blog.  From there, you will noti...

In chatting with my friend Steve, I realized I haven't yet given any details as to my trip to Green Bay this week, so, before this weekend comes, I figured I had better write something. Day 3 (Wednesday) went pretty smooth.  I woke up with a high level of sleep deficiency (surprise, surprise), and went out to the office for the last time.&n...

I'm still kind of in awe of it all, but ....  holy cow..  Samuel Jason Jones has arrived! We got into the car around 4:30pm after Sarah had been in labor since around 6:00am.  Wow... What a trooper. We arrived here at the hospital at 5:00pm anticipating his arrival around 10:00pm or so...  Yeah right...  Samuel had ot...