Mormon Bloggers

Most people don’t know this about me, yet, but I’m a nut about the history of stories. It all started when I read a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales about 4 years ago. Many of the stories were very similar, or more commonly, shared and reworked elements. By the end, it felt like I was reading the same story over and over again. One story, in particular, was called “The Girl without Hands”. At this point I was already interested in the symbolism in stories so while I was reading, I would sometimes go online to read commentaries on the stories. Anyhow, the commentary on “The Girl without Hands” was interesting, and took into account earlier versions of the story, which I found at the university library and read. Anyhow, I’m always excited when I am able to recognize where a story came from. Like, how Bones, Psych, and House are all based on Sherlock Holmes. A couple of months ago, I sat down with Ephraim and we watched “Phineas and Ferb: across... Read the rest of this entry »

When Cassey asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I had just been thinking about what I wanted to do after I finished reading The Book of Mormon in French. I’ve been trying to do some language study each day during my commute to work, and I’ve been trying to combine that with my scripture study. One thing I learned while reading the Book of Mormon in French, is that Isaiah still reads like Isaiah, even in a foreign language. Even though I normally have no trouble with Isaiah in English, I found that I could easily tell I was reading Isaiah by the fact that I had to keep my French dictionary handy. Usually I just keep it in my bag and maybe pull it out once or twice a chapter. By I had to look up a word practically every other verse or more whenever I found myself getting into a citation of Isaiah. Anyhow, I just recently finished reading through Alma, and thought it was time to start planning for the eventual end of the book. I still have a small matter of months... Read the rest of this entry »

Each year, neat things happen, and important things are written. Here are some important writings from 2010 (or 2009) that I have gotten around to reading this year and which you might consider for yourself. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission A solid victory for the Freedom of Speech, but hotly contested in the political arena, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is certainly one of the most important things to come out of this year. As I have told many, McCain-Feingold has been an irritant to me and was one of the primary reasons that I didn’t vote for McCain, and even left the Republican Party (I’m currently an Independent, and no, I didn’t vote for Obama). The main opinion has weaknesses, but the conclusion is solid. I couldn’t concur more with Justice Thomas’s opinion. The dissent of Justice Stevens struck a raw nerve. His dissent does a good job of exposing some weaknesses in the arguments of the majority, but he simultaneously expresses... Read the rest of this entry »

20100716-john_labas_family_1860.gif While doing some indexing as part of the FamilySearch Indexing project recently, I came across the following name: Williã To me it was a no-brainer that the name was William, but I suspect most people might have been inclined to mistake the tilde for a stray mark. However, the mark was no stray. The name Williã occurred 3 times on the image I was indexing, each time with a tilde over the a. The reason why I knew what it meant was because of the two years I spent in Portugal. Over there, (as well as in Brazil and other Portuguese speaking countries) the tilde is a very common mark. It is used as an accent mark which nasalizes a vowel/diphthong. Since I was in Portugal, I had the opportunity to visit a lot of the old castles and read the old inscriptions, where I learned that the tilde was once a very common shorthand for indicating that a nasal consonant (m/n) was to follow. So, instead of writing “verano” (as you might find in modern Spanish),... Read the rest of this entry »

20100716-john_labas_family_1860.gif While doing some indexing as part of the FamilySearch Indexing project recently, I came across the following name: Williã To me it was a no-brainer that the name was William, but I suspect most people might have been inclined to mistake the tilde for a stray mark. However, the mark was no stray. The name Williã occurred 3 times on the image I was indexing, each time with a tilde over the a. The reason why I knew what it meant was because of the two years I spent in Portugal. Over there, (as well as in Brazil and other Portuguese speaking countries) the tilde is a very common mark. It is used as an accent mark which nasalizes a vowel/diphthong. Since I was in Portugal, I had the opportunity to visit a lot of the old castles and read the old inscriptions, where I learned that the tilde was once a very common shorthand for indicating that a nasal consonant (m/n) was to follow. So, instead of writing “verano” (as you might find in modern Spanish),... Read the rest of this entry »

As many of my readers are likely aware, Jasher KO’d my laptop a few weeks ago, with a dash of liquid (milk), like it was the Wicked Witch of the West. The witch took all her data with her. I back up my code every once in a while, so I didn’t lose much there (though I’d just created a new UML component that I think is now gone), however, family photos will be hard to replace. (Mom, we’ll be looking into getting a copy of that CD we sent you for your Birthday, and anything else of that nature we might have sent.) Anyhow, the old computers were not faring too well, but I just got my bonus at work, so we got a new computer for under $500, which arrived Saturday. I also picked up an external hard drive which I will be using to do regular backups. (I’ll be keeping it disconnected and unplugged between backups in order to minimize the chance that an issue will be able to affect both hard drives.) The new computer, oddly enough, came with Windows Vista, but that’s... Read the rest of this entry »

Bird Poo in the Attic A week ago, Cassey said she thought there was a cat in our attic. I said “no way, it’s just a cat on the roof”. I clearly wasn’t keeping in mind the second law of marriage, which is, “the wife is always right”. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I got a call from my wife while I was at work. Something in the attic had meowed at her and scampered away when she opened the hatch to peek in. I’d never been in my attic before. I had many ponderings on the subject. I was certain the insulation was awful, and I was curious as to the state of the wiring and plumbing. We have two attic hatches, one in the addition at the back and one in the original portion of the house, which is in the front. (Cassey’s experience occurred in the addition.) I began my investigation last night by opening up the hatches and shining the flashlight around to see if I could get the attention of the cat (if it was still around). Nothing seemed... Read the rest of this entry »

Ephraim is now pretty competent at recognizing and sounding all upper-case letters, and I’m bringing in the lower case. I’ll need to start giving him words in lower and camel case in a week or two. Reading is progressing slowly, but he enjoys the lessons and makes progress. I’ve been quite pleased with Maine’s passing of Question 1, rejecting same-sex marriage. It passed by a slightly better margin than our (California’s) Proposition 8, even though the its proponents were out-funded by quite a large margin. My programming has focused on The Glyph Project. I’ve been creating a tool to generate word pages to import into the wiki. I think I got it to a point last night where the pages that are generated are about what I want. I just need to break up the import files into manageable chunks of 100 pages or fewer to import. Once that is done, there will be lots of work to do to organize the words better than could be done automatically, extending MediaWiki... Read the rest of this entry »

Today I have a cold, so I took the day off from work and approximately rested. Despite being sick, I was able to knock out a few important chores I’ve had to do. My big goal for today was to deal with my overfilled webmail. I only had 10MB of space allocated to my email account, and to deal with the issue, I’d decided to install my own webmail application on my website instead of using the one provided by my hosting provider. Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well, and the application was having trouble trying to connect to the servers. While looking into the issue, I discovered that my hosting provider had increased the space available to me for email from the old 20 MB to 1GB. All I had to do was increase the allocation to my specific email addresses. So, now I have 100MB allocated to my primary email address, and my problem is solved. After conquering my email issue, I attacked The Shtick Image Editor. I’ve made a lot of changes since my last release, but it... Read the rest of this entry »

Seeing as it has been a relative while since I last posted anything, this post is going to be a jumble. I’ve had plenty of ideas for posts, but the time to sit down and write has escaped me. The first major problem was a flea infestation. The source of the problem was the front bathroom, where hoards of fleas were getting trapped in the tub and living short hungry lives. They didn’t all get trapped in the tub, however, and we were suffering for it. On the upside, we got pretty good at flea catching. So, we sprayed and we vacuumed and we sprayed some more. I’m now happy to report that I haven’t seen a single flea since Sunday, though, we’re still playing it cautious, and I haven’t really been in the front bathroom much either. (Last time I went in, there were very few live fleas.) My bites have been healing nicely. The drivers for the flea infestation seem to be two-fold. First, we had a possum living under the bathroom (and perhaps dying there). Second,... Read the rest of this entry »