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2026
2005
- I decided to move this journal to a blog, so today this one ends and Top of the Mountains begins.
- Rediscovered the LDSMusicians.com mailing list. I subscribed to it before my mission, but since I’ve...
- Was called as the ward pianist today. It’s nice to be able to play, because I don’t have easy access...
- Spent several hours at the Family History Library up in Salt Lake researching my ancestors from Pola...
- At the end of my New Testament class the other day my teacher made a profound comment that really st...
- I’ve started teaching myself hiragana and katakana (Japanese script). No plans to master kanji or an...
- Found this neat quote from C.S. Lewis’s essay "Transposition" (in The Weight of Glory: Let...
- Read a compelling article in BYU Magazine (Winter 2005) by Val D. Hawks that really gets the gist of...
- I’ve been home from my mission over six months now. Six months?!? It’s amazing how fast time goes by...
- We got back on Monday. Anyway, I made burritoes from scratch today. My eventual goal is to make most...
- My roommates and I are on our way to Las Vegas for the weekend. I want to start updating this site m...
- The other day I found a neat site on jazz improvisation (music theory): A Jazz Improvisation Primer,...
- I suppose I could update this journal more often if I simply put my mind to it, because it really do...
- Taught myself how to play “Edelweiss” and “What Child Is This” on the guitar. The skin on the tips o...
- I’m pretty much better now (other than some weird constriction in my chest, but I think it too will...
- Last night I ate some masaman curry that we had made on Sunday, then went to Bangkok Tokyo for our m...
- Wow, it’s been a while. I moved out on New Year’s Eve and am now living in a house off campus with t...
2004
- Found a neat page on Brahms’ thoughts on inspiration and creativity.
- It’s been a while. School ended (fairly well, for the most part), and I’ve been working full-time ov...
- Read this talk: Honest, Simple, Solid, True (by C. Terry Warner). It’s about how to be free. (You’ll...
- Here’s a quote on reading by Ralph Waldo Emerson that I stumbled across today: “Consider what you ha...
- Four finals down, three to go. I spent a couple of hours tonight teaching myself how to play the rec...
- Last night I got a copy in the mail of the legislative petition by Robert and William Shanks in 1820...
- I’ve had the flu since Wednesday and have been home recuperating. It’s not the most convenient time...
- I’m really busy with school and work right now, so work on this site will cease for the time being.
- I’ve decided to forego guitar for now and focus solely on drawing. Spent a couple of hours in the ev...
- Started teaching myself guitar. Playing single notes is a lot easier than I thought (my fingers are...
- Had a great Thanksgiving with family and friends.
- Finally got all of Adventures in Thailand online. My next project is my mission photos… Went to my c...
- Thanksgiving break starts today! (Technically it starts tomorrow but I don’t have any classes today....
- For the past month or so I’ve been researching the Robert and Elizabeth Shanks line, trying to figur...
- Went to a splendid lecture on Herculaneum by Roger McFarlane. Fascinating stuff. Found a bunch of hi...
- My laptop died eight days ago and wasn’t fixed till yesterday, thus the delay. Only one more month t...
- Went to the Family History Library for five hours and researched my Raffaele Iavicoli line. Found th...
- Midterms have been keeping me busy lately. Today I start a new job, working on the Welsh Mormon Hist...
- It’s snowing! This is the first time I’ve seen snow in two and a half years. Gave into an impulse wh...
- I saw Puccini’s La Boheme tonight, my first time at the opera. I was quite impressed. For one thing,...
- Here’s an article by C. Terry Warner entitled Honest, Simple, Solid, True. I read it when I was in t...
- I’ve been home from Thailand for two months already. Wow. It sure went by fast.
- I’m now the secretary for the Thai club at BYU. I’ll have more details as I learn about what it is I...
- Went to the Family History Library for five and a half hours today. Ah, it was fun! I found the will...
- I’m very, very pleased with my Powerbook so far. It does everything I need it to and it’s a beautifu...
- I’ve been getting everything set up on here. Installed Fink and then Mutt (of course). Downloaded li...
- Well, the reason I haven’t updated this for the last two weeks is that my laptop crashed (in Linux;...
- Most of my time is spent on homework these days. I did start reading Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under...
- Found another record that says Raffaele was born in Castiglione, Chieti. Good. In Greek today I got...
- I’m researching my Iavicoli line, which is from Torre de’ Passeri, Pescara, Italy. One of my ancesto...
- School’s taking up most of my time (midterms are this week and next and of course there’s always hom...
- Used Scribus to make a 20-page picture scrapbook of my little brother’s Eagle project. Usually a pro...
- I really like the new way X.org does fonts, where all I have to do to install new fonts is put them...
- Set up my Epson Perfection 1250 USB scanner to work with my Linux laptop. It actually took very litt...
- Started trying out Scribus (Linux desktop publishing program, like PageMaker) and Inkscape (vector-b...
- I’m trying to get PAF to work on WINE. The install crashes right after it unpacks the files, but I’l...
- I’ve been busy with school. Decided to start studying Italian on my own in preparation for a family...
- TextKit.com is really neat and has a lot of good old Latin and Greek books online (scanned page imag...
- Today I realized that some of the things I’ve been planning to do just aren’t important in the etern...
- Audacity is quite a nice audio editor. I’d used it a little bit before, but it’s progressed a lot an...
- Still trying to get Postfix to work on my machine. I installed Thunderbird, though, which works and...
- I’ve been doing some research on charsets and Unicode and all that sort of stuff, trying to figure o...
- Today I started rewriting the site. I’m paring a lot of stuff down, cutting out many of the links an...
- Got my wireless network card (NetGear WG511) today. I won’t be able to test it out till I go to BYU...
- Last night I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be taking Middle English and that God wanted me to t...
- My sister and I dropped Theatre History yesterday. I signed up for Middle English instead. So now I’...
- Today was the first day of class. It was all quite good and I’m excited for the semester. At the mom...
- I ended up dropping Italian so that I could take Theatre History 201 with my sister. And as a result...
- Back to normal life again. I came in off the plane on Friday at about 7:30 p.m. and have been adjust...
2002
- This’ll be the last entry in this journal for two years. Wow. (My friend Byron will be updating the...
- I can’t wait till Wednesday. I want to enter the MTC right now. But of course I must wait. I didn’t...
- Only four more days. Wow, this is my last Saturday at home. Crazy. I’m going to get most of the pack...
- I’m working on LearningLore.com for my parents (it’s their new business). I think I’ll just take Bla...
- I’ve been reading a book on Buddhism. Fascinating stuff. There doesn’t seem to be much to write in t...
- One week. Wow. I bought my family an Epson Perfection 1250 Photo scanner. That way we can scan in al...
- I’m losing interest in the computer. (It’s a good thing — I don’t want to go through withdrawals whe...
- I’m getting ready to post my farewell talk in MP3/Ogg. The Gnome Wave Cleaner looks most promising....
- Spent most of yesterday getting ready for my farewell and open house, which were today. Both went qu...
- Only two more days till my farewell. Wow. 12 more till I enter the MTC. Goodness, it’s coming quickl...
- I finished reading James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ last night. It’s a hefty volume — almost 800...
- Two more weeks… Wow. Preparation for my farewell talk is going very well. I’m not afraid at all (of...
- 15 more days till I enter the MTC. Wow. I’m continually amazed at how quickly the time is slipping a...
- I started preparing for my farewell talk this morning. It’s coming along pretty well. Better than I...
- Today I was impressed again to work on my family history. Only 17 days till I enter the MTC, of cour...
- I’ve been pulling together a team to work on The Gutenberg Press, the new newsletter for Project Gut...
- I don’t exactly know why, but in the last few days I’ve started sweating a lot. (When I’m working, t...
- Exactly three weeks left. Wow. It’ll go by fast, too. Our family reunion starts today. I need to get...
- 22 more days… It’s crazy how fast the time is going by. I’ve miraculously finished tying up most of...
- I watched the Apple Switch ads this morning. They seemed to be quite effective, since even I conside...
- I went to two missionary farewells today. Wow, my own is in just two weeks. That’s crazy. And only a...
- We’ve decided to switch the Project Gutenberg Software Site from the Faq-O-Matic to a PHP/MySQL solu...
- I’ve decided to use Lucida Sans Unicode for the IPA portion of that Thai alphabet chart I’m working...
- I’m really becoming interested in Church history (LDS Church history, that is). I think I’m going to...
- I guess I’m in an article-writing mood (I wrote Feeding the Hand That Feeds You this morning). The m...
- I read through the Mutt help file this morning. Lots of stuff I didn’t know about. (I can’t believe...
- I get to install Linux on my machine at work. Mmm. I’m going to put Gentoo on it (instead of Red Hat...
- I got back from California this afternoon. Time passes by very quickly. It was a lot of fun. Yesterd...
- Well, I leave in half an hour for California. (I’m taking the bus up to the airport (a three-hour tr...
- I’m going to try to finish the primer today. That would be very nice. I’m also scanning in the TP&am...
- I forgot to mention yesterday that I’m still fairly new to TeX and LaTeX. I’ve learned a lot in thes...
- I decided to make that Unicode Coptic font so I could use it in OpenOffice and TeX (with Omega), so...
- I got a notification e-mail today letting me know that the Icelandic primer has been posted to Proje...
- I’m home now. Just submitted An Icelandic Primer to Project Gutenberg. I’ve been playing around with...
- I’ve been with my family in Oregon for the past week. The drive there is pretty long (ten hours to o...
- Luckily that sickness wasn’t really a sickness, at least not anything major. I haven’t been studying...
- I’ve finished cleaning up the Old Icelandic primer and uploaded the text file. It’s in Unicode, by t...
- I bought the Fellowship of the Ring and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones soundtracks today. Concernin...
- I really like the new journal look. I think I’m starting to get sick again, confound it all. It star...
- Wow, tomorrow is Blank Slate’s two-year anniversary. It’s come a long way from the first version (se...
- I added the Cool Stuff page today. Now the things I think are cool won’t get lost in this journal. S...
- Mozilla’s Orbit theme is simply beautiful. I’m quite taken with it. I’m becoming more and more entra...
- I’ve decided that for the rest of the summer I’m going to get as many translations of the Book of Mo...
- I went shopping for missionary stuff today with my mom. Got most of it done. We still need to get sh...
- I’ve been playing around a lot with my keyboard mappings today. Speed, speed, speed. The colors on t...
- I finished reformatting Kilmeny of the Orchard this morning. I still have to get copyright clearance...
- I’m going to start research for part 2 of Vim Bits today. I put part 1 up on here in the new article...
- Here’s the link to part 1 of my Vim article: Vim Bits 1. I can’t wait to start on part 2… I formatte...
- Finished part 1 of my Vim article and posted it to the site. I’ll get it up on here soon. RELAX NG (...
- I started memorizing the Thai alphabet this morning. It’s coming along pretty well. I realized that...
- I’ve written about 2,000 words on the Vim article so far. It’s ending up much longer than I anticipa...
- Is it already Friday? Goodness, that week went by fast. Only two more months until I leave. Wow. I d...
- After submitting The Ball and the Cross to Project Gutenberg I found eleven more typos in it. It’s a...
- I love mornings! I’ve been an early riser for the past six or seven years and I wouldn’t give up tho...
- I finished reformatting The Ball and the Cross (thank heavens for regular expressions!) and I’m subm...
- I got permission to take four L.M. Montgomery texts from A Celebration of Women Writers (Rainbow Val...
- I spent an hour or so working on the Project Gutenberg Software Site this morning. It’ll go live wit...
- OpenOffice rocks. It only takes 25 seconds to start on my machine, and the font system is pretty dar...
- I spent an hour or so this morning working on Linuxtype (mostly on the adding fonts page). I really...
- I actually start tomorrow at MyFamily.com, not today. (They’ve got to find a machine for me.) The wo...
- I’ve spent the morning helping my family out (mostly babysitting) and installing Red Hat 7.3 on my l...
- Yesterday I finished Anne of Green Gables and read 100 pages of Anne of Avonlea. I like it a lot. I...
- I discovered DjVu this morning and have been quite captivated by it. The Any2DjVu service is a nice...
- I’m tempted to start typing in an old 1911 book I have, Medieval Europe (by H.W.C. Davis). It’s not...
- When I get back from my mission, I’m going to buy a scanner and start scanning and OCRing old langua...
- Well, I’m 99% better. The cough is virtually nonexistent, though it still pops up from time to time...
- I’ve started playing around with PHP and MySQL. I didn’t have MySQL installed initially, so I instal...
- I’m almost completely recovered. The cough pops up a handful of times a day, but nothing major. It’s...
- Is it really June already? Time passes by far too quickly. My cough is almost gone. I’m much better....
- I wrote an article for the UUG site on how I created the BYU-UUG logo (see the logo on the Gallery)....
- I finally got the left-hand sidebar effect I wanted, using CSS. I had to make a background image and...
- Still sick. But it feels like it’s going away. I hope. I volunteered today to create a site for Proj...
- Same as yesterday. Still not as weak as I was before (and I’m very glad of that), but no improvement...
- Well, the good news is that I’m not as weak as I used to be. But the cough is still here. I’m hoping...
- Surprise, surprise — still sick. I can’t tell if I’m getting better or worse. I didn’t go to the far...
- No change. The nights are awful, but the days aren’t terribly bad. Most of my time is spent lying in...
- Still sick. Blah. Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks. I hope it will only be two weeks. I’m amazed at how l...
- It doesn’t seem to be going away. It’s like a pesky little fly or mosquito that keeps buzzing around...
- Still sick. This illness is interminable, it seems. Bother. I’ve decided to write only in this journ...
- Not much new on this front. Still sick. It sounds worse than it is, though. Nothing more than a coug...
- I seem to be caught by this illness. I really hope it goes away soon. I’ve tried everything I can th...
- Still sick. Argh. I decided to collect all of this information I’ve been gathering about Thailand an...
- The coughing attacks almost feel like they’re getting worse. They don’t come all that frequently, bu...
- I thought I would start getting better, but I’m getting worse. This is certainly not fun. I won’t be...
- Still sick. Last night I didn’t wake up in a cold sweat, though, so I think (hope) I’m getting bette...
- It seems like the only remaining evidence of my illness is the cough (which seems to be getting bett...
- Still sick. Yesterday afternoon my cough moved from the innocent stage to the gritty, raspy, painful...
- Still sick. Sicker than before, actually. Not fun. The amazing thing is that this time it isn’t mess...
- Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is quite beautiful. I found an MP3 of it somewhere on...
- I started studying Thai today. It’s not as hard as I thought, thank heavens. I focused my efforts on...
- Installed Red Hat 7.3 on that scratch computer I put together the other day. (It’s a P266 with 128 m...
- We’re going to switch from our ISP (Computer Solutions) to AT&T’s broadband service. It’s report...
- I haven’t worked on The Ball and the Cross for a week or so, but today I typed in the requisite seve...
- Fluxbox rocks. I switched over this morning and have been very pleased with it. Gnome was nice, but...
- Life has been rather busy for the past few days. Thursday I got most of the remaining immunizations,...
- I got my mission call! I’m going to Bangkok, Thailand. I’ll enter the MTC on August 21st. That gives...
- I think I really am going to be a history professor. History and languages appeal to me a lot. And I...
- I think I’m going to put German on hold right now and focus on Spanish. Why? The chance of getting c...
- Found another C.S. Lewis time-related quote somewhat like the one in the 4-25-02 entry: We are so li...
- It still doesn’t feel like school is really out. I meant to spend a lot of time reading and studying...
- I interviewed with MStar this morning. If I get the job, I’ll be developing database-driven sites (O...
- My mission call could possibly come today or tomorrow. The sooner the better. But it will come when...
- Finals are over! I finished my last two (Comp Lit and Coptic) last night. It feels absolutely wonder...
- Finally found out how to use Unicode characters in a webpage. For example, here’s an umlauted o: ö....
- “I Dreamed a Dream” (from Les Mis) is an awesome song. Wow. I reviewed that German stuff I memorized...
- I decided to memorize German paradigms today. So I memorized the conjugations for sein and haben and...
- My first two finals are over. Latin went well, and I really liked the unseen passage (from Caesar’s...
- The Ball and Cross work is still going along quite well. I’ve entered in five chapters so far.
- I ended up doing my resume in AbiWord. I also did it in LaTeX, using a different model. I need to sp...
- Today is my last real day of class — tomorrow two of my classes are canceled and in the other one we...
- This is the last week of school. Wow. We just finished Book One of Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gal...
- I’ve decided to try my hand at Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet itself isn’t very hard to learn, but i...
- Turns out the suture was okay, so I didn’t have to get it sewn up at all. The dentist said it will h...
- I found Linux X Cursor Control while browsing around for something else. It’s cool. My left suture c...
- I’ve been out of it for the past few days. I had my wisdom teeth taken out last Thursday and I’m sti...
- Yesterday I installed Ximian Gnome. It is incredibly cool. I’m very pleased with it. Oh, I’m getting...
- Bought a Russian and an Italian dictionary. Yum.
- I bought an Italian and a Spanish grammar today. They’re pocket-sized from Barron’s, just like the F...
- I really like CSS. The style/content separation paradigm is a beautiful thing. I’ll write up some st...
- CSS is cool. I’ve been reading up on it and I like very much what I’m seeing. I’ll switch the site o...
- Mozilla is cool. I upgraded Galeon 1.2.0 (I didn’t realize the version that comes with Red Hat is on...
- My tablet came on Monday, but I couldn’t get it working till last night (I spent six hours on it on...
- My tablet didn’t come Saturday, but it should arrive today. I can’t wait, especially now that I’ve r...
- Almost done with the week of tests. Yesterday’s test on Romanticism (Goethe’s Faust and The Sorrows...
- The GIMP FreeType plugin is amazingly cool. The kerning feature is the main reason I like it — kerni...
- I haven’t been able to do much reading at all for a while. Other than school, that is. At the moment...
- Well, as the obsessive-compulsive person I am, I couldn’t wait to get Blank Slate up. So, instead of...
- The tutorial idea will have to wait a little while. Right now my main focus is passing the three tes...
- I came up with an idea this morning for the site. I realized that I like writing tutorials, and so I...
- That Latin competition went quite well. Far better than I thought it would, actually. I still didn’t...
- It doesn’t look like this weblog will be a daily thing; oh well. School’s still going well. I’m in a...
- I’m back in school now. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get used to it again. Actually, I was pl...
- Well, the weeklong break is almost over. It went by fast. I didn’t really do any homework until toda...
- For quite some time now I’ve wanted to have some kind of journal on this site, but the site news pag...
- I started working on Shadows for ten minutes a morning, and did so for nine or so days. It’s been fo...
- School has taken up more of my time than I expected, so the only book I’ve finished of those listed...
2001
- I’m currently working on a novel, tentatively entitled Shadows of the Beyond. I won’t say any more a...
- I began Dante’s Inferno a few days ago, reading a canto a night (just before bed). I’m also reading...
- I’m reading Hugh Nibley’s Abraham in Egypt, Gordon B. Hinckley’s Standing for Something, LeGrand Ric...
- I’m still reading Wuthering Heights. I’m also rereading Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring in anticipa...
- At the moment I’m reading Wuthering Heights and absolutely loving it. I’m also reading The Nibelunge...