just a classic xkcd to cheer everyone up on a cold, windy saturday afternoon. i think i saved this one so i could send it to my little brother (an avid tuba player in marching bands, etc) to make fun of him.

i only marched in band a few times. i was first chair trombone for a few years, but i never really loved it… i remember our marching band would start the march onto the field by one half yelling out “my bologna has a first name, it’s o-s-c-a-r!”, and then the other half would yell “my bologna has a second name, it’s m-a-y-e-r!” we had a long debate one day as to whether it was “m-E-y-e-r” or “m-A-y-e-r”, and it finally ended with us calling up the oscar mayer company and asking them for the official spelling (this was before things like google and wikipedia mind you). good times.

i saved this link on 2008.03.26.

well, at least not in the normal sense. i am slowly transitioning away from google services, so tonight i began moving over to a new jabber/xmpp chat account separate from my @gmail account. if you were on my chat list before, i tried moving you over, though i’ve found it had some problems. so if you wanna chat with me through your google talk, add a new contact with the address being ryan at the domain name of this blog (without the www).

pretty sad/shocking:

So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.

yet i pay for it cuz i NEED my sms! unlimited texts for $30 split three ways on my family plan isn’t too bad tough…

i saved this link on 2008.03.28.

at least until i screw something up again… sorry for this mess… this is what i get for tinkering so much with my blog… anyway, so it looks like subscribers are still subscribed, however, some older feed links seem to have a big delay! so, the safest bet is to just subscribe directly to this feed:

https://iambismark.net/index.xml

that should always be right, no matter how badly i screw things up.

but that really shouldn’t bother my mormon readers. though from the number of people who have recoiled in disgust when i mention such a thing, it obviously does bother some mormons. i mean, people who drink alcohol can’t get temple recommends, so how could Jesus, someone without sin, have drunk it? i hear the theory often about how wine was really unfermented grape juice back in new testament times… but is there really any internal or external evidence of such a reading of the bible? i really don’t think so, and here is why:

evidence #1: gospel of john 3:1-10

here Jesus turns water into wine. could it just be grape juice? read verse 9 and 10:

When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.

the wine that Jesus made was apparently pretty awesome. usually, at a party, the hosts gave out the really good wine at the beginning for everyone to enjoy. after drinking that for awhile and getting somewhat inebriated, the poorer quality wine was brought out and no one would really care. this makes no sense with just grape juice.

evidence #2: gospel of matthew 9:17

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

grape juice doesn’t break bottles, the fermenting process does. true, this is just a parable, but it does show that wine does not equal grape juice in this instance.

evidence #3: greek

the greek word for wine is oinos. it is the same greek word used throughout the new testament. whether talking about the passover or warning against drunkenness, it is the same word.

ok, so even after all of this, we could still probably come up with some way to say that Jesus never drank alcohol. but what’s the point? the word of wisdom as found in doctrine and covenants section 89 is not an eternal law.

A Word of Wisdom, for the benefit of the council of high priests, assembled in Kirtland, and the church, and also the saints in Zion— To be sent greeting; not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the word of wisdom, showing forth the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days… (emphasis mine)

even in the latter-days, the word of wisdom has not always been considered a “commandment”. it wasn’t until 1902 that it became a “soft” test of fellowship and requirement for entering the temple. it didn’t become an absolute requirement until 1921! so why are we worrying so much about Jesus, someone who lived in a completely different dispensation, going against a commandment that has only been in force for the last 88 years? prior to 1902, not drinking alcohol was a suggestion. prior to 1833, there wasn’t even that! now, occasionally drinking alcohol is obviously different than drunkenness, and i don’t believe that Jesus ever lost control. and of course, since i am currently living my baptismal covenants, i will not drink wine. but i do eat pigs, something which Jesus certainly would not have done, so there is precedence for the two time periods having different food restrictions. actually, i think we can learn valuable things from taking a better perspective on this. mormons don’t have to be bothered by the scientific evidence that occasional alcohol consumption might be good for your health. it really might be! but it doesn’t matter, because we covenanted to be a peculiar people, and we will be fine without it. we also should not judge people who use alcohol with proper restraint as being evil or sinful. they are not living under the baptismal covenant, they have no such restrictions (kind of like how john the baptist didn’t drink wine, but Jesus did). ok, now please leave a comment about why i am wrong/apostate/awesome.

ok, so like i talked about in my mobileme review, i’ve decided to finally get away from gmail. i don’t like gmail. i don’t like the ads. i don’t like the weird IMAP implementation. so, i’ve set out on a search for something better. i’ve started to believe much more in paying for quality. that may not at first seem like the frugal thing to do, but really, frugality has much less to do with the amount you pay for something. according to your money or your life, frugality is about having a high enjoyment to stuff ratio. that resonates with me, so paying a few dollars a month to not have my private emails indexed for advertisers and to have IMAP not feeling kludgy on my devices seems worth the money to me. but i digress…

so i’ve been evaluating a couple of email hosts. my basic criteria are:

1. allow me to use my own domain
2. “normal” IMAP
3. server side rules
4. decently low priced for the quality of service

so, here are the email hosts i’ve looked at so far:

1. eumx.net

they seem to have a bit of a following on emaildiscussions.com, but their web page seems to have out of date info all over the place. they only cost $16 a year for 10GB storage (both email and files) and unlimited bandwidth, which is probably the most bang for my buck that i have seen, but it also makes me a bit leery… can the service be that great at that price? they don’t have a free trial, so it’s hard to evaluate them much further…

2. slashmail.org

$18.95 a year for 3GB inbox space. seems like a good solid host, though they appear to do a bit more handholding than others. that may or may not be good. to use my own domain, they just have a form to fill out on their site and it says it will be set up within 2 days. i kind of prefer being able to tweak to my IMAP and domain settings, etc, myself. i send them an email asking for more details [just heard back, sounds like they will set it up to do anything i want, but they require me to let them do it to prevent spamming..eh]. also, they limit you to 20 server side filtering rules… seems a bit arbitrary.

3. fastmail.fm

$39.95 a year for 6GB inbox, 4GB file storage. the reason this is so expensive is because they only allow personal domains with their highest level accounts. for awhile i was actually considering using them for both my email AND my web host, but i’ve found a better web host since, making them a much less interesting option. $40 a year is just a bit too steep.

4. tuffmail.com

a no frills, no handholding, no nonsense email host. certainly the most geeky of all of them with the amount of sure power it gives me. the cheapest plan is $24 a year, but that only includes 512MB of storage. over five years at gmail, i’ve only built up 700MB, so huge storage isn’t that big of a deal. that plan also only allows for 1GB of transfer bandwidth a month. i have no idea how much i actually use right now, though i bet it’s less than that. i really like how geeky and customizable it is, but for the price, the storage and bandwidth does seem a bit stingy.

so what to choose? right now i feel it’s down to slashmail and tuffmail. less control but more space? ultimate control with skimpy space?

ok.. birthday is coming soon..

i gave a talk in sacrament meeting a week ago. it’s been a long time since i’ve given one, and my presentation was rather shaky. i want to share some of my thoughts in hopefully a way that is more understandable than when i first stumbled over it. my topic was “preparing for an eternal home” and for some reason the first thing that came to my mind was president monson’s talk 1 during the sunday morning session of general conference. maybe because it was my favorite talk of the whole conference.. anyway, i decided to talk about how the principles taught in that talk related to an eternal home. and that led me to doctrine and covenants section 2:

BEHOLD, I will reveal unto you the Priesthood, by the hand of Elijah the prophet, before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming. (emphasis mine)

so what? big deal? i think so:

The beginning and the end of the gospel is written in section two of the Doctrine and Covenants. It is the keystone of the wonderful gospel arch; and if that center stone should weaken and fall out, the whole gospel structure would topple down in unorganized doctrinal blocks. -Elder John A. Widtsoe

[as an aside, a version of this scripture is in the book of mormon and is, i believe, a central theme of the book of mormon, making elder widtsoe’s statement in perfect alignment with “book of mormon = keystone of the gospel”.]

ok, so why is this whole elijah stuff so central to the gospel? first of all, without it, “the whole earth would be utterly wasted”. basically, without the keys that elijah holds, God’s reason for creating the earth is for naught. but what exactly are these things elijah will be doing? “the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers.” or in other words, their hearts will become one. or in other words:

And the Lord called his people Zion, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them. -Moses 7:18 (emphasis mine)

i believe the sealing power of elijah is the fundamental base for building zion. actually, i think all of the priesthood keys and ordinances exist for the creation of zion. take for example, the baptismal covenant as discussed in mosiah 18:8-10, 21:

And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of Mormon (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life— Now I say unto you, if this be the desire of your hearts, what have you against being baptized in the name of the Lord, as a witness before him that ye have entered into a covenant with him, that ye will serve him and keep his commandments, that he may pour out his Spirit more abundantly upon you?… And he commanded them that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another. -Mosiah 18:8-10, 21 (emphasis mine)

a majority of the baptismal covenant is about us promising to build zion. it’s not just an individual covenant concerning our personal salvation. i feel like this is why we renew that covenant through the sacrement in a church setting. when we take renew that covenant, we should not just be thinking about ourselves, we should be thinking about how we can be better serving and loving brother jones to our left and sister smith to our right. the endowment covenant is the same: we covenant to give our time, talent, and even our lives to the building up of zion. what nobler cause could we dedicate our lives to than loving and serving our neighbors and our community to bring about zion? and finally the sealing covenant, i.e. eternal marriage, gives us the greatest responsibility for building zion out of anything is the gospel. we covenant to become one heart with our spouses and by extension, our children. creating zion in the fundamental unit of our community is an integral step in spreading the unity of heart throughout that community. so whats the point of all of this? we need to build zion through eternal marriages so that the purpose of this earth does not go to waste. here is the key to being a true disciple of Christ, to creating a successful marriage and a happy home, and to building zion:

I am confident it is the intention of each member of the Church to serve and to help those in need. At baptism we covenanted to “bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light.” How many times has your heart been touched as you have witnessed the need of another? How often have you intended to be the one to help? And yet how often has day-to-day living interfered and you’ve left it for others to help, feeling that “oh, surely someone will take care of that need.” My brothers and sisters, we are surrounded by those in need of our attention, our encouragement, our support, our comfort, our kindness—be they family members, friends, acquaintances, or strangers. We are the Lord’s hands here upon the earth, with the mandate to serve and to lift His children. He is dependent upon each of us… My brothers and sisters, may we ask ourselves the question… “What have I done for someone today?”

— President Thomas S. Monson, “What Have I Done for Someone Today?"

ok guys!!! so, my new blog’s URL is www.iambismark.net. please change all of your bookmarks to point to there! theoretically, if you are reading this post, you don’t have to change the RSS feed at all! expect more changes soon! ps, if you could be so kind as to once again leave a comment so i know my feed still works…

update it obviously works! thanks!!

if you are reading this in google reader/bloglines/whatever, please click through and leave a comment. i am worried i borked my rss feed.

some thoughts on mobileme. dunno if i will stick with it.

“one bad apple [online service] don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl!” so, i decided to give mobileme a shot. i’ve got $300+ dollars in amazon gift certificates and they have been burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so having some of the cool features like “find my iphone” seemed like a good way to relieve myself of the burden. but thankfully i was smart and decided to use the 60-day free trial before taking the plunge. there are some things that are definitely making me hesitate spending $69 a year (amazon sells mobileme for $30 less than apple for some reason). here are my initial thoughts:

my setup

i have my macbook with me 80% of the time. i do everything on it: web browsing, chatting, email, programming, etc. the other 20% of the i have my iphone with me in case i need to do any of that stuff. so my biggest wants from mobileme are related the syncing of my macbook and iphone. if i had another mac or windows machine, or if i needed my data remotely accessible on the web, my wants/expectations might be quite different.

contact sync

slick. i love having my contacts consistent across both my mac and iphone. this is possible with google sync, but i really dislike how cludgy syncing between my mac’s address book and google contacts is. mismatched fields, random duplicates, and the weird all contacts vs my contacts things on google just turned me off to that solution. but despite how nice this is, i don’t really need it. i usually sync my iphone through itunes every one or two days for podcasts and application updates anyway, so its not a killer feature for me.

calendar sync

basically everything i said above but with calendars. syncing ical and google calendars is still a mess because apparently google and apple have different ideas on how webdav should work. i suppose i could shell out $40 for busycal, but it’s really not that big of a deal for me. last time i tried google sync, i had to consistently restart ical on my mac while trying to use webdav syncing with google calendars, and occasionally everything would just disappear from my iphone calendar. and the biggest thing that bugged me was not being able to select colors for calendars on my iphone. but once again, not a killer feature since i sync my iphone through itunes pretty often.

find my iphone

one of those features that isn’t useful until you really need it. some people consider $69 a year worth it just for this functionality. my poor graduate student self isn’t quite convinced of that.

photo galleries

flashy, though i already have a lot of time sunk into tagging, etc on flickr. though the $25 a year for flickr pro might be one bill i could eliminate if i use this instead… doesn’t seem to be a way to use those pictures in my blog posts however.

idisk

again, something i didn’t quite play around with enough, but i wasn’t impressed at first blush. my main comparison is dropbox, which is just seamless. when i first opened up my idisk, i felt a bit confused. i can understand the purpose of folders for pictures, music, and documents, but what about the library, backup, sites, and web folders (some of which are folder aliases)? what am i supposed to do with those? can i delete them if i don’t want them? and why does it ask me to enter a server password when i double click on the web folder? now i am sure i have the technical aptitude to figure this out, however i was just a bit turned off by it. in comparison, a dropbox starts with a pictures folder and a public folder, both with readme files explaining their functionality. in addition to this clunky beginning, i’ve read some horror stories about failed syncing, something that i would rather not care to deal with. i don’t need the backup functionality since i use mozy (i would have to pay some undisclosed amount to expand my idisk storage space to fit all of my data). lastly, dropbox just works on my mac, on my iphone, and is also very handy for transferring files to/from the windows xp virtual machine i occasionally have to boot up.

web publishing

mobileme lets me use my own domain name and i just got a new domain: iambismark.net (haven’t gotten it all hooked up correctly just yet..). however, my family still uses cpanra.org for other things (wiki, brother’s blog), so we would have to figure out what to do with that before i could stop paying for shared hosting. i didn’t really play with the web publishing on mobileme, but i have a feeling it doesn’t have php or mysql, so i couldn’t host my blog there. probably not a very useful feature for my needs.

email

now for the real deal breaker. first, let me say that i really do not like gmail all that much. i don’t like the webmail, and i hate hate hate the weird imap implementation. finally having a decent imap account was one of my main motivations for being interested in mobileme. but the biggest gotcha: no server-side mail rules. this is a big deal to someone like me who gets 20-30 emails a day from mailing lists. i don’t want these emails filling up my inbox, so on gmail, it was easy to set up rules to automatically label them and skip the inbox. unfortunately, mobileme doesn’t allow me to do this. i can set up a client-side rule in my mac’s mail.app to filter messages into the right folders, however the iphone has no such functionality. so if my macbook is not currently awake and connected to the internet, my iphone’s inbox will just fill up with every single email i receive. not what i want at all. gmail also has a handy feature of allowing you to change the sender field in your emails to other verified email addresses. mobileme’s smtp servers do not allow this (probably for spam-related reasons), though this isn’t a huge issue as i can just use a separate smtp server to send with other addresses (namely my school address). it would be a bit annoying to have to switch email account on my iphone just to send from another address, but not a huge thing. the lack of server-side rules however makes the email worthless to me. i spent most of last night trying to figure out some better way to deal with email (having gotten a taste of real imap). i’m actually considering paying for a fastmail.fm account. yes, i know paying for email service seems very foreign in this age of hotmail/gmail/yahoo, but fastmail.fm seems to just have the features i want. i can also use my own domain, which would be pretty sweet [update apparently gmail allows for this also]. $50 a year for server-side rules, storage comparable to gmail, non-cludgy imap, and my own domain address. i am tempted.

so, here is a break down of my two options:

contacts:

mobileme OTA sync or itunes wired sync

calendars:

mobileme OTA sync or itunes wired sync

find my iphone

mobileme vs nothing

photo sharing

mobileme galleries vs flickr pro (though mobileme would be losing functionality)

file sync

idisk vs dropbox (less space on dropbox, but i use <2gb as it is)

web publishing

not a factor since mobileme doesn’t have my needed features.

email

mobileme mail vs fastmail

price

$69 a year vs $25 + $50 = $75 i think $6 more a year is worth the server-side mail rules over the OTA contact/calendar sync and find my iphone. or i could just stick with free gmail. blech.

my friend krista sent this to me… almost describes me, but apparently its the mexican girls i am more in to.. here are the lyrics:

Have a seat and listen, please don’t say a thing The matters of the heart sometimes, the truth will ever sting
Just don’t take it personally, this is no attack
But we will never last because I am white and you are…also white

I only like black girls the brown girls, the café au lait
Caramel girls, and mocca girls just blow me away
If your a nubian, I want you to-be in every fantasy
But if you’re a whitey, say nighty-nighty, your just not the girl for me

Oh I hate vanilla ice cream, I like chocolate instead
I hope she likes her soul food with a little Wonder Bread
Don’t call it Jungle Fever cause that just isn’t right
I am not a racist, some of my best friends are white

I just prefer black girls, the brown girls, the café au lait
A caramel girls and mocca girls just blow me away.
If you’re a cracker, you better get blacker or else you best get out
It is no mystery, I like a sister see that’s what I’m talkin about

Our wedding song will be “Ebony and Ivory”, and we’ll sing Christmas carols round the old Kwanzaa tree
But color is not the issue here, it’s dignity, it’s class
It’s all about her heart, okay it’s partly about that ass

I want me some black girl, the brown girl, the café au lait
A caramel girls, and mocca girls, just blow me away
If you’re a honky, you’re singin the wrong key, it’s the honest truth
The skin that she’s dwellin in, must contain melanin, that is the Fountain of Youth.

Thomas Jefferson. Robert DeNiro.
David Bowie. To a certain extent…Ted Dansen.
Strom Thurmond!!! Strom Thurmond!!! yeeeahh…

and heck, let’s try this… this is an amazon affiliate link.. just wanna see what happens!.. so umm, if you want to buy the album this song is on… do it here: The Craig Machine

i saved this link on 2008.03.20.

seriously, did this meme ever stop being awesome??

well, grad school is tough. at least the convincing myself that i am spending my time wisely is tough. i’m not making any money, i’m thousands of miles away from the woman i am in love with, and i have to do homework.

sometimes its tough being very motivated. not to say that i am not learning some pretty cool stuff. my operating systems course is extremely interesting, and the weekly seminars from guest lecturers from google, cray, etc, have been pretty good too. i am not part of a research group yet, but my TA job is fine for now.

i dunno, i am just wondering if i am going to be any more marketable once i get out of here than i was six months ago after getting my bachelor’s. ok, i guess no matter what, a master’s degree from a top ten program can’t hurt… and what how much more marketable i am afterwards is entirely dependent on how much i put in to it (even more so than a bachelor’s degree). though i have wondered a few times if i could be making myself more marketable by taking some day job and just working on some independent projects by night. i could probably even do that in provo and be close to mariam… of course my parents and mariam have been encouraging me to stay.

i am sure that if i gave up now and just went into the workforce, i would completely regret my decision in a short time. i mean, it is free and all…

let’s be honest, i probably will stay. and i probably will have a crappy semester. and it will probably motivate me to get back on track next semester and then i will start loving it here. until then.. sigh.

ok, scratch that, comments are back (and perhaps better than ever???). so i’m going to be using the disqus commenting system from now on. why? well, i like comments. but i don’t know if i like wordpress (security issues, seems bloated for my needs, etc). i’m actually thinking about rolling my own system similar to brent simmons. and disqus would work just fine with such a solution. obviously this is just an idea i am mulling over for now, but getting all the comments on disqus seems to have worked easily enough. so, comment away!

it seemed so true then. guess i beat the odds…

i saved this link on september 25, 2007.