A Curious Instrument

It is my thought that this world and circumstance must be among the lowest in the domain of our Heavenly Father.  There has always been stories of how this world was the only one in which the Christ would be crucified, but as I read scripture and view the expanse of history, I can come to the conclusion that righteousness is a very rare commodity here on Earth and often taken away from this place to find its promised thriving elsewhere. I think of the people of the city of Enoch, who built a Zion Society that lasted for perhaps 400 years and then "fled", literally taken off of the Earth.  We also have a little reference to a group that was assembled at Salem, led by the great high priest Melchizedek, who are mentioned once and never heard of in scripture again, perhaps also removed from this sphere. We also have the case of the "lost" ten tribes of Israel, who legend says repented whole-heartedly of the behavior that led to their capture by the Assyrians and were ...

I actually reactivated this blog as a bit of a replacement to the old web/gopher server I used at home. I was using an old POS board that used old laptop hard drives that are very very fragile and everything that was transferred to them was ultimately lost to little stuff. I have upgraded that system to be totally solid state, but I haven't put it back into service for now. Instead, I am now using an old consumer minitower with a software RAID in it, which should solve my worries about losing data again (at least for a while). For now, I am populating the server with some very, very old data that was backed up eons ago, some of which was on the previous server and some that never was, so things are a bit different.  Explore away! So, I expect to continue the blog for a bit as a replacement, but with some interesting stuff on the home server that are probably unique due to their age.

It was almost a week ago when some spare hard drives, disturbed by my shuffling about in preparation for our upcoming move, dropped from a cabinet onto the open-faced motherboard that served as my web and gopher server for the past year.  The debris dislodged the sound card and jarred the hard drive enough to gouge the surface and totally ruin the drive.  I typically have a none-too-recent backup of the drive, but I have had to shuffle around the backup drives to put my daughter Shayna back into service, so the backup drive had been recently formatted and EVERYTHING is now lost!! Fortunately, I had been slowly moving most of my core documents to cloud servers, so all of what I would consider to be the really important stuff has weathered this storm.  The server itself is back in service and there is a web and gopher server running, but they are both quite empty for now.  Both the old podcasts are totally gone, which is a bit sad, but it would probably be just as we...

After years of effort and trying to walk away from the thing, the first book of the Navigiary series: Escape , is finally out and available on the Kindle store. There is also another blog that I have just for Navigiary . Surprisingly, I also allow commenting on that blog as well! See what I have been working on all these years but know that Escape is but an introduction - the meat of the story is yet to come!

I am tired.  I find myself bored with my present life and the person I am right now.  I have a fine, fine job and I work alongside wonderful people, but I need to be doing more.  I need to become more and I am reasonably sure that this is also what God expects from me.  I hope you readers don't consider this a "cocky" statement as I consider it an indictment of my lack of activity in the area of rising to my potential.  I have no idea what that potential is, but I have not be making much of an effort toward discovering it.  I want to begin to rectify that, starting right now. Every Sunday, we hold a family council and a bit of a "home evening" with whatever family members are available.  During the council, each family member has an opportunity to ask a question, present a concern, or make a comment.  Last Sunday, during my time to do "questions, concerns, or comments", something popped into my head and, after only a moment or two of thought, I ...

[Update: I do have a facebook account now, but that is only to advertise blog posts and such to the world.  I rarely look at what others post there.  Like me and be my friend knowing that I probably am not reading your stuff.] I have just been regaled by the utterly thoughtless postings of several of my talkative extended family members on a "service" called "facebook".  My oldest daughter is an on-and-off member of this chronic exhibitionist collective, which is how I know anything about such things at all.  At the ripe age of 44, I am one of those "old farts" that avoids "texting", much less its more evolved cousins like twitter and a procession of social yammering spots.  I just never got interested. The larger problem is that I decided long before this technology existed that it was far smarter and safer to keep your thoughts to yourself.  I can't say that I do a marvelous job of this, but I seemingly do far, far better than the typic...

A bit of the Canadian Escarpment nearby As a hiker, I am excited about another public wilderness opening up very near where I live! If I cannot afford to move closer to hike-able places, it is just as good to have hike-able places move closer to me! Of course, it is all very new and there is no access to the wilderness for now (might never be). I suppose you have to get airlifted in and out (or perhaps use an ultralight aircraft - there's an idea!) Public Lands Information Center - Sabinoso Wilderness : Press Release about the Sabinoso Wilderness